Thirteen years before he ran for president, Barack Obama published an inspiring work of fiction titled “Dreams from My Father.” It raised his profile significantly, and the activist and organizer quickly began rising through the political ranks.
There was only a tiny problem. See, Obama had billed “Dreams from My Father” as a work of non-fiction dealing with his experiences of race and identity in America. And it came across convincingly enough — so convincing, in fact, that it wasn’t until three years into his presidency, when The Washington Post’s David Maraniss (hardly a conservative firebrand) looked into it and found it was a loose roman-à-clef at best, and a work of deft fabrication at worst.
But the key word there is deft. The lies, such as they were, were of the believable sort. The kind of people who liked Barack Obama’s backstory continued swallowing every last word of it, even if it were false, because it was not only inspiring (to them, at least), but plausible.
If only Kamala Harris had taken a creative writing workshop with Obama during his days teaching at the University of Chicago. Because, when it comes to fashioning her own life story, Harris’ believability leans more toward her current boss, President Joe Biden, than her boss’ former boss.
Harris, as you probably now know, gave her first official interview as Democratic nominee on Thursday. The softball affair, even with running mate Tim Walz at her side in case she glitched, was underwhelming. She offered vague policy nostrums but no specifics, a lot of rambling non-answers, and, of course, heartwarming moments of “joy” specifically engineered by interviewer Dana Bash of CNN.
This included the delightfully quaint story about how she found out that President Joe Biden was stepping aside and handing the torch to her as she was sitting down to eat flapjacks with her family — one that brought Kamala to tears as she recounted it.
“It was — it was a Sunday, so, here, I’ll — I’ll give you a little too much information,” Harris said, laughing.
“Go for it; there’s no such thing, Madam Vice President,” Bash assured her.
“My family was staying with us. And — including my baby nieces. And we had just had pancakes and, you know, ‘Auntie, can I have more bacon?’ ‘Yes, I’ll make you more bacon.’ And then we were going to sit — we were sitting down to do a puzzle,” she said, laughing again.
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“And the phone rang. And it was Joe Biden. And — and he told me what he had decided to do. And I asked him, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And — and that’s how I learned about it.”
“And what about the endorsement? Did you ask for it?” Bash asked.
“He was very clear that he was going to support me,” she said.
NEW: Kamala Harris breaks down in tears when she recalls the day that Joe Biden told her that he was dropping out of the race.
This is painful to watch.
“My family was staying with us and including my baby nieces. And we had just had pancakes and, you know, auntie, can I have… pic.twitter.com/tFt8yuAwRe
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) August 30, 2024
How very, very sweet. And very, very dubious.
I know it’s hard, given the pace that this election has moved at, but think back a month and a half to that momentous weekend. The Biden administration was pretty much at DEFCON 1 as the week drew to a close — and with good reason.
After several botched interviews that somehow made the president’s June 27 debate debacle worse (“By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman, to serve with a black president,” he infamously claimed in one), the president had some kind of medical event while campaigning in Nevada. The official party line is that he was diagnosed with a case of COVID-19, although the known facts don’t quite seem to fit that explanation.
Whatever the case was, the Biden administration was in the midst of the biggest sudden erosion of political support from a sitting president’s own party since Richard Nixon released the “smoking gun” tape in August of 1974. California Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the House’s most powerful lawmakers and likely California’s next senator, became the highest-profile elected Democrat to publicly call on Biden to end his campaign.
Privately, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was telling Biden and his inner circle that internal polling data showed that not only did Biden not have a chance at re-election, but that the numbers showed his candidacy would drag the Democrats down in the House and Senate, too. Not only that, she made it clear she wanted an open blitz primary process to replace Biden atop the ticket, reports indicated.
Behind the scenes on that sultry Washington weekend, pretty much every Democrat with some modicum of power was exerting pressure on Biden and those around him. And, as we’ve heard time and time again, Kamala Harris was supposed to be the last person in the room with Biden — even, in this case, if it was metaphorical, due to his COVID isolation.
But, as Washington was engrossed in a flurry of political intrigue not seen for nearly a half a century, the second-most powerful person in the Biden administration — who knew she would have to fight to avoid a blitz primary if Biden’s recusal, becoming increasingly likely by the hour, came to pass — was having a leisurely breakfast with her nieces. Making flapjacks and bacon. Getting ready to do a puzzle.
And then, an unexpected phone call. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she was thrust out of her anodyne Sunday breakfast and into the national spotlight.
Right. And Santa Claus flew down from the North Pole and personally escorted her to the White House in his sled to save the Secret Service the trouble.
I’m not saying this version of events is impossible. I’m saying it sounds darn near impossible, and it’s not the first time that part of Kamala’s backstory comes across as so preposterous as to beggar belief.
For instance: In October of 2020, while on the campaign trail with Joe Biden, Harris sat down for an interview with a fawning Elle Magazine writer by the name of Ashley C. Ford, who apparently has access to neither an editor nor a fact-checker.
The lede to this unintentionally hilarious piece: “Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young. She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle.
“At some point, she fell from the stroller (few safety regulations existed for children’s equipment back then), and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset. ‘My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,’ Harris says, ‘and she’s like, “Baby, what do you want? What do you need?” And I just looked at her and I said, “Fweedom.”’”
How sweet. How inspiring. How (almost certainly) blatantly ripped off from an interview given by the most famous figure of the civil rights movement to the most famous chronicler of the civil rights movement.
In 1965, Alex Haley — writer of “Roots,” ghostwriter of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” — sat down with Martin Luther King Jr. for an interview that was published in Playboy. He asked MLK whether there were “ever moments when you feel awed by this burden of responsibility, or inadequate to its demands.”
King responded he “must accept the task of helping to make this nation and this world a better place to live in — for all men, black and white alike,” then relayed this story: “I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. ‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’ She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me.”
Almost identical, and not at all caught by Ms. Ford or any of her superiors. Was this just a mere coincidence? Was Kamala Harris casually making flapjacks and bacon with the fam as the re-election campaign she was a part of and potentially stood to inherit collapsed around her by the minute? You make the call.
Or take Harris’ noted embrace of Kwanzaa, the wintertime celebration of African-American culture. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s her purported childhood memories of the holiday that have raised some eyebrows.
“Every year, our family would – and our extended family, we would gather around, across multiple generations, and we’d tell stories,” Harris said in a December 2020 video.
“The kids would sit on the carpet and the elders would sit in chairs, and we would light the candles, and of course, afterwards have a beautiful meal. And, of course, there was always the discussion of the seven principles. And my favorite, I have to tell you, was always the one about self-determination, kujichagulia.”
Again, how sweet. However, as the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh noted, not only was Kwanzaa not invented until 1966 — two years after Harris’ birth — but it didn’t enter wide cultural circulation until the 1980s, when Harris was smoking pot at college while listening to Tupac. (Still the greatest rapper alive, according to Kamala!)
Somehow I find it hard to believe that she has a deep childhood attachment to a holiday that didn’t exist when she was born https://t.co/037S09KqxP
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 27, 2020
I repeat: No, these things are not impossible. They are all very, very, very improbable when taken together, especially from someone with a track record.
Like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Kamala Harris is someone who has actively tried to cultivate a captivating backstory without a great deal of concern for the veracity of it. Of those two men, one got away with it. One is such a bad liar that, whenever he prefaces anything with “no joke,” your ears perk up, safe in the knowledge that you’re about to hear some grade-A bunkum.
At the very least, you can’t say Kamala Harris didn’t learn anything from Joe Biden. To return the favor, maybe she can teach him her pancake recipe as they sit down for a nice long talk about fweedom and kujichagulia. If her relaxed schedule during the most hectic weekend Washington, D.C., has seen in decades is any indication, she certainly has the free time.
