When Kamala Harris first jumped into the 2024 race, the joy was palpable.

Every major Democrat leapt to celebrate. The legacy media uncorked the Champagne. Rank-and-file Democratic voters had a pep in their step. After all, the Democratic Party had pulled off an unprecedented feat: After rigging the Democratic primaries to avoid any serious opposition to ailing incumbent Joe Biden, they had, without a single vote, removed his nomination and handed it to Biden’s younger, more diverse vice president.

What could go wrong?

The theory was simple: The problem with Biden’s campaign was Biden. It wasn’t the issues. It wasn’t Americans’ view of the country more broadly. It was just the doddering old man wandering around stages and speaking mushmouth. Put him out of his misery like Old Yeller, the theory went, and Democrats could insert literally anyone and beat the much-despised Donald Trump.

For a few weeks, it seemed they might be right.

Harris soared in the polls; suddenly, where Trump had led by anywhere between three and five points nationally, she was ahead by a similar margin. In the swing states, where Biden had fallen far behind, Harris had leapt to small but measurable leads.

The Kamalamentum was real.

And then, suddenly, it faded away.

What happened?

The answer is simple: The American people realized that Kamala Harris is, after all, Kamala Harris. She’s still the awkward, empty, incoherent mess she was when she ran for president in 2019. She doesn’t know how to answer basic questions about her own policies; worse, she doesn’t even know her own policies. She begins to fritz out like Quaid’s fat lady suit in “Total Recall” when asked anything beyond the absolutely facile. Her sentences resemble MC Escher illusions: verbal staircases that ought to ascend to a fixed point, but instead, defying the laws of reason, curve back on themselves to end where they began. Her platitudinous slogans are matched in the magnitude of their vacuity only by the extraordinarily ersatz enthusiasm with which she utters them. All the off-putting tics — the random laughter, the strange hand motions, the nasal smugness as she recites entirely obvious tautologies — they’ve all reappeared with a vengeance.

In short, she’s terrible.

And she was always terrible.

Biden himself had worried about this reality. There was a reason Harris dropped out of the 2020 race earlier than any other major candidate. There was a reason she was the most unpopular vice president in modern American history.

And there’s a reason she’s collapsing now.

And so she’s left with one strategy: bribery. She’s pledging new goodies, day after day, directed at specific voter blocs. This week, after deploying Barack Obama to lecture young Black men didn’t jog her support levels, she proposed a bevy of obviously unconstitutional giveaways, including a million loans of $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs, fully forgivable. This followed her pledge to hand a $25,000 homebuyer grant to first-time homebuyers, with heavier grants to “first-generation homeowners” — a giveaway again specifically targeted at minority audiences.

This is unlikely to work. After all, big promises rarely materialize in big results. She’d require Congressional help to achieve any of this — and as she made clear to CBS News’ Bill Whitaker, she literally has no idea what to do if Congress refuses.

And so Kamala Harris is on the ropes. The joy is gone. The sugar high has worn off. Kamala, it turns out, is still Kamala. And that’s devastating news for a Democratic Party that had hoped to move forward, unburdened by what has been.

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