It seemed the Democrats were test marketing a new label with the aid of Politico's Friday Read that they seem to hope would take the 2024 race by storm. That magic label now being test marketed by the Democrats supposedly to describe the Kamala Harris presidential campaign was, wait for it, "movement."
It seems to be the sad duty of poor Michael Kruse of Politico on Friday to put that "movement" label out there to see if the public laughs it off the campaign trail in "The Surprising Word Democrats Keep Using to Describe Kamala Harris’ Campaign."
Although Kruse seems to have the unenviable task of hyping the utterly artificial (in this situation) label, he also appears to be subtly undermining the idea of the Kamala Harris campaign as a movement by going hilariously over the top with the hype:
...From the United Center to the convention center to the ballrooms and halls of the delegate-housing hotels, from stages to caucus meetings to the roster of wee-hours parties, people were using a word loaded with historical weight. Is Harris already or can she be, people were asking, not only a candidate for president but actually, and rather remarkably, the leader of a political movement?
Come on, Michael. Confess that you were cracking up with laughter while typing out those words, describing the campaign of a candidate who got her start via Willie Brown and later did so poorly in her 2020 presidential primary that she won not a single delegate.
Although "movement" was mentioned 27 times in the story, Kruse seemed to be mocking it at the same time with observations such as these:
Even so, given her boffo fundraising, her surging crowds, her spiking polling and favorability rating and a TikTok and meme game that’s getting Gen Z reengaged, the question’s being asked. Tonally and generationally, along gender and racial lines, is this the precipice of some sort of tectonic shift?
Kamala has a meme game? Right!
You just know that Kruse is now pulling our legs which he continues to do with laugh lines such as this quote from Maryland Governor Wes Moore:
“I think what we’re seeing right now is not just about a political campaign. I think what we’re seeing right now is the American people have a choice about what type of country that we want to be. That,” he said, “is a movement.”
And if you still think Kruse is not pushing back at his "movement" hype assignment, then read this quote by a Democrat strategist with a "proto-phenomenon" bloviation:
“At times,” the longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik wrote of Harris and her candidacy in a recent memo, “it appears that she is leading more of a movement than a political campaign.” Sosnik is one of the most prominent voices invoking this proto-phenomenon.
Reagan, Trump and Barack Obama, in the estimation of the 67-year-old Sosnik, are the three political movements of his lifetime. “Harris is not the leader of a movement right now. She’s still the leader of a campaign,” he told my colleague Ryan Lizza in the wake of the release of his memo. “But she has been making strides, and she could by the end of the month — particularly if the convention goes well in Chicago — she could be at a point where she’s a head of a movement, which is bigger than a candidate, and that’s pretty much unstoppable. And if you are leading a movement, issues don’t matter, nothing matters. She’s not there, but she’s not far from being there.”
Kruse tops that laughable Democrat hype by serving up even more laughter care of another Democrat strategist in the midst of a Kamala as JFK ecstasy:
Think bigger, said Hank Sheinkopf, the veteran Democratic strategist who’s worked on campaigns in more than 40 states for going on 40 years. He casted all the way back to 1960, to John F. Kennedy. “She is closer to JFK,” Sheinkopf told me. “New generation. New global order. Changing national economy,” he said. “The political and the social are united in the Harris moment. The reversal of Reaganism in total. A return to a war against poverty. The continuation of the Cold War. A fight for Medicare all over again. Returning respect for labor unions,” he said. “JFK redux.”
But wait! If you weren't done laughing about Kamala as a "JFK redux," Kruse maked the Democrats look even more ridiculous by quoting Stephan Smith (described as the "online engagement director for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign in 2020"), who presents us with the hilarious idea of Franklin Delano Kamala:
Obama, of course, was a historic candidate and president, but he wasn’t in the end the leader of a movement, I suggested to people I talked to this week. The reaction to Obama was Trump. Bill Clinton definitely was generationally new, but his presidency was a reaction to Reagan, a function of the necessity of Democrats having to find a way to bend to Reagan to win, and it didn’t lead to durable Democratic control. If anything, it was the runway to the last quarter-century and then some of ever-increasing partisanship and polarization. And JFK? He and Lyndon B. Johnson in the most immediate sense led to Richard Nixon, to the Southern strategy, to the regional and ideological resorting of America’s two major political parties. Is it, then, possible that Kamala Devi Harris (KDH?) could be more of a leader of a political movement than any of them?
“FDR didn’t know what was going to happen in 1932. All he knew was it’s a crisis, the country’s in danger, and people have given me what seems like an improbable-for-the-time landslide victory, and now I have to use this power to do the right thing,” Smith told me. “So we don’t know,” he said. “We are birthing something new. No matter what, that is what is happening, period. My bet is that on the other side we are looking at Kamala wins and a 1932 situation.”
Kruse entertained the readers with yet more such over the top Democrat hype about their new miracle word. Although, he did miss the opportunity to warn that using that word so frequently in a campaign would almost inevitably invoke images and memes of the type of movement that happens when one sits upon a porcelain throne.
