Momala Mia!

Kamala Harris: Savior? Or speed bump on the road to ruin?

Actress Drew Barrymore attempts to smother Kamala/”Momala” to death

Editor’s Note:  Have a question about whether Matt’s become more liberal over the years? Don’t bother asking  — he will not be entertaining your Soros-funded inquiries. But feel free to Ask Matt™ other questions about his favorite subject (himself) at askmattlabash@gmail.com.

Dear Matt,
So many questions after recent developments. How do you feel about Kamala Harris? How do you correctly pronounce her name? Will she save us from Agent Orange?  Or is she just a speed bump on the road to ruin? And lastly, are you a DEI hire?
Yours,
Dr. Jill B.

First things first. I know there’s been some controversy surrounding the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s name, with detractors taking spiteful pleasure in mispronouncing it. But once and for all, her name is pronounced “hEH – rihs.”

Now that that’s settled, thanks for hogging all the questions, Doc. But I understand your blatant selfishness. In times with no clean answers, all we have are more questions. The rush of news is giving us all hypertension. Every time I polish off a column, the entire world shifts. Two weeks ago  — which now feels more like two years ago — former President Trump (or still-President Trump, as he prefers ) got shot in the face for democracy, as he put it. To which democracy responded, “Now you know how I felt on January 6.” Since last we spoke, Jilted Joe Biden got thrown overboard  — sorry….checking my sheet music here…..he “selflessly and heroically passed the torch to a new generation” — just a little over 100 days before the election. Thus ensuring that democracy’s new champion, Kamala Harris, will defend the title without having won a single Democratic primary vote. Ironies can be fun!

But I’ll answer your questions in ascending order of importance. No, I’m not a DEI hire, as some Republicans (racistly) accused Kamala Harris of being, prompting Kevin McCarthy to implore them to stop. Helpful hint: Not only was the former San Francisco District Attorney, former California Attorney General,  former U.S. Senator, and current Vice President more qualified to run for Commander-in-Chief than was the game-show-host/fake publicist before he made his first run. But you know that you, as a party, are gazing into the moral abyss when My Kev is your voice of conscience, since he’s been without one since about 2015.  

Again, however, I was not hired over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion considerations. I got this job the old-fashioned way. I slept with the boss. (Myself.)  As a white person, or person of no color as we wokesters call it, I’ve thought about diversifying my workforce. Until I remembered that I am the entirety of the workforce, so it’s kind of out of my hands. In fairness to my diversity sensitivities, I flirted with being black for a while in the early ‘90s. I listened to D.C.’s homegrown go-go music. I self-selected my own Wu-Tang name  (Lazy Ass Samurai). I watched a lot of Martin. But after I got caught in black church clapping on the 1 and 3, I was kindly asked to leave. (No hard feelings. I earned it.)

As for Kamala, I have conflicting thoughts about her. Yes, I know in the Democratic hagiography/revisionism of the last week, we are now supposed to regard someone who washed out of the 2020 Democratic primaries before Iowa even took place, and who has served as something of a chronic punchline as Vice President (as many Vice Presidents do), as being the second coming of Barack H. Christ, this time, without all the bothersome male gadgetry.

But cards on the table: Kamala wouldn’t have been my first choice to replace Biden. And not even my second or third. But I don’t decide these things.  And apparently, Democratic voters aren’t going to have much of a say in the matter, either. Such is the way the cookie crumbled, since Democrats discovered very late in the game that their guy was disqualifyingly old, and destined to get older. A fact they could’ve unearthed back in 2022 or so if they’d spent a few minutes on Wikipedia, or watched any one of innumerable creaky, befuddled Biden appearances on YouTube. If they’d have convinced Biden to step aside back then, that would’ve afforded them a full-on primary, as God intended. Which Kamala would have had a much tougher time boxing her way out of. Yet unlike the bug-eyed nutcakes on Elon’s Conspiracy Emporium — the ones who don’t even think it was really Biden who gave his pretty decent Oval Office speech the other night (since Real Biden has already been liquidated by the Deep State)  —  I don’t think this is unfolding according to some diabolical plan. Because if it were, it’s pretty lousy advance planning to count on someone whose poll numbers were right around those of meter maids, journalists, and herpes before she was repurposed as democracy’s Lord and Savior.

I have not exactly been a Kamala fan over the years.  Not only because she is what Andrew Sullivan called “the Dems’ weakest and wokest candidate,” as he suggested that a sinister rationalization for her candidacy might go as such: “Could it be that Biden and all of Harris’ rivals still expect to lose in November, and Harris is a useful sacrificial lamb? Or that Biden suspects that a Harris defeat would vindicate him in retrospect? Or that the Dem governors knew it would be political death to challenge a black, female candidate for president in a woke party, and see 2028 as by far their best shot?”

Nor just because of her disastrous turn as Biden’s border overseer, or her cringey out-of-place cackling (which can probably be fixed with a cackling consultant). Or even, as Sullivan elucidates, over her iffy past policy positions on everything from defunding the police to decriminalizing illegal border crossings (comparing ICE to the KKK) to pushing bail for 2020 Black Lives Matter rioters.

But I also never gave her much of a second thought because she’s felt diminished, as is often the case with Vice Presidents. As the most storied veep of all-time, Selina Meyer, played by the brilliant Julia Louis-Dreyfus, put it in the best political comedy ever conceived (Veep), it’s kind of the nature of the gig: “Being Vice President is like being declawed, defanged, neutered, ball-gagged, and sealed in an abandoned coal mine under two miles of human shit!”

It’s a pretty thankless task, as Mike Pence, who was almost lynched by his boss’s supporters, can attest.

Kamala, or “Momala” as public intellectual Drew Barrymore chose to call her as she begged Kamala to nurture us back to good health, is currently benefiting from low expectations. Not to mention, nearly every anti-Trump contingent just feels relief that they don’t have to haul old Grandpa Joe’s bag-of-bones across the finish line. Their mood is almost celebratory as a result.  Is that celebration justified?

We’ll find out. To Kamala’s credit, she already has campaigned stronger in the general than she ever did in the 2020 Democratic primary  — where she was almost wholly unremarkable — now showing flashes of the prosecutorial acumen that she often did when providing senatorial oversight in committee hearings. As Slate’s Scaachi Koul convincingly demonstrated in a recent piece, Kamala might provide gobs of lightweight, meme-ified entertainment. But get past her awkwardness reels, and she’s at least a middleweight, by nature. Which, grading on a curve  —  in a political landscape populated by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar — could almost qualify someone as a light heavyweight, if you squint hard enough.

Within a week’s time, she’s already narrowed the gap in a race that was being decisively lost by the man who handed her the baton. (Harris is within one point of Trump in the most recent New York Times/Siena poll.) After the fundraising spigot was shut off while Biden’s future was in doubt, she’s brought in record hauls, thanks to both newly optimistic small donors and deep-pocketed boosters. And even right-leaning friends of mine who dislike Trump are willing to give her a second look. As one stated to me:

Well, we’ve had a reality TV star and a cadaver in the White House. Why not a dancing clown who loves Venn Diagrams and word salads? Personally, I can’t wait to see First Gentleman Dough Emhoff singing 2 Chainz at the first Oval Office karaoke night.

If not exactly a ringing endorsement, it’s at least a begrudging one. One that shows growth potential, even if there’s not much time to grow. (Three months.)  Do I think Kamala Harris is the answer to all our problems? Based on her past performance, I’d venture a “hell, no.” But do I think she might be the most immediate answer to the problem I consider our most pressing one? Possibly.

For even if I haven’t agreed with her on many issues, I agree with her on what I regard these days as the most important issue of all: making sure this beautiful thing of ours keeps on keeping on. Without democracy as we’ve known it, continuing uninterrupted, we can’t square our differences if we don’t even have a say in what our differences are. And when one side — Trump’s side — has seemed completely willing and eager to not only not play the democracy game when the desired results don’t materialize in his favor, but who is intent on throwing the board across the room, while eating the game-pieces……well, give me a woman I can disagree with while still settling matters at the ballot box, over a wannabee tyrant who declares the ballot box illegitimate if it doesn’t contain enough votes for him.

When your house is on fire, you have to put the fire out first, before you can worry about secondary concerns, like unclogging the bathroom toilet or tidying up the family room.

Bonus Track: Kamala Harris is, without a doubt, a dancing machine.  Much more so than her patron Biden was, who seemed to often be challenged by mere walking. But if you live for awkwardness — and I do — a song I’d like to see her dance to is a DC go-go classic (go-go music never went national, even if should’ve):  Little Benny & the Masters’ “Cat In The Hat.” From Benny’s white gloves (he sadly left us in 2010), to his dancers in tiger suits pawing at the back-up singers, to that unmistakable go-go beat, it doesn’t get much funkier. Here’s hoping Harris takes my advice. I’m no social media guru, but there’s about a 120 percent chance that her fulfilling my wishes would result in instant virality: