There are few more reliable cheerleaders than Kamala Harris’ friends in the liberal media.
Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race last month, his print and television networks have been hard at work trying to hide Harris’ past record as the most unpopular Vice President in American history.
To read and hear her flowery praise is to believe that Harris is already a surefire presidential candidate, and not a last-minute replacement as the Democratic nominee.
That was until his lackluster speech Thursday night at last week’s Democratic National Convention, which appears to have stemmed the torrent of optimistic fanaticism.
The liberal New York Times was among the first to suddenly change course on Friday, targeting what many perceive as Harris’s fatal lack of clear policy with a brutal headline that read: “Joy Is Not a Strategy.”
There are few more reliable cheerleaders than Kamala Harris’ friends in the liberal media.
In a bitter commentary, NYT deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy said he had “cringed” when former President Bill Clinton took the convention stage on Tuesday to claim that Harris would be “the president of joy.”
How is that going to help the millions of Americans whose livelihoods are now at stake? Healey asked. And why has Harris not held a single interview or serious press conference since Biden stepped aside last month?
“Ultimately, she needs more voters in key states to trust that she will handle the economy better than her opponent… Harris cannot live comfortably on ‘joy,'” he concluded caustically.
But the worst was yet to come from the Times.
On Monday, the paper published a guest essay titled “Trump Can Win on Character,” by conservative commentator Rich Lowry.
Without mincing words, Lowry wrote that Harris is “weak and a fraud and doesn’t really care about the country or the middle class.”
Lowry attacked Harris’ record as vice president, particularly her failure to “secure the border or address inflation.”
“He doesn’t care whether his tax policies will destroy jobs. He’s been part of an administration that has seen real wages stagnate while downplaying the problem because he cares more about party lines than the economic reality of American workers,” he added.
Of course, such criticism is not uncommon in conservative circles, but the appearance of such harsh words in the NYT will undoubtedly be seen as a warning by Harris’s team.
Another Times guest essay, written by veteran financial journalist Roger Lowenstein and published Tuesday, took aim at Harris’s economic policy.
In the article – which, to be fair, also criticised Trump’s position on import tariffs as “absurd” – Lowenstein criticised Harris for being “censorious and vague” in her plan to unveil communist-style “price controls” in supermarkets.
‘Forget that your proposal addresses a problem that no longer exists… More disheartening was your apparent ignorance that price controls, almost without exception, have led to shortages, supply chain disruptions and, eventually, higher prices,’ he wrote.
And it’s not just the Times. In fact, a sense of unease with Harris now seems to be spreading among commentators, with the prestigious Wall Street Journal and the left-leaning The Hill joining in on the concern.
“Are you willing to pay $5 billion for Kamala Vibes?” asked senior commentator James Freeman in the WSJ on Friday.
Freeman argued that Harris has damaged the economy during her time as vice president, most notably by supporting Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar increase in government spending during the COVID crisis.
“She deserves more than her fair share of blame for delivering the decisive Senate votes on spending plans that fueled inflation,” he wrote. “And now she promises to impose new, destructive tax increases on our slow-growing economy.”
Since Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, liberal media has worked hard to try to obscure Harris’ record as the most unpopular vice president in American history.
Donald Trump has long complained about US media bias, blaming it for the long “honeymoon” Harris enjoyed since Biden dramatically dropped out of the presidential race.
Meanwhile, on Friday’s episode of the Journal’s popular daily political podcast, “Potomac Watch,” former George W. Bush speechwriter Bill McGurn described Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention as “tired.”
Meanwhile, Journal commentator Kim Strassel chimed in to criticize Harris’s apparent lack of policy.
“I have no doubt that the Kamala campaign would be absolutely thrilled if you said, ‘I have no idea what any of that means,'” he joked. “That’s their campaign strategy, to make sure that no one has any idea what she’s actually going to do.”
Donald Trump has long complained about US media bias, blaming it for the long “honeymoon” Harris enjoyed since Biden dramatically dropped out of the presidential race.
But it’s not just Republicans who have been concerned about the coverage.
Take this jab at the solar plexus from The Hill website, a favorite of the D.C. political scene, which, in the hours immediately following Harris’s speech Thursday, gave conservative writer Derek Hunter space to criticize Harris as “an empty pantsuit, basking in the glow of positive media coverage and unburdened by accountability.”
Hunter noted that Harris was not chosen for her new position by anyone in particular.
“She is the first candidate from either party who did not have to secure a single delegate or a single vote in the primary,” he wrote. “She is ‘historic’ in the sense that it is highly unlikely that she would have been able to secure that nomination had there been any sort of competition for the position.”
Hunter’s criticism is not the first The Hill has made of Harris.
Opinion contributor Merrill Matthews wrote earlier this month that “we don’t really know what Kamalanomics is,” adding that “the vice president has focused more on delivering platitudes with attitude.”
“So far, her campaign website has no policy proposals, so that’s not helpful. But you can buy a Harris-Walz hat that the media has been promoting,” he said.
Gerard Baker, former editor-in-chief of the WSJ, came to a similar conclusion.
In an article published in the Times of London on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, Baker said Harris “aimed at achieving electoral victory on a platform so thin and empty it might as well have been launched on clouds of propaganda.”
‘In this he has been helped by a client media company which, rather than doing its traditional job of vetting a candidate and testing their skills and ideas, has for the most part simply joined in on the fun.’
But now that those “client media” are starting to ask questions, it looks like Harris’ honeymoon may have run its course — and there are still 69 days until the election.
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