Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi matter-of-factly described why President Joe Biden was thrown off the Democratic ticket after he had spent weeks insisting that he would not go.
“So many young people were not enthusiastic about voting,” she told Elex Michaelson on “The Issue Is,” Fox 11’s statewide political show, because “they saw two older people, and they’re like, ‘what?’”
But now, Pelosi continued, Democrats had a much better chance of winning close House races. “In California, you’re seeing the numbers are so different — for young people, LGBTQ, Asian American, Hispanic and Black voters who were more lethargic about these two guys, that now are very excited about her.”
“So once again, you were right,” Michaelson said.
And there you have it. After manipulating the primary rules to ensure that no other Democrat could meaningfully challenge Biden for the nomination, the Democratic Party kicked Biden to the curb and installed Kamala Harris to scratch out a few more percentage points of voter turnout in contested congressional districts.
That explains the empty campaign, devoid of press conferences, interviews or detailed issue positions. It doesn’t matter to the Democratic power brokers if Harris loses state after state in the Electoral College as long as enough registered Democrats in California can be carnival-barkered to the polls to win a few crucial House seats and take back the majority in Congress.
And if it doesn’t matter whether she wins, it doesn’t matter that she picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate.
It doesn’t even matter that he was arrested for drunken driving in 1995 when he was a 31-year-old teacher, or that he stands accused of stolen valor for his decades of untruthfulness or exaggeration about his military record. Countless video clips have surfaced of Walz claiming, or allowing others to claim, that he retired from the Minnesota National Guard with the high and impressive rank of command sergeant major after serving in combat following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In fact, Walz left that position to run for Congress just before his National Guard unit was to be deployed to Iraq. His actual rank at retirement was master sergeant, and he was never in combat. He was in Italy.
And it also doesn’t matter that Walz is on video during the “White Dudes for Harris” online fundraiser saying, “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
That’s only true if your neighbor happens to be an armed gang that robs your house every day, but it’s a great line if you’re trying to win the support of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Maybe those DSA voters in California who so enthusiastically supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 are concentrated in key congressional districts, because Harris announced this week that she’s in favor of central government control over food prices.
There go the farm belt states into the Trump column. And it’s safe to assume that any state that relies on domestic manufacturing will feel the chill from Harris’s ridiculous statement that “corporate price gouging” is the reason “prices are still too high” even though “inflation is down.” The rate of inflation is down from its peak, but annual inflation numbers are cumulative. Inflation may “fall” to 2.9%, but that means prices are up another 2.9%. It doesn’t provide any basis to reduce them.
Even The New York Times wrote skeptically of Harris’s plan for a “federal ban on price gouging.” Pronouncing the issue “complicated,” the Times reported that economists cite “a range of forces for pushing up prices,” including “increased consumer demand fueled by stimulus from the government and low rates from the Federal Reserve.”
Federal control of food prices raises the threat of potential federal control of the prices of anything or everything else. That would certainly strike terror into the hearts of businesses and investors, likely crashing the stock market if anybody thought there was a chance that this policy could actually be enacted.
It would be poetic justice if business-oriented donors to the Democratic Party pulled their support from Democratic congressional candidates and instead supported Republicans, just to make sure there were enough votes in the House to block economically ignorant and catastrophic price controls by a potential Harris administration.
The next voice you hear might be Nancy Pelosi telling Harris, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
With the Democratic convention starting next week, there wouldn’t be much time for replacement candidates. Then again, the party dispatched the sitting president of the United States into the wilderness with a single tweet on a weekend, so it doesn’t take them long once they pick up the knives.
Then the only question will be what to do with all the new photographs and adoring portraits that make Harris look like she belongs in a gallery of North Korean dictators.
There’s a museum in Culver City that houses a collection of Cold War artifacts, including busts of Communist leaders from the Soviet era. The Wende Museum might consider adding a small annex to display the likenesses of Kamala Harris that have been created since she took over the ballot spot that was won in the primaries by President Joe Biden.
That would be a fitting final resting place for the political career of this California machine politician who so recklessly proposes seizing the fruits of other people’s labor and investment to buy votes and repay donors.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley
