In the eyes of the faithful, Kamala’s gone from useless VP to Wonder Woman. But what she’d do in power is still a mystery

Thirty-six people were shot, seven of whom were killed, in Chicago during the four days that Democrats gathered in the Windy City to crown Queen Kamala as their last-minute candidate for the 2024 presidential election.

The widespread gun violence did not affect the deputies, who, unlike the rest of the city, were safe during their deliberations behind several steel rings.

There was nothing unusual about the massacre, either. It was just another week for the undisputed murder and street crime capital of America.

Of course, no congressional speaker referred to the blood on the streets outside the confines of their hermetically sealed conference hall. Nor did the party’s many allies in the media draw attention to it. They were too busy cheering from the sidelines, any semblance of balanced reporting had been abandoned.

The Democrats have ruled Chicago continuously since 1931. If you want to run the country, it hardly makes sense to emphasize that you can’t keep the streets of the nation’s third-largest city safe.

It may seem like a curious omission when the leader of your ticket in the November election brags about how tough she was on the bad guys when she was district attorney. But it was just one of many hypocrisies on display.

Donald Trump was criticized as a plutocrat (who was an easy target, by the way), while the Democratic stage was filled with billionaires (talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker) and ordinary multimillionaires (the Clintons, the Obamas, Desperate Housewives’ Eva Longoria and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi).

The Democrats cherish the charming idea that they are still the party of the working class, when in reality they are a wholly owned subsidiary of the wealthy, liberal elite that dominates politics, business, academia, entertainment and the media.

The hypocrisy didn’t stop there. Barack Obama called Joe Biden “my brother,” even though he was the one sharpening the knives and handing them out with instructions to tell poor old Joe that the game was up. Michelle Obama was more honest in her convention speech: she didn’t mention Biden at all, because she had her own personal pet peeves with the First Family.

Bill Clinton was the oiliest. Like many who want to ease Biden’s pain at being forced out against his will, he portrayed Biden as a mix of Franklin Roosevelt (who compared his famous New Deal to Biden’s approach to the economy) and George Washington (for putting country before self).

Comparisons that are only compelling if you ignore the fact that American living standards have been eroded by sky-high inflation, the economy is visibly slowing, and the federal government is drowning in record debt.

As for Washington, he did indeed step down voluntarily after eight years. Biden, on the other hand, continued to cling to the curtains of the Oval Office as his party’s powerful forces dragged him out.

The vice president will hold a series of debates with Donald Trump starting next month

No matter. Democrats think they have a winner on their hands in Kamala Harris, and despite the accolades, Biden is already a man of yesterday who cannot be allowed to stand in the way of her victory—hence the decision to move his farewell address on the first night of the convention to well past bedtime for most Americans, let alone Joe himself.

Nor are the Democrats wrong to think they have a potential winner on their hands. She has, in the eyes of the Democratic faithful, gone from a rather useless—even embarrassing and unpopular—vice president to a Wonder Woman candidate for president. It is a succession story like no other, one of the most remarkable transformations in American politics, even if it is largely a fabrication.

The Democratic Party and its media allies are ready, having spent most of the summer in the swamps of despair. Now all they have to do is convince the American people. That could be a bigger challenge.

It remains one of the great mysteries of the universe what she would do if she were in power. Her speech to the convention on Thursday night offered few clues. These are not occasions for policy minutiae, but a flood of platitudes overwhelmed even the slightest nod toward substance.

Yes, she can read the teleprompter with confidence, which is more than Biden can do and Trump has the discipline to do. But most national politicians can do that. It’s a necessary skill for the job. With Harris, it was the words that disappointed.

No standard rhetoric was left untouched. She promised “opportunity,” a “new path forward,” the “bringing together of labor and business,” no “going back” and, in a rare nod to detail, lower prices for groceries.

There was no hint of how any of this would be achieved. Even her recent enthusiasm for price controls was strangely absent from the script. It was, as one commentator put it, the politics of the ’empty trouser suit’.

Instead of policy, we got a reinterpretation of her life story. She is depicted as a poor child growing up in a tough environment. Yet her parents were both professors and she grew up mostly in Berkeley, California, and Montreal, Canada, neither of which were known for their ghettos.

She claims to have been “immersed in the civil rights movement,” even though she wasn’t born until 1964, around the height of the modern civil rights movement.

But this is old-fashioned whining, because we are now in the politics of vibes, where a general feel-good factor and an infectious joy are more important than policy or facts, we are told. Whether such vibes translate into votes, we will find out in the next 12 weeks.

The signs are good, at least for now. She comes out of Chicago with political momentum behind her, while the campaign itself begins. The polls in the swing states are moving her way, the Trump campaign continues to flounder, unsure how to deal with her and yearning for the return of Sleepy Joe.

Even Robert F Kennedy’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Trump won’t necessarily save him. JFK’s seriously unreliable nephew won between 4 and 6 percent of the vote in the swing states, and while Trump will get more votes than Harris, it’s unlikely to be enough to win him the election.

Less than a month ago, it was Trump’s chance to lose the election. Now it’s her chance. Her greatest ally is Trump. Her optimism, however misplaced, is more appealing than his relentless negativity, which irritates. His childish name-calling only backfires on him. People are tired of this kind of whining.

The hard work required to underscore her repeated policy shifts—from right to left to right—has been beyond his reach. In his most recent campaigns, he has looked more tired, discouraged, disheveled, and unfocused than ever, lacking the fighting spirit or even the will to win. His people don’t know it. They just don’t know what to do about it. “It’s a complete mess,” one senior Team Trump figure wearily confessed to me.

Still, the question of “which Kamala Harris should govern from the White House?” is entirely legitimate, and we have no idea yet what the answer might be.

She is not basing her campaign on the Biden-Harris administration’s record, perhaps because it is not exactly something to write home about.

She pretends to have abandoned all the leftist positions she held a few years ago, but she has never been called out on it because she refuses to do proper interviews with journalists who are not cheerleaders. She is clearly trying to run more from the center now, but we don’t know what that means because she won’t tell us.

But at some point, she’s going to have to stop hiding behind the teleprompter and a complicit media and start letting herself be questioned properly. Nor can she avoid the debates with Trump, which begin next month, which could be his chance if he sticks to exposing her policies (or lack thereof) and doesn’t make them personal, which would only remind moderates why they didn’t vote for him in 2020.

And if he doesn’t change, I asked one of his closest confidants, what’s Plan B? “Call 911. Or the Holy Spirit,” he replied. I’m not sure if he was joking.