The Gift Of F.A.I.L.ure
What Trump and many supporters get wrong about Kamala Harris
![Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks to the National Congress of American Indians Annual Conference, Tuesday, October 12, 2021 in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)](https://otb.cachefly.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/kamala-harris-phone-camera.jpg)
One of the ongoing attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris from former President Trump and his supporters is that she’s not a good politician. For example, yesterday OTB commenter Jack wrote: “Kamala Harris was a drag on the ticket because, well, she is an idiot with the political instincts of snail.” This idea of Harris being (a) not smart and (b) a bad politician is echoed in this run-on sentence from a recent Donald post on Truth Social (strap in for this epic run-on sentence):
I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL Polls, and this despite the Democrats unprecedentedly changing their Primary Winning Candidate, Sleepy Joe Biden, midstream, with a Candidate, Kamala Harris, who failed to get even a single Primary Vote, and was the first out of 15 Democrat Candidates to quit the race.
Setting aside the usual Trump lying and puffery (i.e. he’s not doing “really well” in any polls at the moment), there’s a particular portion of that quote that I want to zoom in on: “a Candidate, Kamala Harris, who failed to get even a single Primary Vote, and was the first out of 15 Democrat Candidates to quit the race.” Beyond implying that Harris is undeserving of her position because of her race and gender (i.e. being the DEI pick), most Right Wing attacks on Harris as a person ultimately hinge on her poor performance in the 2020 Democratic Primary.
Harris announced that she was considering running for the Democratic Nomination in December 2018. On MLK Day, 2019, she formally announced her campaign to seek the nomination. At the time, she was the sixth major Democrat to enter the race, almost two and a half months before Biden entered the race. She would remain in the race until December of that year. Here is some of the reporting from a CNN post-mortem of Harris’s campaign’s ups and downs:
Harris’ abrupt decision on Tuesday makes the senator the most high-profile candidate to date to drop out of the race to challenge President Donald Trump, and is the culmination of months of disjointed messaging, contentious infighting among top aides and severe money issues that plagued the campaign.
A host of issues sunk Harris’ campaign, but the final straw, according to a number of Harris aides and advisers, was the California senator could see no path toward the nomination given her inability to gain any traction in the race or raise money to get her message out, leading her to make what she called “one of the hardest decisions of my life” and end her presidential bid.
Harris was the lone black woman to launch a bid in 2020 and aimed to coalesce a diverse coalition of voters that mirrored that of President Barack Obama. But Harris failed to cut into former Vice President Joe Biden’s commanding lead with black voters, particularly in the early voting state of South Carolina, and struggled to break into the top tier of contenders in Iowa, despite polls showing voters viewed her favorably.
The CNN article and a more indepth one from the New York Time (free to read link) published just before she dropped out of the race dive into the campaign’s major challenges. Both call out issues with her campaign and fundraising staff and structure (including the decision to bifurcate the leadership of her campaign team). She also struggled to define her positions in a race that included Joe Biden running as a centrist (to her right) and Elizabeth Warren running as an extreme progressive (to her left). That led to her messaging was all over the place. All of that also led to a drop in fundraising that ultimately buried the campaign before any vote was cast.
However, both articles from 2019, also point out some useful context for understanding what has been happening in 2024. From the Times:
Harris’ central reason for dropping out now was to preserve her political future, multiple people close to the senator told CNN. At 55 years old, Harris did not want to assume debt – financial or political – and she believes she will be better positioned to be considered as a running mate or to run for re-election in 2022 if she accepted reality and ended her candidacy now.
So we see a Harris who understood that she was failing and made the choice to end the campaign early to preserve her political future. Personally, that doesn’t strike me as someone with the political instincts of “a snail.” Likewise, the Times article points out that there were highlights within her 2019 campaign. For example:
On a conference call with donors after the last debate in mid-November, Jim Margolis, a senior campaign adviser, pointed to her improved performance as a case study in letting “Kamala be Kamala,” according to one person who participated in the call — a reference to Ms. Harris’s strengths when she is listening to her competitors’ comments and reacting freely.
It was her abundant political skills — strong on the stump, a warm manner with voters and ferocity with the opposition that seemed to spell trouble for Mr. Trump — that convinced many Democrats of Ms. Harris’s potential.
That second paragraph, in particular, reflects much of what we are currently seeing on the campaign trail. What’s particularly striking to me is how often both articles contain phrases like “Harris realized the problem, but wasn’t sure at the time how to fix it.” This brings us to the topic of failure.
For some people, failure is seen as toxic. There’s a certain mindset where only losers fail. Not to mince words Kamala Harris failed in the 2020 Democratic primary in a pretty major fashion. Hence the criticism from Donald Trump and his followers. However, what they miss (or choose not to acknowledge) is that failure isn’t necessary the end of a bigger process.
I have a friend and martial arts mentor who shared a great phrase with me: “FAIL is just an acronym for (F)irst (A)ttempt (I)n (L)earning.” I love this phrase as it spoke to something I had been struggling to externalize. Failure is a necessary part of learning. In fact, learning often involves many failures. Over the years, I’ve expanded on the phrase, saying: “The F in F.A.I.L. can also mean (F)ifth, (F)ortieth, or (F)ive-hundreth attempt in learning.”
After failing in 2019, Harris had four years as Vice President to learn from that failure and practice her skills. We’re seeing the results of that process at the moment. The rollout of her campaign has been measured and methodical. She appears to have intentionally resisted doing press until she gets everything in place (including her VP, staff, and messaging). While she’s inherited a campaign team from President Biden, we’ve yet to hear about the same types of internal battles that plagued her 2019 from the start. All and all, it really appears that she’s learned from her failure.
This can be contrasted with the current reporting on the challenges facing the current Trump campaign, namely Trump himself. Most of the reports, see today’s Axios article and the recent one from the New York Times (free link) focus on his inability to change his behavior, beginning with publicly acknowledging the loss of the 2020 election. From Axios:
What we’re hearing: Republican sources close to Trump tell us he realizes he needs to bring new focus to a message that can be meandering and self-indulgent. But it’s Trump. So a new script is often fictional wishfulness.
- Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” a top Republican source tells us.
- Trump’s aides know he won’t change. So they’re focusing “not on the need for him to change but on the need to adapt his message to win,” the source said. “But he has to convince himself to leave the other garbage behind.”
Trump failed to win reelection in 2020. But rather than face that failure and engage in any sort of reflection, Trump denied losing the election. And if we look at his approach to campaigning 2024, it is essentially the same as what he did in 2016 and 2020 (just with far fewer campaign rallys). Granted, that strategy worked once (in 2016) and failed once (in 2020). And it did appear to be working for most of this cycle. Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee out of the gate and acted out of that position of power (choosing not to participate in any of the Republican Primary Debates). The problem is that life can come at you fast, and now Trump (and his supporters) find themselves in a very different position. From the Times:
As Ms. Harris — long ridiculed and underestimated — has transformed the contest, campaigning energetically and drawing roughly even with Mr. Trump in many polls, Mr. Trump has responded with one unforced error after another while struggling to land on an effective and consistent argument against her.
He has found the change disorienting, those who interact with him say. Mr. Trump had grown comfortable campaigning against an 81-year-old incumbent who struggled to navigate stairs, thoughts and sentences. Suddenly, he finds himself in a race against a Black woman nearly 20 years younger, one who has already made history and who is drawing large and excited crowds.
The people around Mr. Trump see a candidate knocked off his bearings, nothing like the man who reclined serenely on July 15 as he watched as thousands of delegates cheered him on the first night of the Republican National Convention.
Imagine, just for a moment, if Trump had accepted and tried to learn from his failure. Or, at the very least, accept that, even if that isn’t possible for him, it’s something that other people can do. This isn’t a guarantee that Harris will continue to perform well. But as long as she continues to demonstrate she learned from 2019 and has taken steps to improve, Trump and his followers are going to struggle with a reality that they can’t believe is happening. If only there were word for that experience.
Three quick follow up thoughts:
First, what we are seeing with Harris isn’t a new phenomenon or one that is restricted to politics. For example, one need look no further than sports. Since we are about to enter football season, here’s a recent article from NFL.com that lists what they consider to be the 10 greatest one-season turnarounds in football. If Harris continues to perform well, perhaps she’ll end up in a similar article for political careers.
Second, in addition to clearly underestimating Harris’s ability to learn from failure, Trump and his supporters like Jack have made the mistake of using a single political race to define Harris. In part, this is most likely because she is a California politician, and an assumption that any Democrat with a pulse can win office in California. While there is some truth to the political lean of the state, this fails to acknowledge that Harris still had to successfully win Democratic party primaries (at the local and state level) and navigate state-wide races. While it’s true that San Francisco leans Democrat, she still had to win two elections in a field that featured three Democrats. So again, characterizing someone who had won multiple elections over the course of her political career as having the political instincts of “a snail” probably has more to do with one’s personal biases than any interest in the actual facts at hand.
Third, as I wrote about yesterday, I think one of the challenges that the Trump campaign has faced is that they are currently handing over all of their media and messaging to a VP who only won a single election (in a State that is becoming a Republican equivalent of California) and has so far demonstrated worse political instincts (at least when it comes to the press) than Harris. Which is… wait for it… weird.
There are famous narrative renditions of this, but here is the list of the countless elections Lincoln lost before being elected president.
You’re citing Jack? Really? You’ve got numerous other commentators who’ve been around for years and can talk intelligently, and you picked Jack? Of course he said negative things about Harris – what else does he contribute around here?
This is about laying the groundwork for their next coup attempt:
‘A different level than 2020’: Trump’s plan to steal election is taking shape
@Not the IT Dept.:
Sure. Why not?
FWIW, I’ve been trying to build user comments into more of my posts. It just happened to be that something he wrote yesterday was a nice hook for today’s post.
Sometimes that’s enough. He does a great job of offering the perspective of ride-or-die Trumpers.
Yup, and I’ll keep watching comments to see which other ones I can build off of. For example, I’ve been working on something related to Animorphs for years and I know exactly who I will use for that one… wait for it… our resident Stormy Dragon! I might also ask Gustopher as I’ve been led to believe by his avatar that he’s at least partially a giraffe.
@Matt Bernius:
Leave my chimp out of this, please.
@Matt Bernius:
If I ever get the power to turn into a dragon, I’m definitely staying in that form for more than two hours!
(One of my foundational memories was reading “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” and wondering why Eustace transforming into a dragon was treated as something horrifying instead of the greatest thing that ever happened to him =3 )
@Matt Bernius: It’s a young grey kangaroo, with a snail on his head. Part of a series of drawings I did a very long time ago.
I thought he was a wallaby, but I’ve recently found the reference photo, and he is a juvenile kangaroo.
Dear Matt –
I was parroting media, party and social media. Sure. You can try to hide from that, blame me, but it just ain’t so. It was the party line when JB was “sharp as a tack,” and KH the ball and chain.
But then, there was a sudden need for revisionist history. Presto!! Kamala as Jesus. And everyone on the left falls in line. Try – I know its hard – to be honest. But probably some sort of partisan disease.
I agree with everything above, so I want to argue a minor point:
Bernie was the extreme progressive. Warren was a bit more centrist than him, and struggling to find the space between Harris and Bernie. Warren is very much an institutionalist.
It was also fun watching the BernieBros get angry that when Warren dropped out, almost all of her support went to Biden. Sure, Warren endorsed him, but endorsements from losing candidates don’t mean as much as the genuine dislike everyone had for BernieBros.
Bernie: a decent man with good positions, who hires so many shitheads who quickly become post-left, and who attracts many followers who don’t have the sense to grab a half-loaf when offered and then keep fighting for more.
This discussion complicates something that actually is pretty simple.
Running in a primary against people of your own party, people you might someday need as allies, is a very different situation to running in a general against a highly polarized opposition.
Different incentives, different skills needed. There is no reason to think Harris would ever have been a weak opponent to TFG.
@charontwo: No edit key so new post to add – Biden didn’t choose her haphazardly, this is something he would have given a lot of thought to, and had some reasoning to go with.
@Jack:
Which media? Matt’s OP demonstrates that your characterization is untrue. Or at least, not universal.
Now, if that was the take from right-wing outlets or social media, then it doesn’t support your conclusion about Dem partisanship, but kinda does for the GOP.
I will admit that partisanship on the Dem side has been a point of contention here.
Hey @Jack, thanks for the response:
Huh. I have to confess I have never seen the second part of that. Perhaps you can find examples of people in the Democratic party saying, “KH the ball and chain.” If it’s as common as you say, it must be easy to find. I mean, I saw a lot of right-wing sites claiming this, but they might just be speaking to their primary audiences (you know the way you say OTB does).
So are you saying that you don’t agree with what you posted? Because, just a few weeks ago you posted that Harris is *checks notes* “a ditz” and “Sarah Palin” in the past:
BTW, Obama endorsed Harris within 24 hours of your posting that. So it seems like his view isn’t what you were portraying.
Man, life comes at you fast doesn’t it? But as you reminded us, people today don’t have integrity. I really appreciate you are so committed to us that you decided to model said lack of integrity.
BTW, and this is a serious offer: if you want to refute my point and affirm that you personally think Harris is a competent candidate let me know. I’ll add it to the main body of the post.
You’re right, we did do that. Which seems to be disappointing to Jack of the past who was celebrating the disarray.
I mean, I’d be salty too if what I suggested was a self-inflicted wound ended up completely devastating my preferred candidate’s lead in the polls.
Also, I want to note, true to your word, that you’ve yet to offer any apologies or excuses for the issues with Trump and Vance that I have called out across multiple posts now. I’m pretty impressed by that.
The most you’ve done is try to hijack threads with topics that have nothing to do with Trump or Vance. I wonder why?
Still good on you! And hey, keep on reading. I see you and appreciate your comments.
@Jack: He’s not blaming you, he’s quoting you and using it as a springboard for a post he probably already had baking.
It’s instructive to remember that Trump himself was considered a joke candidate BY REPUBLICANS until he started garnering actual support.
Kamala Harris passed the California bar exam, widely considered to be the most difficult bar exam in the country. Yes, it was on her second try, but the CA bar has a pass rate of just 34%. She’s definitely not an idiot, and she certainly didn’t have her big brother beg and pay her way into Wharton.
This is just so laughable coming from a Trump supporter.
@Jack:
Also Jack, to @Jen’s point, can you point out how I’m “blaming” you? Again, that’s a serious question, I’d love to understand what I said that made you immediately jump to “blame.”
Was it:
If it was, and you think that’s an inaccurate assessment of you, let me know and I’ll remove it from the post.
I don’t know where the Times got this (bold mine):
I don’t know any Democrat who ridiculed or underestimated her. If Republicans ridiculed and underestimated her, well, they do that to pretty much every Democrat.
Also, Matt didn’t mention in the post that the Biden campaign sent her out to stump for abortion rights by doing local media and also non-traditional media (e.g., The View — I happened to catch her on that show when I was working out at the gym), and she’s further honed her skills there.
I’m always puzzled by the claims of someone being a “bad candidate”.
By what metric? A candidate either wins or loses. It doesn’t matter if they are good or bad.
It just reminds me of barstool sports where people try to tell you that their favorite team is actually the best, even though they lost, or vice versa, try to convince you that the Superbowl champion team is actually terrible.
@mistermix:
Good catch. I had assumed that the “long ridiculed and underestimated” applied to her political opponents. But maybe this is what Jack was talking about–that he sees the invisible “by Democrats and supporters of President Biden” that the rest of us can’t see.
This. And it’s been going on for a while. In doing some research for this post, I came across this post James wrote a year ago about Harris’s role in doing active PR for the election campaign:
https://outsidethebeltway.com/kamala-harris-taking-leading-role-in-2024-campaign/
@mistermix:
I underestimated her.
My only exposure to her was her 2020 campaign, and also there’s something about her manner that vaguely annoys me (trying to pin it down, I think I would go with “wine mom who laughs at her own jokes”, but milder. She’s fine, she just irks me.*).
I’m very surprised, and very relieved that she is doing much better than I expected. And that she either doesn’t vaguely annoy everyone else, or that people don’t care about that.
——
*: Is it a quiet sexism and/or racism? Maybe! I am born and raised in America. Maybe the way she has to navigate other people’s sexism and racism comes across too performative to me. Or maybe she comes through just fine and if I met her I just wouldn’t like her. Whatever, none of that means she wouldn’t be a good President.
@Chip Daniels:
Can they communicate clearly? Can they control the media narrative about them? Can they control the media narrative about their opponent? Do they have any giant red flags that they can’t work around?
Do they fit within the mainstream of their party? Do they fit within the mainstream of America?
There are absolutely bad candidates. JD Vance leaps to mind. And my personal favorite, Elizabeth Warren, who is great at communicating to me, but kind of not anyone else, at least on a national stage?
If you run a terrible candidate against a terrible candidate, one of them is going to win, but that doesn’t make them not a terrible candidate.
@Gustopher: I also underestimated her. I thought that a big reason Biden wouldn’t step back was that any candidate other than Harris would be suicide for the Democrats and that Harris was not a strong candidate, based primarily on my vague recollection of her quick exit in 2020. I have not only been surprised about how Democrats coalesced behind her, I have been happily surprised (shocked) that she has resonated so well so far.
@Gustopher: I underestimated her too and, even more so, the Democratic Party’s ability to rally behind her. I am delighted to admit I was wrong.
This (seeming “performative”) is worth highlighting because I’ve both seen this when working with female politicians, and have experienced it myself. I think any woman in a position of authority and/or power (including Herself, Ms. Taylor Swift), gets caught in a very annoying trap/cycle of being always ‘on.’ The second you let your guard down the criticism starts. Leave your house looking less than perfect? “She doesn’t take her job seriously.” Always put together? “Too uptight/can’t loosen up.” Laugh too loudly? “Unladylike.” You correct that to smile politely. “No sense of humor.”
So yeah, after a while, women in authority do probably come across as performative. Bonus: you get labeled as “cold” or “bitchy” when this happens.
It’s hard to overstate the mental f*ckery that this exacts as a toll on your personality.
@Gustopher:
Warren, like Hillary Clinton, is someone who could make a good Prime Minister, but is a terrible Presidential candidate (though I think Warren is better at retail politics than Clinton).
I will say, like @Joe, @MarkedMan, and maybe (?) past Jack, I also underestimated the speed at which the Democratic Party would get behind Harris. That was honestly my biggest concern with Biden stepping down. I am on record here as thinking it would be necessary for him to give up the Presidency in order to ensure she was the nominees. I’m glad I was wrong about that.
@Jen:
There are not enough upvotes for this. I’d also extend this to anyone in a position where they are from an historically under-represented community. There’s a reason why “You have to work twice as hard to get half as much” is a phrase in many communities.
There’s a phrase in sports (and maybe elsewhere): It’s not win or lose… it’s win or learn. Harris clearly is someone who has the mindset, consciously or not.
Trump on the other hand? Eash…
@Gustopher: and terrible candidate does not necessarily mean terrible politician. I was a huge Bernie Sanders fan for years, as a result of listening to him every week on the “Brunch with Bernie” segment on the Thom Hartmann show. But the way he carried out his 2016 campaign so thoroughly turned me off that I voted for Clinton in the primary. Since that time, he has gradually won me back. I like him as a politician, hate him as a candidate.
Biden failed to be the Democrat candidate numerous times before finally succeeding.
Incompetent, inexperienced, picked solely for his ethnicity to please a small subgroup of the US population… Ladies and Gentlemen, your 2024 DEI VP selection: JD Vance!
Matt, I think even with the day-to-day experience of prior positions, Kamala took the past 4 years to get better at public speaking. And laughing in public.. which is a very normal, human thing. Pop quiz: Find a clip of Trump laughing.. even one. You can’t – because he doesn’t laugh. And that, to me, is wildly offputting. You know, weird.
This reminds me of a Master Sergeant I used to work for, who once told me “you know, I’m the smartest guy in the room.” I said, “well that seems a bit egotistical” and he replied, “well, I wasn’t born smart, I got that way because I’ve made more mistakes than anyone else here. And I learned more from figuring out why I fucked up and how to fix it than I ever did any other way.”
Harris, it seems, is an exceptionally quick and adept learner. She knew when to back out in 2020, she knew how to get herself into a position where she could and would be selected as VP, and she has managed the transition of the 2024 campaign from Biden to herself with admirable mastery.
I was one who believed Biden should stay in the race, until it became clear he had been so damaged by the reaction to the debate that he could not have retained the support of Democratic voters nationwide. When his withdrawal seemed imminent, I understood the only viable option would be Harris, and I was not upset by this, I believed then that she would do well and she has only proven that right x1000. And choosing Walz as her running mate has shown her political instincts are spot-on. She could hardly have made a better choice.
@Jen:
Everything you say here is true. Then add in the additional challenge of being a non-white woman in power and you know her public persona is carefully crafted and honed.
But it also means that she is probably the candidate most likely to handle someone like Trump. Irrational anger and attacks that are not based on reality are things that she has faced her entire life and they won’t throw her off.
Possibly the worst performance in any Marvel movie was Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Just an unmitigated disaster.
And yet somehow Reynolds managed to seize control of the character and make three brilliant Deadpool movies that have now grossed somewhere north of two billion dollars.
So yeah… failure can be something to learn from.*
*By the way, not blaming Reynolds for the first disaster. It was Fox… and they were the ones who had to learn from the failure to listen to him…
@Joe: @MarkedMan: I underestimated her as well. I thought for sure “the country isn’t ready for a black woman President”. I am encouraged by how fast the party has rallied, and I’m also impressed by her social media campaign.
A lot of the college-aged youth I know were prepared to sit out or vote RFK, they don’t see the “long view”, that Trump is a threat our nation and a vote for RFK is a vote for Trump.
The addition of Walz has only added to it, my own “ready to vote” teenager is ecstatic that she “has someone to vote for that isn’t Great-Grandpa old”. Her and all her friends are saturating their personal social media feeds with their ads, proud of their “registered to vote” status.
I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a breath of fresh air, I had resigned myself to another Trump presidency and doom, but suddenly…..I have hope!
@Not the IT Dept.: Exactly. Jack isn’t a thinker, analyst, or poser of thoughtful questions. He’s a troll. He defecates on the screen. That’s all there is.
On the other hand, you comment is thought provoking for the readership and you got to address some issues that may be important to the audience. If his comment was how you got the topic, I guess that makes his crap useful, or at least serviceable.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: One note (no edit, obviously): the “you” in reference in par. 2 is Matt, not “Not…” I wasn’t paying attention to the heading of my post as I wrote.
@Jax:
A vote for RFKJr is more akin to sitting it out than voting for Trump. It doesn’t boost Trump’s count in comparison to Harris’s.
I have no idea how anyone could think RFKJr is worth voting for, when he is manifestly insane, and his anti-vaccine stuff has killed lots of people, and he’s very pro-Israel, but… stupid is going to vote for stupid. And a lot of young people are stupid. Their frontal lobes haven’t finished developing, so I cut them some slack.
@Matt Bernius:
Several years ago we had a family cat that spent most of her time indoors, but that we would occasionally let out into the yard when we were out there working or lounging. One day, we saw that she had cornered a mole. She would bat it around. It would roll itself into a ball, then scamper away a bit when it caught a break in the cat’s attention. The cat would pounce and start the cycle all over again. In the end, she didn’t kill the mole. She just let it go – battered and exhausted, but alive.
Not sure why, but I think about this cat play whenever you construct replies to Jack such as this one.
Years ago when I had indoor-outdoor cats they were all Democrats.
Any mice that the cats caught and ate were Republicans.
I thought at the time that her decision to end her campaign and switch her support to Biden as early as she did was a sign of intelligence. And look how that decision has set up her to be where she is now.
So many Presidential primary candidates allow their egos to keep them in the race long after their expiration dates. It takes quite a bit of emotional intelligence to admit that something isn’t working and figure out the best Plan B.
@Jax:
I won’t believe it until she wins election day. Hillary was up +11 points over Trump at one point AND in the days before the election there were polls putting her 5 points over Trump.
I do fully admit I was absolutely wrong about how the switchover was going to happen. I expected the Democratic party to be the Democratic party and fracture like cats. I didn’t expect the Biden campaign to go into this election season with the foresight to set buys and such up to be transferable to Harris. I’m not into the nitty gritty so I have no idea what was lost as a result of the change over. I’m just super surprised that Biden’s team went into this election with a viable plan for someone else taking over at the top. The timing was great too.
@Gustopher:
It’s cute!
@Matt:
Same here. There were two places that I thought this might happen–the first, when Kamala was introduced as the new candidate, and the second when she announced her VP choice.
That this did NOT happen shows thought and planning.
I underestimated Kamala Harris as well. This had two main parts.
First, her pitch in 2020 was “I’m the most attacking candidate. I will go after Trump hard.” The electorate didn’t want that. (They didn’t want to risk a black woman, either, and black voters were very enthusiastic about Biden.)
Second, her voice in video and manner in video ads (on YouTube) did not seem to me to measure up. I think the sound of a candidate’s voice is probably even more important than their appearance. I was convinced that Joe Lieberman would never be president because his voice just wasn’t that good. However, in concord with the thesis of this post, Kamala has made improvements on that, in short order. That is truly impressive. It says a lot.
@Gustopher: @mistermix:
I don’t know any Democrat who ridiculed or underestimated her.
I underestimated her.
I underestimated her too. I was asked by a friend to go to a fundraiser for her in San Francisco when she was running for DA. I donated, heard her speak and confidently, when asked by my friend, what I thought, said there was no chance she was going anywhere…. 🙂