Kamala is not Biden and she’s not Trump, but she’s still probably Harris

I predicted Trump would win the 2016 election. On the day of the election, the betting odds on that were 12%. Had I been a betting man, I’d have made YUGE money.  

In 2020, I again predicted Trump would win. On the day of that election, the odds of that happening were 35%.

Trump lost that time, but, given the odds, I would not have lost nearly as much as I would have made four years earlier in 2016. I’d still be way ahead.

My point is that even though I missed the call in 2020, nailing the near-impossible call back in 2016 makes me a frigging prophet.

So, listen to me. Trump will win this year.

Kamala’s campaign had a strategy from the outset. Before talking about it, bear in mind that the “outset” for her was not in 2022 or even 2023 when other Democratic candidates were slogging through the snows of Iowa to visit rural coffee shops and giving interviews to local radio schmucks in New Hampshire and North Carolina.

No, the “outset” for Kamala was a couple of weeks before the Democratic convention last summer when nameless party poohbahs snatched her out of the obscurity of a failed Vice Presidency in the service of a frail, failed Presidency.

They installed her as the Democratic candidate, even though she has never won a single primary delegate, despite – or because of – her best efforts. (By the way, one might wonder exactly what’s in it for the poohbahs.)

Anyway, here’s their strategy. It’s to rest on the fact that (1) Kamala is not that frail, failed President and (2) she’s not Trump either.

That has been almost enough. But not quite.

Although they’ve succeeded in convincing voters that Kamala is not Biden and not Trump, they’ve failed to convince them that she’s not Harris.

They did try. Kamala disavowed her earlier open border policy, sort of. She retracted her position that guns owned by people not named Kamala should be confiscated, kind of. She no longer favors defunding the police, apparently. She seems not to think Joe Biden is sharp as a tack, anymore. She has not advocated taxpayer funding for “gender affirmation” surgery for rapists so they can move into women’s prisons, lately. She doesn’t advocate men competing in women’s sports, for now.

It’s a little hard to state Kamala’s current position on these things definitively. That’s because she herself does not state her position on these things definitively.

She reminds me of the lawyer who is asked “What is two plus two?” The lawyer answers “What do you want it to be?”

Kamala is more shrewd than that lawyer, however. She simply refuses to take the question. She refused all summer to sit for interviews or stand for press conferences after the previous two years when she had no campaign appearances at all because she ostensibly was not campaigning.

Once she did start campaigning in the wake of the poohbah coup, years after everyone else started, she campaigned not with press conferences or position papers or interviews – even with friendly interviewers – and pretended not to hear questions shouted to her. She instead campaigned on “Joy.”

There’s something disconcerting about anonymous poohbahs pulling a behind-the-scenes palace coup, installing a figurehead of their choosing, and instructing her not to give interviews but instead to campaign on “Joy.”

To the poohbahs’ credit, Kamala is definite about a few things. For example, she’s definite that she favors peace in the Mideast.

To their discredit, however, she’s not very definite about how to achieve it. Defeating the bad guys is evidently not on the table. In fact, identifying them is not even on the table.

All this joyous indefiniteness worked for a while. Despite Kamala’s absence at interviews and press conferences and her missing position papers, voters still believed she was definitely not Biden and definitely not Trump.

But as noted, they came to believe she might still be Harris.

As Kamala’s polling numbers have slipped, the poohbahs have evidently finally decided in desperation to put her in front of the media to state definitively that she’s not only not Biden and not only not Trump, but also not Harris.

The voters are saying, “OK, maybe. But then just exactly who are you?”