Matthew Continetti
Commentary, September 2024
“ … there is no more binary issue in the world today than a democratic nation retaliating against a genocidal terrorist organization that rapes and murders innocents, hides behind hospitals and schools, and burrows underground. “
On July 30, Kamala Harris released the first TV ad of her presidential campaign. The 60-second spot, titled “Fearless,” leans heavily on biography. The narrator begins with Harris’s career as a prosecutor, when she locked up “murderers and abusers.” There’s a mention of her tenure as California state attorney general and her fight against “the big banks.” Harris’s years as vice president, we are told, have been spent controlling the price of insulin. We hear a quote from one of her recent speeches. “This campaign,” Harris says, “is about who we fight for.”
The commercial is noteworthy for what it excludes. It leaves out Harris’s four years in the U.S. Senate, when she compiled a voting record that put her in the same company as the far-left Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The ad doesn’t mention her calamitous run for president in 2020, when she called for the abolition of private health insurance, the decriminalization of border crossings, and the passage of the economy-crushing Green New Deal, then dropped out two months before Iowa. The name of the man for whom Harris has served as vice president also goes unuttered in the television spot, but that’s understandable: At this writing, according to Real Clear Politics, President Biden has an average job approval rating of 41 percent. … [To read the full article, click here]