Kamala Harris is a uniquely bad candidate. She can still win.

As Harris falls behind in six of the seven key swing states, Democrats are hitting the panic button. But as daft and incompetent as the world-salad-queen is, she's not the problem. It's her strategy.

Kamala Harris is a lousy candidate. But that’s not news to those who pay close attention to politics. Harris last ran for the presidency in 2020. She dropped out two months before the Iowa caucuses. She garnered zero delegates. Iowa voters understood––as Gertrude Stein said about Harris’ putative hometown of Oakland––”There is no there there.” At the time of her inglorious exit, Harris was not even polling as a leading candidate in her home state of California.

The impression of Harris as an ambitious but ideologically vapid candidate haunted her then and haunts her now. As a California prosecutor, her enforcement of quality-of-life crimes rendered her palatable to common-sense broken-windows policing fans like myself. That is, until she bailed out BLM rioters, undercutting her tough-on-crime performance art.

But Harris wouldn’t figuratively die. Viewed as a paint-by-numbers diversity hire for a vacant presidential campaign, she was selected Joe Biden's 2020 running-mate despite her failures as candidate, prosecutor, and senator. A real-life Selina Meyer as Veep, Harris managed to achieve little over the past three and a half years except to alienate her staff and welcome in over twelve million illegal immigrants as the Administration’s de facto “Border,” er, “Root Causes” Czar.

Even still, desperate Democratic donors thought enough of Harris to force Biden out of the race under duress. Ever failing upwards in this Age of DEI Hiring—blithely unaware she’d long ago hit her Peter Principle level of incompetence—Harris giddily took the reins as our nation’s first Chauncey the Gardener “nominee.”

Given the truncated nature of the post-Biden campaign––with Harris not having to face the necessary winnowing of a primary tilt––the coronation of Kamala seemed like a masterstroke of Tammany Hall cynicism. First came the relief bounce from Geriatric Joe being whisked off the stage. Then came the “vibes” bounce from the deceitful Democratic Convention––why be specific on policy when your spendy boondoggles caused Bidenflation!––that sent the Trump-deranged faithful into hope-filled delirium.

But after Labor Day, Harris mania began to subside. To the rescue came the September 10 debate against Trump––his second against a Democratic nominee this cycle and more than sufficient––which Harris “won,” if you count a 3-on-1 partisan assault on Trump, truth, and decorum a “win.” After that final bounce, the Harris slide resumed as the race resorted to its longstanding dynamic. Per RCP, Trump is back ahead in six of the seven swing states that will decide this election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Harris hangs on in Wisconsin, barely.

Unless Harris polls swimmingly after her fiercely Trump-deranged, antagonistic, and fillibuster-riddled Wednesday night interview with Fox News gentleman-anchor Bret Baier, there will be no more bounces. Besides, the last two bounces went Trump’s direction anyway after a second assassination attempt on his life and after J.D. Vance surgically eviscerated the hypocrisy of Democratic debate moderators––the pompous, uninformed Margaret Brennan should seek other work––and kindly “knucklehead” pretender Tim Walz, who made Admiral James Stockdale seem confident and capable by comparison.

Still, in rare moments, Kamala Harris has an uncanny ability to seem plausibly presidential. I saw this on Capitol Hill. The way she smiled and held herself in stand-up interviews––I couldn’t hear her from where I was standing in the Rotunda––was reassuring. But it’s all nonverbal cosplay with Harris. Once one listens to her, one’s countenance shifts to the horrified figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Her nasal word salads, unhinged cackling, flimsy grasp of economic realities, and stoner demeanor—that suddenly shifts under mild inquiry to a strident Brentwood Karen—can be grating. You want to get as far away from that Xanax voice and affect as possible. And there’s little that Harris can do about it since it’s who she is mixed with who she’s contorted herself to be to get as far up the ladder as possible.

Harris does not wear well, unlike other black female public figures from Halle Berry to Cicely Tyson to Oprah Winfrey, let alone black male political figures from Willie Brown to Barrack Obama. Further exposure to her invariably reveals what those savvy Iowa voters––who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008––instantly realized: she’s a fraud. There’s no consistent anything. Unlike her opponent––who for 40 years has been declaiming about what open borders and globalized trade have done to the American working class––Harris seems to have nothing she consistently believes in, except abortion up to and including birth and that she is a “joyful” woman of color.

Yet, with such a harshly polarized electorate and the DNC’s prodigious ground game, I am here to tell Democrats: that’s sufficient. Harris can still win.

But first, she must halt these infantile attempts to define a "real man,” let alone “toxic masculinity,” especially when her very husband, Creepy Doug Emhoff, is a serial abuser of women. With their pronoun obsession and denial of basic biology, Democrats can’t even define what a woman is. Harris’ ad below is such a dumb, cringy caricature that it reads like a Babylon Bee comedy sketch.

Know what "real men" want, Madame Vice President? Stand for the flag. Don't ask us our "preferred pronouns." Don't let boys use girls' bathrooms. Fund the police so we don’t have to do the job ourselves. Stay away from our money, our homes, our stuff, and that one sacred day when we can go to the religious service of our choice then zone out to sports free of lame, empirically false “social justice” disinformation. Oh, and secure the border and stop spending our money on inflationary boondoggles while you’re at it.

Harris must cease her ham-fisted attempt to persuade Rust Belt, working-class men. They don’t like her. They never will. This is a gender election, not a transgender one. Men overwhelmingly support Trump over Harris. It’s not remotely close. It’s the same margin for women and Harris.

It’s brainless Democrat orthodoxy that soft-on-crime, open-borders oddball Minnesota Governor Tim Walz somehow helps Harris secure Wisconsin––the race's tightness there suggests otherwise––let alone white rural and blue-collar men more broadly. Michigan and Pennsylvania are less historically Socialist and politically eccentric––think Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Senator “Stuart Smiley”––than Minnesota, a state so “nice” it let Minneapolis burn rather than confront BLM arsonists, rioters, and thieves. With his antic Chris Farley demeanor, “real man” Walz is not helping. He might truthfully be costing Harris votes with his Elmer Fudd hijinx. See here:

Harris must also stop courting NeoCons, who engendered the worst foreign policy disaster in American history: the deceitfully sold Iraq War. Exit polls showed that Barack Obama won in 2008 mainly because of voter opposition to that debacle. That’s a mantle for Harris to assume.

Instead, due to her shocking ignorance of history and foreign affairs, and obsession with Trump, she cavorts openly with the very snakes who orchestrated the Iraq War. NeoCons naturally loathe Trump because he cares about the working-class men and women who must fight the NeoCons’ ginned-up chickenhawk misadventures and because he knows that the 51 intel spooks who lied about Hunter’s damaging laptop to give Biden his preposterous 2020 win are drawn from NeoCon ranks. Harris doesn’t tell you that little tidbit when she brags about their support.

The Nation is not the brightest publication on the planet, though it agrees with me on the need for Harris to distance herself from these war criminals. When a far-left media staple tears into you--rightly so, given your embrace of bloodthirsty war-mongers like Dick and Liz Cheney and their deep-state henchmen--there’s a problem, Madame Vice President.

If current trends continue, the only male cohorts Harris will decisively win are gay men, queer men, trans men, pot-addicted and developmentally arrested Deadheads, and that emasculated cohort of “sensitive new age guys” (SNAGs) who still read Mother Jones with a straight face and who live in such weak, apologetic, over-feminized bubbles they think the anti-interventionist Trump is Hitler because he wants––like all Democrats before Biden and Harris–– to secure the border.

With the Nikki Haley and Never-Trump voters coming home to the GOP––as Republican voter registration now exceeds that of Democrats––Harris’ only hope is to regain and redefine the mantle of “hope and change.” But not with the current tired, insulting outreach to black and Hispanic men, who are sick of the infantilizing “you ain’t black if…” horse pucky emanating from condescending Democrat elites. Watch the tone-deaf and outdated Barack Obama show how this is not done:

With his billion-dollar Netflix deal, Mr. Obama does not have to pay the bills of black men crushed by the Biden/Harris economy. Twenty percent of black men are moving towards Trump for good reasons: their wallets, safety, and job prospects were much better under pre-COVID Trump. Unlike Obama, Mr. Trump also signed criminal justice reform into law.

Barrack Obama and his fellow Democratic elites keep pushing their nine-year Trump-deranged obsession with tone and rhetoric. But tone and rhetoric don’t pay the bills. They don’t protect the border. They don’t lower murder and assault in Dem-run cities.

Instead of the old, tired shibboleths, there’s a third way that Harris and her handlers should embrace: a call for American renewal and a rebirth in American exceptionalism and excellence. Call out the grotesque failures of Democratic mayors (on crime, on homelessness, and on their divisive, enervating race and gender mandates). Call out the bad science behind DEI. Position yourself as a new-style Democrat Centrist: strong borders, safe streets, balanced budgets, less power in DC and more power with states and localities, a profound rethinking of the consequences of legalized weed and gambling, taking the war on fentanyl and human trafficking right to the cartels, embracing free speech, politics-free science and rock-star innovators like Elon Musk, whose Space X, Starlink and Tesla are making the planet a better place for all.

In foreign policy, end foreign wars of choice unless they are in the strict national interest while taking the gloves off Israel and Ukraine so they can crush their enemies with speed, surety, and dignity.

Above all, rekindle faith in our founding principles, glorious institutions, and shared American story. That’s the winning strategy for Democrats, Kamala Harris, and our great and gifted nation.