Harris's inelastic Gaza script may snap her chance at election

Can she shed the Stepford routine?

The other day, scrolling through comments at the end of an article at the Washington Post, I noticed a pained but hopeful remark. The person said that, although she’d received her absentee ballot and could vote at any time, she was waiting. 

She was holding out, waiting to hear Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic candidate for president, say that what was going on in Gaza could not continue. She had filled out the rest of the ballot and hoped against hope that Harris would respond to the moment. This was in the wake of Israel’s bombing of tents outside of Al-Aqsa Hospital, wherein 19-year-old Shabaan al-Dalou burned alive in the blaze, the images of which shocked consciences around the world.

She was waiting as long as possible to fill out the rest of her ballot, because maybe Harris would finally say the right thing: that something had to change.

There’s communication and there’s meta-communication. 

There are cynics among us who feel that the Biden administration in general, and Harris in particular, co-opted the word ‘ceasefire’ so as to rob activists of this term and to neutralize the growing strength of the pro-peace movement. I myself had written previously about how Biden had changed ‘ceasefire’, long synonymous with ‘truce’, into a term for surrender.

But beyond that, the fact remains that Harris’s commentary about Gaza has become wooden. Have you noticed? Every time she’s asked about it, she gives the same response that clearly she had fastened together months ago. At the DNC, in her acceptance speech for the nomination, she gave some boilerplate pablum about Palestinians deserving sympathy and being worthy of dignity. That standard line hasn’t changed, even though events on the ground have morphed considerably.

Her own message hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s calcified. That speaks in a meta-communicative way. Rhetorically, she has dug in her heels and will not be swayed. That intransigence may cost her the election.

I presume that her pat answer on Gaza was focus-group-tested before her speechwriter penned her acceptance speech. Maybe in August that type of answer was just vague but bombastic enough to be seen as threading a needle. 

But we’re in late October, and material conditions have changed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to “escalate to de-escalate,” a dystopian strategy meant to give cover to his decision to invade the sovereign nation of Lebanon and wreak wholly new destruction there. He’s widely seen as implementing the “General’s plan” in northern Gaza, whereby the total siege that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant promised — no food, fuel, water, or medicine — has been fully set into motion, a campaign of fire and extermination. IDF forces are aggressing against UN peacekeepers, attempting to push such eyes and ears out of southern Lebanon. And Netanyahu has put out what is described as a “hit list” on six Al Jazeera journalists, marking them for death.

These are not the actions of a democracy. Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter what he may have represented in the past for the people of Israel, is clearly out of control. The Lebanese had approached Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for assurances that Israel would spare certain areas in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, and Austin replied that the US had urged Israel to do so. Yet Netanyahu went ahead and ordered intensified bombing of Beirut.

Compounding this is the almost casual yet intentional destruction of Tyre, one of the world’s oldest cities and a UNESCO heritage site. Similar to the effacement of the iconic Buddhas of Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001, the ancient sites destroyed in Tyre by Israel cannot be replaced.

Last week, the IDF bombed a Lebonese Christian village, Aitou, killing 24 people. About 1150 people live there.

It’s much worse than these brief descriptions. Yet Harris is content to maintain the same set line about Palestinians being deserving of dignity. She’s inflexible. She’s demonstrating that she can’t adapt.

Greg Stoker, a soldier-turned-commentator who has developed quite a following, recently remarked upon the 2024 race, particularly analyzing Harris’s canned Gaza response. Someone in the chat noted that she was saying the same thing that she always does, and Stoker replied that there did indeed seem to be some sort of uncanny valley going on.¹ He went on to say some irresponsible things as speculation, but his point about an uncanny-valley-esque sensibility in Harris’s demeanor seemed right on point.²

Why has this happened?

What has plasticized Harris? This is an important question, because the crisis that struck the Democratic Party when President Biden faltered on the debate stage in June and then resisted mounting pressure for him to relinquish his pursuit of the nomination was a crisis of capability. The party was in freefall, yet it was reported out that some insiders had resigned themselves to a Trump presidency. People in the rank-and-file as well as in the grassroots began to despair that the party was unable to adapt to changing circumstances.

Yet Biden did step out of the way, and it was that move that reignited hope that the Democratic Party could respond to crisis, that it wasn’t fossilized, that it still had agility and capacity.

Harris seemed to pass her own version of this test when, having narrowed her vice-presidential selection to two choices, she decided upon Tim Walz as her running mate, bucking conventional wisdom and demonstrating that she could make out-of-the-box monumental decisions. That was a form of leadership, a signal that she would be her own person.

That quickly changed.

What happened? According to Turn Left, a political channel coming out of the UK, Harris’s team turned to center-right figures of the Labour Party for consultation, despite the fact that Labour, while winning big this year, lost voter share (not to mention that PM Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has shed popular support in record time, with Starmer himself cratering more than 45 points in favorability).

Turn Left reports that “Labour Together advised the Dems to be more hardline on immigration and to stop being so supportive of trans people.” The channel highlighted the following passage from Politico:

“Jon Ashworth, chief executive of Labour Together and a former front bencher under Starmer — until he lost his seat to a pro-Palestinian candidate in the biggest shock of the election — was also at the DNC in Chicago in August. He urged the Harris campaign not to hide from issues voters care about that the left normally finds difficult to address, such as illegal immigration.

“Labour also sought to neutralize talking points the right could weaponize. Ashworth warned his U.S. comrades to develop solid responses on transgender issues, after Labour colleagues faced repeated media questions about whether women can have penises.

“‘One of the things I was raising in Chicago was about how that would become an issue if they weren’t careful,’ Ashworth said.”

We can see the result of Harris’s acceptance of this advice in her varied responses to NBC News anchor Hallie Jackson’s questions about Harris’s stance on gender-affirming care. 

Jackson: Do you believe that transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming care in this country?

Harris: I believe we should follow the law. I mean, I think you’re probably pointing to the fact that Donald Trump’s campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars —  

Jackson: They’re trying to define you on this. I’m asking you to define yourself, though. Just broadly speaking, what is your value? Do you believe that they should have that access?

Harris: I believe that people, as the law states — even on this issue, about federal law — that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary. I’m not going to put myself in the position of a doctor.

Jackson: I will move on, but I don’t know that I heard a clear answer from you on the issue of gender-affirming care. It sounds like what you’re saying is there should be something between trans Americans and their doctors. It feels like that’s a long way from “We see you and we love you,” which was your message to trans Americans in May. What do you want the LGBTQ+ community to know as they’re looking for a full-throated backing from you for trans Americans?

Harris: I believe that all people should be treated with dignity and respect.

So we know that she took Ashworth’s advice. She’s become muddled and calculating instead of having the clear, searing concision that was winning support from both the left and the middle.

Now she is demoralizing the left in her quixotic pursuit of center-right Nikki Haley voters. Wary of Donald Trump’s incessant painting of her as a radical, she’s abandoned any position that might place her in the progressive camp, scared off of that position just as Democrats in general abdicated liberalism when Rush Limbaugh demonized the word. She is doing Trump’s job for him by ditching the very engine of her campaign’s verve and excitement.

For the activist left, nothing is more disillusioning than her stance on Gaza.

In fact, the Trump team knows this. The issue that has fractured Democrats most thoroughly this cycle is the issue of Palestine-Israel. Trump means to capitalize on this by driving that wedge deeper and capturing breakaway voters (or possibly shuttling them into third-party candidates where their voting power can be kettled and contained).³

Harris has watched her slim lead in swing-state polling narrow to almost nothingness. Still, she’s doubling down on the strategy — originally that of the Biden campaign — of chasing these Nikki Haley voters, possibly the new incarnation of the coveted soccer moms of the early 2000s. She’s done this at the expense of dissipating the energy that had buoyed her campaign, rendering her honeymoon to a period as brief as the entirety of a cicada life cycle.

After noting that Harris’s plan for in-home health care workers for Medicare recipients is “great policy” and in normal times might be a gamechanger, a correspondent for Turn Left noted,

“This isn’t a normal election, because unfortunately Donald Trump is running again. And the big problem with this is they [the political and pundit classes] do not talk about the election like a normal election would be talked [about]. There are no issues conversations. It’s just about — vibes. It’s all vibes. And, because of this, that means the conversation and every part of the election, and the election itself, will unfortunately be decided upon vibes. So even if Kamala came out with all the greatest policies that you and I could ever love, it wouldn’t really matter. ✂️

“She changed the vibes of her campaign, and this is coming back hard on her. And because Trump is doing ridiculous stunts [daily] … it’s narratively falling into this idea that Trump is getting to do fun clown things and that’s good TV, and then she goes and does normal politician things and is unfortunately criticized for that.

“Then there is a very big, real problem, which is a Gazan genocide happening right in the background. And unfortunately a lot of people are seeing that also next to weird Trump stuff, and that takes up all the space in a lot of people’s heads. This is all very dangerous for a campaign that is basically 50-50 at the moment.”

It does not help that the Harris campaign fed information to outlets like the New York Times, stating on background but unequivocally that if Israel were still engaged in hostilities by the time Harris got into office, she would maintain Biden’s current policy.

[A]ccording to U.S. officials and campaign advisers, the empathy she has expressed as vice president should not be confused with willingness to break from American foreign policy toward Israel as a presidential candidate. ✂️

[O]ne senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail Ms. Harris’s thinking, said that if she won the election and the war were still going on, her policy was not expected to change.

No swerving. No adjusting for changes on the ground.

There is still time

Believe it or not, there is still time. There is time for Harris to come out and say the barest minimum, which is that she will enforce U.S. law regarding overseas commitments. Even that small, buttoned-down promise would be enough to signal that she is willing to adapt to the moment and make decisive changes. Not only would she be indicating that willingness by pointing to a shifted policy position, she’d be demonstrating it in real-time in terms of bucking stifling advice that she’d mistakenly implemented.

Ten days is not much, but it is enough. In fact, it might work out to Harris’s advantage, as the groups that would be most motivated to punish her for changing her position would have limited time to marshall and allocate resources to damage her standing. If she’s ever going to distance herself from Biden’s calamitous policies, this is the time to break away.

That commenter at the Washington Post is waiting. I’m waiting. Our pens are poised above our ballots, ready to fill in the bubble next to the name of the candidate that repudiates our current foreign policy stance. Michigan hangs in the balance and, as Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times said back in February, as Michigan goes, so goes the entire election. There’s a chance for Harris to repair mistakes that she’s made. Here’s hoping she does not let the hour grow too short.

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Further reading:

“As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated,” New York Times, October 24, 2024

1. The uncanny valley is a perception in which a person seems eerily to occupy a space in-between plasticity and full humanness. It’s seen as an equally attractive yet repellant perception, causing people to draw in toward the phenomenon as well as want to turn away. This happens with robots that sport faces too reminiscent of human faces. Mainly here, as Stoker uses the term, it’s meant to call attention to a particular form of artificiality. A really interesting (though disturbing) talk by David Livingstone Smith that touches upon the uncanny valley can be found here: “Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization” — Case Western Reserve University (YouTube, November 17, 2016), starting ~ 32:50.

2. Stoker said that Harris might be “masking” psychopathy. This is highly irresponsible, as he’s giving off an impression to his audience. He made the disclaimer that he was not a clinical expert but was just giving his opinion. That doesn’t wash. That’s the same caveat that Joe Rogan gave when he had Covid conspiracy theorists spout their unfounded claims to his gigantic audience. The very platform lends an air of legitimacy. I personally have devoted time to reading the peer-reviewed psychological literature about psychopathy. Harris does not qualify. If Stoker felt he could detect the “mask,” that shows that the mask isn’t there — the whole point is that it blends, making the person appear natural. What Stoker noticed in all probability is that Harris is highly ambitious, something she’s never hidden. While many psychopaths are ambitious, not all ambitious people are psychopaths. Stoker would be wise to understand the difference between the two and to not slander Harris so flippantly during this critical window, no matter how cynical he is about her as a candidate.

3. This is the same man who contracted Cambridge Analytica to run micro-targeted ads at individuals in 2016, tailoring individualized messages so as to peel off disaffected or otherwise persuadable voters. Though in a different form, he’s doing the same thing again: he means to divide and conquer.