STEPHEN MILLER: Kamala Harris ran the Fyre Festival of campaigns.
As it turns out, not all of those celebrity “activists” appeared with Kamala Harris because they believed in her or were doing their civic duty by getting engaged. They charged fees — and some were astronomical. Harris made elaborate promises to her crowds about celebrity performances. Crowds were brought in with the promise of seeing Beyoncé perform, only to leave disappointed. It was all a financial ruse, much like the infamous Fyre Festival of 2017. For the uninitiated, Fyre Festival was sold as a high-end island music festival and was promoted on Instagram by celebrities such as Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid. Attendees were promised luxurious accommodations, airline transportation to and from the island and expensive food and alcohol. What followed, however, was mass confusion, unfulfilled promises, stranded and hungry people and vendors left unpaid. The lead promoter went to prison on fraud charges.
As it turns out, the Harris campaign wasn’t run much differently. As reported in the Washington Examiner, the Harris campaign spent upwards of six figures to build a custom set for her appearance on the Call Me Daddy podcast, which only netted about 800,000 downloads. Meanwhile, Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast — and his interview has got more than 47 million views on YouTube.
There were seven swing-state concerts that involved high-priced performers — Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jon Bon Jovi, Ricky Martin and more — who seemingly ended up costing the Harris campaign more than $20 million on event production alone, and reportedly even more on paying the celebrities to appear. Even Oprah Winfrey charged the campaign $1 million to show up. The campaign went so far into debt that the campaign was reportedly forced to scrap Canadian Nineties indie-pop singer Alanis Morissette to save money. The pop concert campaign strategy is said to have been the brainchild of former Obama advisors on the campaign.
You can do rock concerts as a campaign strategy when your candidate has rock star chops, of the level that (the composite character of) Barack Obama had on the stump during his 2008 campaign. But Kamala’s campaign was a textbook example of what happens when a bunch of Obama advisors go to work for a candidate who isn’t him and attempt to run the same playbook.
Obama also benefited from a very different news cycle: until the massive subprime mortgage meltdown tanked the stock market on September 29, 2008, the economy wasn’t an ongoing horror story in the news; inflation was under control, unemployment was low in the first half of the year, and on the surface, the stock market was performing relatively well (until it wasn’t). A recurring headline in the summer of 2008 at Instapundit was “Dude, where’s my recession?” It eventually arrived — and how — but until it did, Obama campaigned in a much more forgiving environment among potential voters, before Milton Friedman wasn’t running the show anymore, to only slightly paraphrase the unintentional warning by Joe Biden in 2019 on what he was about to unleash on the unsuspecting American middle class.