SHAPIRO: Hidin' Harris

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To call the last eight weeks in presidential politics unprecedented would be a wild understatement. It was just over two months ago when Joe Biden — a man deemed highly successful and mentally sharp by our legacy media — took to the stage to debate Donald Trump, and promptly expired. It took another month for Biden to drop out of the race, prompted by the backstabbing Democratic cadre of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and, most importantly, former President Barack Obama, all of whom wheedled donors and cudgelled Biden into submission.

It then took promptly one day to solidify Vice President Kamala Harris in Biden’s stead.

It has been more than a month since Biden was defenestrated in favour of Harris. Since then, Harris has answered precisely zero difficult questions from the media. She has spent the intervening weeks being “brat” — social media-friendly and utterly vacuous. We know that she likes Doritos, that she enjoys cooking, that she supposedly makes a mean brisket, that she wears Chuck Taylors. When asked outside Air Force Two what she would do next this week, she answered, “We’re going to walk up those stairs.”

Deep stuff.

Deep.

And yet there are less than 70 days to the election. Republics are predicated on the idea that the voters deserve to know something about the candidates for whom they vote. Voters already know everything there is to know about Donald Trump; he’s the most overexposed political figure in history, and we’ve already seen what his presidency looks like. But voters have been shielded from Harris. According to the legacy media, her 2019 presidential campaign policy positions are completely irrelevant: She’s now sent out surrogates to disown her own position on decriminalizing border crossings (she was in favour), electric vehicle mandates (she was in favour), private health insurance (she was against), “reimagining public safety” or defunding the police (she was in favour), and fracking (she was against), among others.

All of that in the last month alone.

The media apparently have zero questions.

Meanwhile, we’ve been told that she’s not even tied to the administration in which she is currently the vice president. This week, Politico headlined, “Vance tries to tether Harris to Biden during Michigan rally.” Tries to? She’s the sitting vice president! Her boss — the same person she shivved to steal his nomination — is currently still the president. Sam Stein of The Bulwark and MSNBC headlined, “Dems spent four days in Chicago castigating, belittling, and demonizing Donald Trump. And then they did something even more vicious: They turned him into the incumbent.” Trump the incumbent? She’s the sitting vice president of the United States!

All of this is why Harris must avoid scrutiny. She’s obviously squirrelly on debating Trump — first she tried to bully Trump into accepting the same debate rules he’d accepted against Biden; then she denied him extra debates; then she tried to switch the rules. Her campaign has gone through Talmudic discussions internally to determine if and when she ought to be interviewed. Their verdict: OK, fine, but only if pretaped while joined by happy but cloddish sitcom dad running mate Tim Walz.

This entire charade smacks of disdain for the American people. Rig the nomination process in favour of Biden; throw Biden off a cliff in favour of Kamala; hide Kamala behind an Instagram filter while she dances and calls herself Momala for the duration of the campaign. At no point do Democrats want Americans to understand just what Kamala Harris will do as president, or to connect her to what she’s already done as vice president.

Perhaps it will work. If so, Americans will only have proved H.L. Mencken’s cynical theory: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Ben Shapiro’s new collection, “Facts and Furious: The Facts About America and Why They Make Leftists Furious,” is available now. Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+.