HANSON: Can Harris's Cynical Run-Out-the-Clock Campaign Succeed?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris -- ever since President Joe Biden, at the 11th hour, dropped out in July.

Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked.

Her single, 11-minute post-debate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating -- even though the host was sympathetically left-wing.

Even socialist Bernie Sanders pointed out that for Harris to get elected, she must temporarily disown her lifelong leftist credentials.

As vice president, she must further deny co-ownership of the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration.

Left unstated is that whether she wins the presidency -- or loses it and continues as vice president for another three months -- nonetheless she will inevitably revert back to her hard-core, lifelong leftist beliefs.

In addition, Harris has reconstructed her privileged upbringing as a child of two PhDs, living in a posh Montreal neighborhood into a struggling, middle-class Oakland childhood.

How can she stage such a complete makeover -- and contemptuously count on the voting public to be so easily deceived?

She avoids all news conferences, one-on-one nationally broadcast interviews, and town halls. And like Biden, she will debate only on leftist venues with impartial pro-Harris moderators.

When asked to provide the details of her past responsibility for the open border, inflationary economy, spiraling crime, attacks on fossil fuels, and collapsing foreign policy, Harris smiles, makes hand gestures, and dodges. She changes the subject to her empathetic personality, her "joy" campaign, and her iconic profile as a supposedly dynamic black woman.

When pressed, Harris outsources the task of squaring her hypocrisies and subterfuges to the stonewalling campaign, Democratic surrogates -- and the media.

Harris is also certainly not running on her demonstrable experience, vision, or intelligence as much as she is not Trump (or, for that matter, her former partner, Biden).

To make that distinction stark, Harris must demonize and bait Trump nonstop and make the country fear him.

So, she paints Trump as a racist and violent insurrectionist, not a former president whose four-year term saw a superior foreign policy, economy, border, and security than during the Biden-Harris term.

Instead, Harris has repeatedly claimed Trump is a dictator and a threat to democracy -- as if he had politically weaponized the FBI, CIA, DOJ, or IRS as had former President Barack Obama and Biden.

Trump as Hitler has become a staple Democrat smear for the past decade.

That vicious caricature is so entrenched that major Democratic figures assume it's OK to joke about, or seriously call for, Trump's demise.

So, Harris's current prominent advisor David Plouffe years ago warned the nation that "it is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again."

Just last year, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-NY, claimed that Trump "is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be, he has to be eliminated."