Every now and then, politicians allow the truth to seep into their carefully crafted talking points.  That’s exactly what happened when Nancy Pelosi went on the record to confirm that Kamala Harris was not the Democrats’ original choice to be their presidential nominee in 2024 when Joe Biden was ousted in an orchestrated coup back in July.

This is what Pelosi told Ezra Klein of The New York Times, as it appears in the interview transcript:

Yeah, well, I think here’s the thing.  The thought was that if this were to happen, but it happened fast, we ... none of us had any idea he would do it that Sunday.  Well, I didn’t have any idea.  Most people didn’t.  So when he did that and endorsed [Kamala Harris], then the thought was everybody wanted an open process.  Let’s see the talent, let’s see the bench of the Democrats and let them come.  And see what they can attract.  But when he endorsed her, then it was, “Are you with me or not?”  And she moved quickly. 

This was a bombshell confession.  On the one hand, we all know that Pelosi had been conspiring with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama to get rid of Joe Biden on the ticket after recognizing the polling damage that his obvious senility and terrible performance as president had caused.  On the other hand, she admits to being blindsided by the timing of Biden’s withdrawal and also admits to have been blindsided by his simultaneous endorsement of Kamala Harris, suggesting that “everybody wanted an open process” to identify the party’s candidate.

...everybody, that is, except Joe Biden.  Biden’s endorsement of Harris effectively bound the DNC’s hands, as the exhilarating prospect of having an ethnically diverse female president quickly spread through the party ranks and social media on that Sunday afternoon.  There was simply no time to consider the entirely practical idea to initiate an open and democratic process to identify the Democrats’ best and most electable candidate.

As I observed immediately after the announcement, the Kamala Harris endorsement was Biden pulling the pin of a political grenade inside the party tent.  He knew that conspirators were pushing him to resign, and the promise of a cackling and communist-adjacent Kamala Harris candidacy was his parting gift to the conspirators.

Although it’s arguable that Harris had some success with voters in deep blue San Francisco and California, she has always been extremely unpopular at the national level.  In 2019, she was eviscerated in the Democrat primary, withdrawing before a single state primary vote was cast.  The bulk of the credit for this incredible failure must go to the almost incomprehensibly dislikable and phony Kamala Harris, but a certain modicum must be given to Tulsi Gabbard, who landed one of the most devastating debate moments against any candidate in my lifetime.  This might have ended any potential for Harris to get near the presidency in any other sensible moment in American history. 

But we don’t live in sensible times.  Kamala Harris is a woman, you see, and though many Democrats can’t readily define what that word means, they’re steadfastly sure that it’s a good thing and worthy of their votes for some reason.  She’s also not white, and that confers additional merit somehow.  Therefore, her incredible unlikableness was ignored when Joe Biden faced “tremendous pressure” from Democrats to pick a woman “of color” for his running mate in 2020.

Harris did have a bit of a honeymoon with Americans in early 2021.  Though she’s never had more than 50% approval, there were fewer people who disapproved of her at that time.  But her disapproval rate ramped up quickly that summer, when Joe Biden set her up for failure by assigning her the daunting task of addressing the illegal immigration crisis at the border and she had an embarrassing interview with Lester Holt where she appeared entirely inept at her job.

She never recovered.  Kamala Harris had largely maintained a double-digit negative net approval rating since that time.  But Democrats are emboldened by the pronouncement that she is now their preferred candidate, absent any sort of voter input.  Today, she is suffering only a high-single-digit approval deficit of 7.1%, with roughly 49% of Americans disapproving of her and 42% approving.

That gives a reason for the optimism among Democrats.  Their representative president is a walking corpse, and Donald Trump has been plagued by high disapproval ratings that have also been consistently in double-digits.  Pelosi, who never wanted Kamala Harris as the nominee because Pelosi still has a few brain cells to rub together that aren’t infected by DIE-think, might actually see some path to a presidential victory here.

The problem for Democrats, however, is that Kamala Harris is still Kamala Harris. 

Harris humiliatingly resigned from a presidential campaign in 2019 because she was extremely unlikable and was too much of a radical leftist for the party.  The party had room for only so many outright socialist candidates, and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were stealing all the oxygen in that lane.  The Democrat party then conspired to anoint Joe Biden on Super Tuesday in 2020 by orchestrating withdrawals by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Democrats sabotaged that primary for the simple reason that radical socialist policies, like a federal wealth tax and rent and price controls, were considered a bridge too far for Democrat voters in the swing states.

Here we are in 2024.  Kamala Harris is running on the platform of government price controls in the form of a nationalized price-fixing campaign.  She’s openly suggesting that American taxpayers should subsidize the first $25K of a first-time homebuyer’s purchase, for example, and somehow imagining that this would result in something different from home prices climbing due to increased demand in a market with limited supply.  And by capping rents, we can expect that supply to dwindle further, as there will be far fewer people building homes and apartments when the potential profits for having done so disappear via government price controls.  And what could go wrong with letting politicians in Washington set the prices of food at your local grocery store?

These are the stupid ideas that only an expensive college degree and zero experience in the private sector can buy.  Kamala Harris has both of those things in spades.

She’s not our best and brightest, to say the least.  And the party is so infected by rabid anti-Semitism that Josh Shapiro, who could have been positioned as a moderate to balance the ticket and potentially deliver must-win Pennsylvania, was passed over as the V.P. nominee.  Instead, the party tapped Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who has lied about his military service record, who equates socialism with “neighborliness,” and whose most notable accomplishment is promoting race riots in his state and ensuring that Minnesotan boys in the fourth grade have taxpayer-funded tampons in their school bathrooms.

Democrats have a real problem with this Harris/Walz ticket, though Nancy Pelosi and the old DNC guard may cast unconvincing smiles about the current situation. 

Perhaps first and foremost among those problems is Kamala’s unavoidable proximity to Joe Biden.  Joe Biden is so unpopular with Americans that his own party orchestrated a coup against him, and in large part, this is due to his tremendous failures regarding the economy and illegal immigration.  As a key figure in his administration, and particularly as Biden’s “border czar,” Harris shoulders that blame along with him.

Sure, there is ample poll-bombing to suggest that there’s been huge movement in Kamala’s favor.  Much of this is bunk, as head pollster for Rasmussen Mark Mitchell handily explains here, and we should all be used to this by now.  But there are other massive cracks in that façade.            

On July 1, according to Nate Silver’s 538, Kamala’s approval rating was 39.4%.  As of August 11, her approval rating was 41.9%. 

And as Ben Shapiro observes,

here is the big stat for Kamala Harris: On June 27, only 25% of Americans thought America was moving in the right direction. Today, 25% of Americans still think America is moving in the right direction.  That is the number that should be dispositive for the election.

Those lackluster results are all that was purchased by the Democrats’ fanfare about her historic candidacy and the orchestrated onslaught of positive media gushing.  Add a chaotic convention and more face time with the American people, and we should expect that Americans will become every bit as disapproving of Kamala Harris as Democrats did in 2019 when they sent her packing in the primary.

Image: Mobilus In Mobili via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).