Cue the ‘Jaws’ Theme Song in the Presidential Race

By Conrad Black

The Democratic presidential election campaign has now gone into a Hollywood-produced fantasy land. Emancipation from the intolerable burden of trying to carry to re-election a senescent political wheelhorse who has bombed out in every major policy area has created a fun house euphoria: a candidate who six weeks ago was regarded by two thirds of Americans as an embarrassment as vice president has metamorphosed into the lady of color the nation has been waiting to elect president.

The fact that this is a Potemkin Village candidacy cannot be long disguised. It was an impressive and disciplined performance by the worthlessly partisan national political media, and the great majority of the polls, conducted by left-wing universities in media outlets, to make it look like a winning campaign. An atmosphere like the end zone after a Super Bowl-winning touchdown was confected, amid window-rattling ululations of joy and hope that were really gasps of relief that the fiction that the Biden administration was a serious government worthy of reelection no longer had to be maintained.

There is substantial video evidence to remind people that Ms. Harris was canvassing for release from arrest four years ago of arsonists and rapists following the death of George Floyd. It is clear that she accepts the right of Israel to exist within certain borders, but not seriously to retaliate against the Hamas invasion of last October, in which the equivalent in Israeli demographics of 35,000 Americans were murdered.

Ms. Harris now denies the undeniable fact that she was responsible for the southern border throughout the Biden years, and bears principal responsibility for the invasion of the United States by approximately 10 million illegal migrants, many of them chronically undesirable people. Although there was no mention of climate change or the rest of the green terror at the Democratic convention, she is an unlimited enthusiast of electric vehicles and coerced abandonment of fossil fuel use.

Plus, the vice president claims that she will maintain American strength in the world, but wholly approved of the debacle in Afghanistan in which hundreds of thousands of people who risked their lives for America and its allies were abandoned along with $85 billion of military hardware. Her answer to crime is to continue ignoring felonies of under $1,000.

None of this was featured in the happy-clappy, Kumbaya convention. They could not discuss policy because they are underwater on every policy except possibly abortion. They could not discuss climate change, because the public is tired of it. Their only campaign is to attack Donald Trump, under whom, as the whole country remembers, 80 percent of Americans were better off than they have been since he left office.

The Democrats have never been able to cope with the Trump phenomenon; first it was a joke, then it had to be a theft, and he was investigated for treason. When he neutrally asked whether the Biden family had committed financial improprieties in Ukraine, he was impeached (and was discovered to be not guilty).

Now that the Bidens are in the last round-up, the criminal charges about their conduct in Ukraine are slowly coming down. Their education plan is further prostration before the corrupt and incompetent teachers’ unions, which have reduced the public school system to the level of daycare centers, while approving gender changes by children without the knowledge of their parents.

Ms. Harris’ candidate for vice president, because she was too intimidated by pro-Palestinian extremists to opt for Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, is Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, who lied for decades about his military record, imposed the Covid shut down with totalitarian severity, claims there is no point to erecting a southern border wall because it would be swarmed by millions of people carrying 30 foot ladders, did nothing while Minneapolis burned four years ago, and ordered the sale of tampons in boys’ washrooms in the Minnesota high school system.

He has drawn scrutiny on the right for what Congressman James Comer calls his “longstanding and cozy relationship” with the Peoples’ Republic of China. The Democratic party of FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, and Bill Clinton of moderate liberalism, which strayed into the barren regions of the far left only once with George McGovern in 1972 and lost by 18,000,000 votes, has now plunged head-first into the dark electoral waters of the far left.

The Democrats have abandoned popular consultation as a means of selecting their presidential candidates. When it appeared that a declared socialist, Bernie Sanders, would win four years ago, the party bosses parachuted in ahead of him Joe Biden, who had never won more than two percent of the vote when he had run for the Democratic nomination in previous years and had been heavily defeated in the primaries in 2020, coming fifth in New Hampshire with 11 percent of the vote.

Fishing for blocs of votes, Mr. Biden chose the only non-white female, remotely plausible, as vice president, who had fallen out of the race before the primaries began, and answered every question put to her with the assertion that a “national conversation” was required on that subject.

Kamala Harris has received no votes whatever from her party as presidential nominee yet so desperate has the administration become, that after President Obama, who had lifted Mr. Biden out of obscurity in the first place to make him vice president, and then disposed of him when he was clearly (as Mr. Obama had predicted) inadequate as president, acclaimed the emergence of the cypher Ms. Harris as a messianic experience.

The Democratic campaign is fraudulent and vulnerable. Despite claims from his detractors that President Trump is stumbling and that his candidacy is in grave danger, his personal acceptance rate has risen for the first time to approximately half of the people. He has only two tactical and relatively manageable problems. His enthusiastic and committed supporters still love his shtick, but repetition of it will not pick up those that he needs to recruit on the straight basis of the issues.

People who have driven and waited for hours to hear him want him to speak for 90 minutes and show his comedic talents. Another echelon of the electorate, though, is accessible and wants him to demolish his opponents on the issues. He only has to pitch his campaign carefully and to ensure that it is a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration much more than it is on the personal foibles of Trump himself.

This will not be difficult to do, and he will be well assisted by his vice president, J. D. Vance, who has shaken off the Democrats’ nonsense that he was “weird.” The Democrats’ joy that they are no longer saddled with Mr. Biden is understandable, but their belief that they can be so easily excused for the record of this appalling administration whose nondescript vice president they are now trying to elevate illustrates that they are now so cynical, they are naïve: an unworthy party of decayed servitors. Trump will win.

First published in the New York Sun