Fortune has never favored an American politician as it did Kamala Harris. And no politician has ever let fortune slip so dramatically from her grasp.
Fortune cradled her for almost 100 days, but she never really held it at all. In its place, she, the Democratic elite, and Democratic voters embraced hubris instead. They believed that their sheer insistence that Harris was presidential timber could make it so.
Harris won the 2024 Democratic Party nomination by acclamation. Not since Eisenhower has any person been given the boon of a major party’s nomination without effort. Others had received it previously — Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson, George Washington — but like Ike, they had earned their bestowed nominations based on astounding achievements outside of politics.
Harris had done no such thing. Her 2024 nomination truly stands alone: a fairy tale.
But while unique in American politics, such bestowal is hardly unique in Kamala Harris’ career. More accurately, it was her usual course. She was lifted into politics, then repeatedly lifted over politics throughout her life.
It began in San Francisco, where she ousted her former boss, the city’s district attorney who had promoted her. Then she leaped to become California’s attorney general. When a Senate seat opened, she took it.
Fortune had indeed smiled on Harris, but it would soon smile brighter still.
Despite having been in the Senate just a few years, she decided to run for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination. In a crowded far-left field that had been blazed four years earlier by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Harris stood out — or rather, stood left — among it.
She was from California, the Democrats’ biggest and richest state. She was a woman and a minority in a party that received disproportionate political support from both. She had money, influence, vote potential and cachet that the rest of the field could not match.
Yet Harris managed to be Rumpelstiltskin in reverse, spinning gold into straw. She did not cross the finish line first, because she never even reached the starting line — ignominiously dropping out in December 2019.
Yet Harris’ fairy tale did not end there. Despite arguably running worse than any other 2020 Democrat contender, she was picked to be Joe Biden’s running mate.
Miraculously, his weaknesses converted hers into strengths. As a campaigner and a communicator, she would not upstage him. Her identity-group attributes would play well within a party hyper-conscious of them, and they offset Biden’s lack of them.
With Trump’s divisiveness, COVID, governments’ economic lockdowns, and civil unrest, fortune continued to smile, giving Biden an incredible tailwind that carried Harris along on his coattails.
In the administration, Harris could have had her run of the place. Instead, she ran amok. Her first year was deemed a failure and her subsequent years were no better. Entering her fourth year, there had been calls to replace he on the ticket. Biden did not go that far, but she was still relegated to obscurity.
Still, Harris’s fairy tale continued. After all the primaries had been run, the Democratic elite deemed Biden’s candidacy unsuitable after a debate performance that made his unsuitability to continue in office undeniable. After casting him off in unprecedented fashion, they swept her into the nomination. Without firing a shot, Harris had won by default the war she had lost on her own years earlier.
Fortune only favored her more. The establishment media, which had long covered for Biden by conspicuously failing to notice the obvious, set out to do the same for her — giving her a pass on her avoiding press conferences and public appearances and helping her evade questions when they couldn’t be avoided.
She had money galore — not just the Biden-Harris campaign coffers, but the tens of millions that came rolling in from relieved donors after Biden’s departure. And she had Democrats’ unifying euphoria after Biden’s exit.
At first, the Democrats’ vision appeared true. Biden’s deficit to Trump disappeared, and Harris opened up a lead. It seemed possible that the compressed timetable, her sparse record, and the establishment media’s total lack of scrutiny would let Harris run out the clock and eke across the line.
Alas, even with the elite winds beneath Harris’s wings, she couldn’t fly. Her polling lead vanished. She was forced to do public events that only made her look worse. Her rhetoric became incendiary and off-putting.
The moral of the Harris fairy tale is one of hubris. The Democratic elite thought they could make someone presidential. Harris’s believed that she could bluff her way to the White House. Democratic voters convinced themselves that political force alone could make the Biden-Harris record irrelevant.
In the end, Harris’s reach finally exceeded her grasp. When it did, the Harris fairy tale became a different one: Humpty Dumpty. And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not put her back together again.
J.T. Young is the author of the new book, “Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left,” and has over three decades of experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, and the White House Office of Management and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company.
