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Kamala Does Beto in Reverse

From lackluster primary candidate to flawless general election savior

(edited from Scott Olson/Getty Images)
July 31, 2024

Liberal journalists are all in for Kamala Harris in 2024. She is a Democrat running against a Republican they hate, so rest assured the mainstream media will do whatever it takes to help her win. They have already started to rewrite history on Harris's behalf. When she continues to demean them and ignore their questions, they will cheer her nonetheless.

This was not the case in 2020, when Harris ran for president against other Democrats. Journalists aren't required to support a certain candidate in Democratic primaries the way they are in general elections, except of course in 2016 when Hillary Clinton ran against Bernie Sanders. In every other Democratic primary, they can soberly and skeptically assess each hopeful while probing the candidates' flaws to determine which one has the best chance of beating the Republican nominee.

Harris is experiencing what Beto O'Rourke, the former Democratic congressman from Texas, experienced during his failed career in politics, but in reverse order. Beto was one of the most celebrated politicians in the country when he challenged Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) in 2018. He raised more than $80 million thanks to fawning press coverage and superfluous celebrity endorsements. He still lost, but it was enough to give Beto the idea that he should run for president in 2020 and launch his campaign on the cover of Vanity Fair by proclaiming himself "born to be in it." (He wasn't.)

Beto's primary campaign flopped for the same reason Kamala's did. They weren't very good candidates; they withered under the national spotlight, and the media didn't really care if they won or not because they weren't running against a Republican. After salivating over Beto's "raw" and "effortlessly charismatic" nature and "Kennedyesque" demeanor in 2018, liberal journalists instantly turned on him. Their sycophantic profiles turned snarky. They attacked his "white male privilege." He went from "punk-rock Democrat" and possibly the "next Obama" to just another white dude with a "long history of failing upward."

Liberal journalists were only slightly more generous to Kamala in 2020. They weren't afraid to call out her inscrutable flip-flops on health care and other issues. When it was all over (before the Iowa caucuses), they could honestly describe Harris's primary campaign as an unmitigated disaster that was "more predictable than surprising," according to the New York Times. They were free to report on her "flawed decisions" and inability to "impose order on an unwieldy campaign."

Now that Harris is the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for president, and poised to take on Donald Trump in the general election, so-called reporters are publishing helpful guides advising Harris on how to mitigate the "errors that plagued her first presidential bid." They are pretending as if her failed primary campaign never happened. They are investigating whether Harris's knowledge of cooking and the Los Angeles restaurant scene will help her win in November. (Probably not?)

In any event, the media coverage of Beto's and Kamala's failed primary campaigns proves that liberal journalists are capable of scrutinizing Democrats under certain conditions. The media-assisted effort to force President Joe Biden to abandon his reelection campaign is another example. They wanted Biden gone because he was a bad candidate who was probably going to lose. As long as Kamala Harris remains the only thing standing between Donald Trump and the White House, there are no depths to which journalists will not stoop to boost her candidacy. Enjoy!