Although Republicans are always in panic mode, the reality is that Kamala is a problematic candidate. She slept her way to the middle and then rode race the rest of the way up the escalator. Although she’s great at getting elected to mid-level offices, she’s undistinguished in these roles and failed miserably when running for president. And unlike the very middle-of-the-road JD Vance, she really is weird. So, what are Democrats to do? The newest tactic is to anoint her as the “fun” candidate with “oddball charm”—which is just what we need in a dangerous world.

Kamala’s history is no longer a mystery. Willie Brown got her started on her political path when she dated this much older man while he was still married to (but apparently separated from) his wife. Following the political appointments he made for her, he helped her successfully run for San Francisco DA and then for California Attorney General.

Both as a local DA and as a state AG, Kamala pursued a highly politicized, unprincipled path. In San Francisco, to look like a law-and-order DA, her office obtained more than 1,900 marijuana convictions for low-level offenders. What hid behind those statistics, though, was the fact that almost none of those convicted were actually punished. It was Potemkin justice.

Image: Kamala Harris (edited). YouTube screen grab.

Kamala’s principles were also foul. The best example is Kamala Harris’s decision not to seek the death penalty for Edwin Ramos, who murdered Tony Bologna, 48, and his two sons, Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16—all totally innocent men—as part of a gangland hit gone wrong. It was an unspeakably evil act but Kamala didn’t think the full force of the law applied. Incidentally, I know of no significant cases that Kamala personally tried and won during her tenure.

Once in power in California, Kamala truly reamed low-level offenders. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that California reduce overcrowding in its heinously mismanaged prisons. However, Kamala spent years fighting these orders, effectively keeping mostly black low-level prisoners in jail years long after they should have been released.

The point then was to appear like a law and order candidate. But that was a political pose, not a principle. We can say that with some authority because, when it was politically expedient to do so in 2020, Kamala was raising money to bail out murderers and fighting to defund the police.

Kamala also gave Planned Parenthood a pass for illegally selling the body parts from aborted babies while ferociously prosecuting the man who exposed this illegality.

In 2016, Kamala won her Senate seat because it was basically an uncontested election. California’s open primaries, which turn primaries into pre-elections followed by a November run-off, meant that no Republican opposed her. Instead, in a one-party state, she faced off against the even more radical and unlikable Loretta Sanchez. In the Senate, she was to the left of Bernie Sanders.

When Kamala ran for and entered the Senate, because California has a large Asian and Southeast Asian population, Kamala identified as Indian. By 2019, when Kamala threw her hat in the presidential ring, Democrats had made Trump’s presidency about race. That meant it was expedient for her to be black (which is how she still identifies).

That didn’t help. Kamala dropped out of the primaries before anyone had cast a vote. Even her home state rejected her.

Kamala became Biden’s veep, not on merit, but because Biden promised at different times to pick a female veep and a black veep. She was the best of a bad bunch that included an open communist and Stacey Abrams.

As veep, Kamala has distinguished herself by being the most unpopular vice president in American history. She accomplished nothing even though Biden explicitly assigned some tasks to her (e.g., the border). She was also on TV enough for people to discover her bizarre, fake affect. Also, in addition to race switching, she personality switches.

Unlike Trump, who is always and everywhere Donald Trump, Kamala is a southern preacher, an old Indian lady, a stoner, a law-and-order dragon, or a wide-eyed child. She’s also a speaker who is so bad that the Daily Show made fun of her, someone who cackles whenever she gets nervous (that’ll be a tell during negotiations with Putin or Kim Jung-un), incredibly slow-witted (“And I haven’t been to Europe”), and she has a strange habit of nodding along in agreement with herself as she speaks.

Since Biden pulled out, the media have been shilling for Kamala as the brightest political light ever. The problem is that they’re running into her record, no matter how hard they try to hide it, and it is anything but bright. Instead, it’s radical and incompetent.

The Atlantic, however, is experimenting with a new approach: Kamala is fun!

The much-noted energy shift in the race over the past two weeks is not just about a younger candidate or tightening polls. It’s about the way that Harris’s oddball charm satisfies the content demands of the moment, harnessing how the online-media environment—and the cultural hungers it taps into—have shifted in recent years.

Across the internet, funny clips of Harris are making the rounds, some of them unearthed from years earlier. There’s one of her talking to a 10-year-old about carnitas tacos in a tone of utmost solemnity. There’s one of her impersonating her mother-in-law, squealing, “You’re prettier than you are on television!” And, of course, there’s the coconut-tree speech, related in sing-song inflections, whipping from stand-up routine to sermon. Republicans have tried to use quirky Harris clips to mock her. But these videos have mostly been circulated by gleeful supporters, who are parsing and remixing them like sports highlights.

Harris’s viral moments are fun to watch because they show a serious person having, well, fun.

Sure, that’s what we need. A fun, funky, deeply bizarre president.

Iran is threatening to blow up the Middle East, North Korea is moving nuclear-capable weapons to its southern border, the UK is in flames with Stalin-esque crackdowns planned for native Brits, China is eying Taiwan while Vietnam allies with the Philippines over fears of a Chinese takeover, the stock market is crashing, the border is broken, and Americans are dying by the hundreds of thousands from fentanyl poisoning, but who cares? Kamala is fun.

What does it matter that her nervous cackle makes negotiating with her the equivalent of playing poker with a dog, that she’s incapable of stating a thought, opting instead for meaningless circular phrases, or that she’s deeply unpopular due to manifest incompetence? “Oddball charm” will win the day.

Kamala has an automatic 20-point advantage because of the media backing she gets, which is the most powerful free advertising in the world. But she’s eminently beatable because she’s not fun and charming. She’s bizarre, radical, and incompetent and, in a scary world, there’s nothing fun about that. The real fun will be for conservatives to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do the hard work of winning.