The mainstream media news machine spent the entire Democratic National Convention pushing the idea of “reintroducing” Kamala Harris to Americans, relying on the assumption that vice presidents are seen but not heard.
For any journalists who suddenly want to push the same ambitious, biracial narrative that characterized Barack Obama’s entry into the White House, these autobiographies can be heavily manipulated and edited, so the word “reintroduction” should come as a slap in the face. Obama’s “autobiography” was full of fictional elements, even invented girlfriends.
On the cover of The New York Times on August 26 is an article explaining that the Harris campaign is allergic to mentioning that their candidate was born in the radical tumult of Berkeley in the 1960s. Instead, a video from the convention listed her childhood home as “East Bay.” It can’t be “the People’s Republic of Berkeley” when someone is pitching their new choice to moderate voters.
Reporters Heather Knight and Alexandra Berzon confirmed that Kamala’s mother, Shyamala, “was involved in community outreach in Berkeley and Oakland.” They told readers that the word “Berkeley” disappeared early in her career, when Harris ran for California attorney general in 2008.
But elsewhere it is clearer. In her podcast The daily — broadcast nationwide by taxpayer-funded National Public Radio — Just Reporter Astead Herndon emphasized that activism played a big role in her upbringing.
“She was growing up not only in a black community, but also in a very proud and rich history of blackness… The Black Panthers headquarters was just a few blocks from her house.” Her parents made a “conscious effort to provide their children with places of black affirmation” and taught black history in a radical activist way.
The “reintroduction” advocates also ignored Kamala’s teenage years in Canada. From 1976 to 1982 (from about age 12 to 18) she lived in Montreal, where her mother worked at McGill University. Just noted that Montreal “performed even worse than Berkeley” at the convention. “The city’s name was completely erased from Mrs. Harris’s retelling of her childhood.”
For Obama and Harris, the portrayal of their lifestyle as a mixed-race American in the world is incredibly fluid – depending on which voting bloc you are addressing.
In his podcast interview, Herndon talked about Harris as prosecutor and how that “explains the story of someone who believes you can be multiple things at once. You can be an empathetic progressive but also believe in punishment and accountability.” That’s not at all what prosecutors in San Francisco are known for, but it’s an election year, so it’s time to cheat.
Herndon and the rest of the pro-democracy press just want to defeat Donald Trump, and they would prefer that Harris be hard to label as a leftist. He says: “She is a vessel in which you can see what you want to see. If you want to see a progressive, there is probably enough there for you to see. If you want to see a moderate, you can probably see that too. And so I think one of the stories Here is an ideological fluidity that was once seen as a problem, now seen as a solution.”
Confusion is a solution. They do not hide their commitment at all.
Herndon admits that this deliberate obfuscation makes it hard to know how Harris would govern as president, but for Democrats inside and outside the press, this is not the time to worry about that. That’s a problem (and a project) for 2025.
