Last week, the mainstream media salivated over VP Kamala Harris’ running mate pick - Minnesota Governor Tim Walz - and declared they’ve brought back “joy” to the 2024 campaign.
Here’s a sampling of last week’s headlines.
NYT: Harris Used to Worry About Laughing. Now Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign.
POLITICO: Harris Chooses Comfort Food: Will America Bite?
Washington Post: Harris and Walz seize on joyful message in contrast to darker Trump themes
The Guardian: Democrats’ joy is unconfined as Harris and Walz take upbeat message on tour
The Atlantic: The Hotdish Ticket
The Atlantic piece is the most egregious example. The Harris- Walz ticket - one that supports net-zero climate goals that would forbid gas stove usage, agricultural production, and meat consumption - is spreading joy through their love of food. Not a joke.
“Food is one of the most universally beloved things on planet Earth. Aligning a presidential campaign with it is smart for all the obvious reasons, but for the Harris-Walz ticket, it’s also a signal,” the piece explains.
Food also has a connection to progressivism, the author adds. And this ticket is delivering Obama’s 2008 “hope” with a dish of 2024-style “joy”:
The rhetorical challenge of progressivism is that it is by nature abstract: It imagines a world that does not yet exist, rather than advocating to return to some previous version of the one we know. I find it telling that Walz keeps using the word joy when he talks about the campaign and about his running mate. It’s an uncomplicated message, one that’s even more concrete than Barack Obama’s hope: Hope is the future, but joy is the present. It’s cold milk on a hot day; a perfectly cracked egg; a steaming casserole dish full of God knows what, enjoyed at a crowded table. In foregrounding food, Harris and Walz are making theirs the candidacy of terrestrial pleasure and straightforward abundance. It’s simple, really.
Is the Harris-Walz campaign a “candidacy of terrestrial pleasure and straightforward abundance”? This sentence would make Pravda and other totalitarian propaganda outfits blush.
For the “independent press” they sure do love to dish out coordinated talking points. Is this a redux of the shadowy 2020 election strategy that was employed? The VP, undoubtedly, is taking a page from the Biden 2020 basement strategy playbook by refusing to be honest about her progressive views.
If this isn’t nauseating enough, Harris’ running mate and Second Gentleman Doug Enhoff are the “Nice Men of the Left.” From some sources of mine in Minnesota who have dealt directly with Walz, he’s far from “Minnesota Nice” - especially since he put tampons in boys’ bathrooms. And what’s nice about pro-abortion men like Emhoff who have affairs with their nannies? These kinds of guys are toxic–not nice.
The media is actively memory-holing the most unpopular VP in U.S. history - whose approval sat at 36% in November 2023. And they ignore Harris’ incumbency by convincing themselves she is an outsider who didn’t co-sign Biden’s policies these last 3.5 years. Laughable.
There’s nothing joyful about a presidential ticket bragging they’re going to “mind their own business” but has a history of enacting snitch lines during COVID and a record of intruding on every facet of our daily lives. Harris-Walz wants the government to be in bed with you over what you eat, your business affairs, and how you parent your kids, for instance.
There’s nothing joyful about a ticket that wants to upend the 38% of the workforce - or 64 million livelihoods - by promising to enact the disastrous Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act that abolishes right-to-work and imposes an ABC worker classification test to default all workers as employees and not independent contractors. Unionized workers aren’t the only workers out there; in fact, they’re a shrinking sector of the U.S. workforce with diminishing influence. 64 million independent workers - including many women - won’t be joyful if this ticket prevails.
There’s nothing joyful about a ticket that wants to push net-zero climate goals that would destroy the economy and only reduce - at best - temperatures by a whopping 0.2 Celsius degree. Harris was the decisive tie-breaker vote on the deceptively-named “Inflation Reduction Act” - a law that is heavily responsible for inflationary woes today. When solar and wind– backed by federal government subsidies–collapse, joy won’t be felt by the masses when the electric grid collapses and utility bills further hike up in price.
There’s no concrete policy listed on her website, as of this writing. But Harris is bold enough to steal Trump’s no tax on tips proposal - one originating from Ron Paul - and claiming it as her own, despite her and Biden cracking down on tipping through their new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reporting regime. But by-golly, Harris and Walz are so joyous, cool, and hip–just take the media’s word for it!
As the sugar high of Harris-Walz “vibes” wears off, reality will sink in. AP-NORC casted doubt about Kamala Harris’ electoral prospects on July 31, warning, “The public overall is somewhat skeptical about her chances to beat Donald Trump, though. Fifty-six percent of adults predict Trump will win in November.”
The Harris-Walz ticket’s pitch to America is this: You have to elect us to find out where we stand on the issues. Inflation-weary voters aren’t going to gamble with empty promises under the guise of “joyful” campaign vibes.