Kamala is dumb. I don’t intend this as an insult but as a cool-headed diagnosis. We could use more refined terminology, such as “intellectually unexceptional,” but we have a perfectly suitable, one-syllable word for her condition: dumb. I don’t mean that she would likely score in the mentally handicapped range on an IQ test, in the lowest decile, be legally considered in need of a guardian ad litem. Rather, relative to formally educated leaders, she is a dim bulb, not the brightest in the vice-presidential chandelier. She says stuff like, “When we talk about the children of the community, they are children of the community.” Really? Or, “Community banks are in the community.” It’s not just that she makes such self-evident declarations; it’s that she does so with the air of someone who believes she has stumbled upon a profound insight. She proclaimed, “We will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery effort.” She said Americans need to move on from the “failed policies” that “we have proven don’t work,” as if she were not the current Vice President. Did she forget? But who can forget her inspiring call for us to work together: “We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues . . . and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements that we will convene to work together . . . we will work on this together.”
Yeah, Kamala is dumb. Observers have so frequently described her ramblings as “word salad” that it’s trite, although still apt. Ben Shapiro prefers “word coleslaw.” There’s more objective data. She attended a middling university (86 out of 436 USA universities) and a mediocre law school (82 out of 196). She didn’t distinguish herself. She wasn’t a valedictorian nor an editor of a legal journal. She failed the bar exam on her first attempt. Her entry into politics was not due to out-shining her peers but rather her . . . ahem . . . relationship with a married man, Willie Brown, then the Speaker of the California State Assembly and 31 years her senior. (For those in the Kamala IQ decile, that means that Brown, then 60, was thirty-one years older than Kamala, then 29.) Do we think Brown chose her as his paramour for her scintillating conversation?
But let’s give her some credit. Kamala Harris is just smart enough to realize that she’s too dumb to be subject to serious scrutiny, confining her few, brief interviews to sycophants like Stephanie Ruhle. When Ruhle asked her what she would do if a Republican Congress refused to raise taxes on those greedy corporations that suddenly started price gouging (which Kamala first mispronounced as “gauging”) during a prospective Harris-Walz administration, she responded with all the confidence of a four-year-old being asked what she’d do if Santa didn’t come this year: “Well, but we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes.” But Santa Claus IS going to have to come. Then she lapsed into her mental tic of repeating, parrot-like, the term of the day, this time borrowing from her “mentor” Joe Biden: “fair share.” At other times it’s been “return on investment,” “the significance of the passage of time,” “holistic.” It’s Sesame Street-level vocabulary teaching, like her animated explanation to children, “You’re gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes!” Could they metaphorically see them, and with what else were they supposed to see them than their eyes? Or when she explained that Russia, a big country, invaded Ukraine, a small country, and that’s bad. She can naturally communicate in layman’s or even children’s terms because, well, you know.
This is new in American history. Previously, Democrat candidates portrayed themselves as “egg heads” (like Adlai Stephenson) and technocrats who sacrificed scholarly careers to guide us benighted hicks toward a paradise that never materialized. They smugly ridiculed Reagan as a simpleton actor, Dan Quayle for misspelling “potato,” and George W. Bush’s malapropisms. Democrat presidents were typically highly intelligent and respectably credentialed. Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. Obama graduated from Columbia University and then magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. Even the Democrat wannabes, like John Kerry (Yale University), Al Gore (Harvard), and Michael Dukakis (Harvard Law School), boasted impressive credentials. Democrats put forward candidates who were objectively brainy, even if they often harnessed their big brains to pull dumb causes. Clinton was morally impaired and Obama was handicapped by a twisted ideology but no honest critic could say they weren’t smart.
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