The crafting of the new Kamala narrative

The crafting of the new Kamala narrative

At the DNC they’re trying to perform an amazing sleight of hand that’s aimed at getting people to believe that two plus two equals five. Virtually every sentient being in the U.S. is aware that Kamala Harris has been the vice president of the United States for the last three and a half years—that is, for the duration of the entire Biden administration so far —and so it takes some doing to divorce her from responsibility for those years. But the Democrats know it’s necessary that they perform this piece of revisionist history.

Enter the master Democrat magician: Barack Obama. He said many things Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention. Among them was this:

“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse,” [Obama] said. “America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.

When Obama refers to years of “bluster and bumbling and chaos,” we on the right might immediately perceive that as an excellent description of the Biden administration’s record, particularly on the economy and the Afghanistan withdrawal. But the right is not Obama’s target audience. He isn’t trying to conjure up that image except as a description of the Trump years for his base, although he’s probably also trying to appeal to those independent voters who see Trump as a problem and have bought much of the MSM/Democrat description of him.

Even more striking to my mind is Obama’s use of metaphors involving narrative, of both movies and books. A sequel. A new chapter. A new story. It’s a reliance on what author Milan Kundera called “imagology” in his book Immortality [emphasis mine]:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

The Democrats are banking on the fact that, for the majority of Americans, imagology will remain stronger than reality as they vote in 2024. But the actual story of the moment is not a “story” at all, it’s the reality of what so many Americans are experiencing: inflation, wars, crime, homelessness, unchecked illegal immigration, mental illness, addiction. And another reality is that Democrats have been in power for nearly four years, and the number two person who’s been in power during that time has been none other than Kamala Harris.

To pretend otherwise is definitely to create a story—a fiction. But the Democrats are counting on voters wanting that story to be true, desiring so very much for the story to be true that they believe it rather than their own lying eyes.

This emphasis on stories and narratives—and empty vague rhetoric—was one of the first things I ever noticed about Obama. And whenever things got rough during his presidency, pundits and politicians who supported him would talk about how the Democrats just hadn’t gotten their narrative out to the public properly. All failures were treated as failures to communicate rather than actual failures in the real world.

In the current Democrat approach to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and record, there seems to be no effort to talk to the whole country. The goal is to super-energize the Democrats’ base and pull in a certain percentage of the middle (we’ll leave aside for now the question of whether fraud will be involved as well). The idea is not just to regard the Trump years as a strange yet temporary halt to the progress the Democrats have made; it is also to forget the reality (as opposed to the revisionist narrative) of the Biden years, even though Kamala Harris is practically an incumbent who is deeply connected to the Biden administration.

It’s almost a form of hypnosis, a willed amnesia. Reading about Obama’s speech reminds me how he managed to make so many people believe that his sonorous voice and the slogans of hope and change would lead to something wonderful, a quasi-spiritual awakening and finally—finally!—the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

And now they’re singing that old song, eight years later, in order to elect a person incredibly ill-suited to convey the magic, a magic I never could perceive with Obama but which I know affected many people so deeply that they must be nostalgic for it.

Or maybe, reading between the lines, most Democrat listeners understand that if Kamala Harris wins she would only be the figurehead, much like royalty in Britain, and that the real power will remain in the Obamas and others behind the scenes. And if so, it seems that would be perfectly fine with the vast majority of Democrats.

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