A conservative editorial recently speculated that the Kamala Harris presidential campaign “is betting the press won’t care” about her “past political views, her recent flip-flops, the Biden-Harris record in office, and what appears to be her implicit endorsement of the Biden economic and national security policies.”
The implied point is that “the press,” or the “Mainstream Media” (MSM), is giving Harris a free pass on the way to the White House. Worse, this is all taking place as the Harris campaign bets that “Mr. Trump won’t do the homework or doesn’t have the discipline and focus to expose” Harris’s myriad demerits “in debate or consistently on the stump.” No, this doesn’t make sense.
Which is not a defense of Kamala Harris. At all. Without a teleprompter she’s plainly hopeless. And to the extent that she expresses policy ideas, they’re either bad (tax hikes, a block of U.S. Steel’s acquisition, extension of tariffs, etc.), or they’re a copy of her opponent’s ideas (building a wall at the southern border, zeroing taxes on tips). Still, to pretend that “the media” can make Harris what she’s not to the detriment of Donald Trump amounts to conservative victimhood all over again.
For one, as conservative media keeps pointing out, Harris was so inept as a presidential candidate that she didn’t even make it to the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020. The previous truth signals two things: conservatives are well aware of her lack of skill, but so are Democratic voters.
As for Harris’s persistent inability to string a sentence together, that too has been routinely reported by conservative media, but also in the New York Times and Washington Post. About the latter, skeptical readers need only contemplate the various names mentioned by the Times and the Post when both newspapers (along with columnists within those newspapers) were not only pushing hard for Joe Biden to exit the presidential race, but doing so while bruiting all manner of other Democrats to replace him that were not named Kamala Harris. If that doesn’t imply Harris’s political ineptitude, and broad awareness of it on the left, it’s difficult to know what does.
After which, conservatives can’t have it both ways. They can’t revel in the sizable viewer advantage enjoyed by Fox News, the right’s dominance of talk radio, X (a.k.a. Twitter) and the endless roster of right-of-center pundits on the internet out of one side of the mouth, while lamenting the slant of CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times out of the other. The whining is far too situational. On some days the markets are most certainly working as those who lean right and who want more balanced (if not, downright slanted) coverage get it from countless sources, only for it to seem on other days that the only sources of news for the right are CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times.
Furthermore, the slant of all-too-many media entities doesn’t matter as is. Think back to Ronald Reagan and the coverage he got before the arrival of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, talk radio in total, the internet, etc. Despite near monolithically negative coverage, Reagan won in landslide fashion twice. To say Reagan wasn’t a victim insults understatement.
The problem is that conservatives of today love playing the victim. And that’s too bad. There’s always some reason they can’t win including, naturally, the media. Which is nonsense. The markets are wise, and they expose things. Just as large majorities of the electorate were exposed to Biden’s onrushing senility, so will they be exposed to Harris’s numerous weaknesses. Which means if the Republicans lose, the loss will be the Republican Party’s alone.
Republished from RealClear Markets
