The palace coup which forced President Joe Biden to drop his candidacy for re-election was engineered by San Francisco super boss Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Within hours of Biden knuckling under and doing what she and others demanded, the vacuum was filled – surprise, surprise – by Vice President Kamala Harris, a San Francisco Radical backed by Pelosi.
For months, people worried that Harris would be a worse candidate than Biden.
Now, suddenly, she was the answer to every left-wing Democrat’s dream. She was intelligent, hard-working, attractive, and the obvious candidate to replace President Biden. Harris’s rise from a hopelessly bad candidate to party savior was almost as dramatic as the President Biden’s fall from party leader to forced retiree.
Of course, the 4,000 delegates elected in the primaries had nothing to say about this consequential transfer of power. The 99 percent who were pledged to President Biden simply did not matter. The bosses had spoken. Long live the bosses’ new champion, Vice President Harris.
The propaganda media immediately picked up on the game. Harris was immediately given the full glamour treatment of positive news. However, this time the media would go further than they ever had. Past articles that were harmful to Harris suddenly started disappearing.
GovTrack had once called her the most leftwing Senator. Suddenly, that organization decided it would no longer feature one-year ratings. The article with Harris’s picture on the leftmost position simply disappeared.
Axios and dozens of other media organizations have called Harris “the border czar” for years. Suddenly, that term was dangerous. It would allow President Donald Trump and his team to tie Harris to the complete failure of the Biden administration’s border. The establishment media erased its past sins and got on the new message.
George Orwell called this kind of history erasure a “memory hole” in his novel “1984.” However, this latest instance has been extreme even by today’s eroded media standards. You can expect more of this kind of selective coverage and retrospectively changed articles. The fix is in, and the propaganda media have signed up to be shield bearers protecting their candidate.
However, all the media propaganda in the world is not going to help Vice President Harris.
Two big facts are going to overwhelm the media effort to invent the new candidate Harris.
First, she really is a San Francisco radical. She has a long record of advocating and voting for extreme leftwing issues. Second, as she tries to deny the reality of her life-long radicalism, she will become phony and inauthentic.
An inauthentic Harris who tries to hide from her radical positions will turn off radicals, progressives, and centrists alike. Harris will inevitably shrink into being a normal politician with an unacceptable or deeply confused value system.
We have been here twice in my lifetime. In 1972, Sen. George McGovern was perceived as too radical and incompetent. He went down to the worst popular vote defeat in modern times (Richard Nixon got 60.7 percent of the vote and McGovern got 37.5 percent). Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts and Washington DC.
Just 16 years later, in May 1988, Vice President George HW. Bush found himself 19 points behind Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Five months later, Bush won 54 percent to 46 percent. That swing from down 19 to up 8 meant that every fourth American switched his or her vote during the campaign. The Bush campaign was relentlessly focused on communicating that Dukakis was a Massachusetts liberal (think San Francisco radical for this year’s parallel).
The striking thing about the 1972 and 1988 campaigns was that the news media wanted to help the Democrats as much as it does now. But the weight of the Republicans’ relentless focus on issues and facts simply broke through and made the Democrats unacceptable.
If the 2024 campaign becomes a personality campaign of Harris vs Trump, the weight of media bias and the left’s ability to make a big hay over trivial nonsense might give Vice President Harris a serious advantage.
If the Trump campaign and its allies have a disciplined focus on communicating the larger truths rather than getting sucked into fighting over baloney, then Harris’s collapse is virtually inevitable.
Hollywood, the propaganda media, and the Harris campaign are going to try to create a fantasy version of Harris.
But the real Harris has a long record of radical values, votes, actions, and statements.
If the Trump team and its allies are persistent – and ignore the left’s bait – then the real Harris will break through, and the American people will realize she is unacceptable.
At that point, Harris’s efforts to pretend she is somebody other than a San Francisco radical will destroy her authenticity, and she will collapse like Dukakis and McGovern.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.
