The Unburdened Campaign

Daniel Greenfield | August 24, 2024

“What can be, unburdened by what has been,” Vice President Kamala Harris recites looking into the cameras, into her teleprompter and into the glare of the afternoon sunshine in a swing state.

Unburdened by the laws of her economics, her past track record or reality, anything is possible.

The much mocked phrase has become to her brand what “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” was to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. The twin statements of faith, their awkward construction of both deliberately echoing the cadence of old school preachers and new school gurus, are transformative in very different ways. Where Obama appeared to be offering his followers the opportunity to participate in a new revolution, Kamala offers her supporters the rebirth of forgetting that the old ever existed.

It is easy to see why “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” spoke to a man so convinced of his chosenness that he he was planning to be president even before he came to America. The only con in the phrase was the “we”. “What can be, unburdened by what has been,” is equally compelling to Kamala who constantly remakes herself to the needs of the moment. ‘Kamala for the People’, her 2020 presidential campaign, was launched using her credentials as a prosecutor only to have her endorse police defunding and freeing all the criminals once she saw which way the winds were blowing.

Despite all the unburdening, Kamala in 2024 is much the same way hack she was in 2020. In 2020 she proposed to wipe out health insurance while in 2024, she proposes price controls that would wipe out private enterprise. But being unburdened means she does not have to care about any of that. Now she runs again, unburdened by her past views on banning fracking and bailing out race rioters. She assents to an arms embargo on Israel while her spokesmen loudly deny she believes in any such thing.

Forget being burdened by the past of years past, Kamala isn’t even burdened by the past 5 minutes.

Letting go of the past is cathartic for Kamala as it must be for a woman who started her political career as the doxy of an elderly and corrupt urban mayor and is now her party’s nominee by way of a donor coup against another old man. Had Biden not turned weak and feeble, she would have nothing. But that was a few weeks ago and the coup and all the ugly history around it are another burden to be shed.

Obama and Kamala are both the children of lost black immigrant fathers, raised abroad and then brought into the American elite where they realized that they would have to identify with the blackness of their non-American fathers rather than with the white and Indian heritage of their mothers to get ahead in a culture whose biggest political currency was white guilt. But where Obama made his past and his search for identity into his autobiographical brand, Kamala makes changeability her identity. Unlike Obama who pretended to be what he was not, Kamala doesn’t really pretend to be anything: her identity is too nebulous: a day player who commits to no single role and will read from any script.

Both “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and “what can be, unburdened by what has been” are leftist slogans, but where Obama’s slogan is rooted in a past history, Kamala’s denies it. Obama’s slogan contended that anything was possible because of the power of history while Kamala’s insists that anything is possible if we reject history.

Obama was running as the candidate of change and he was indeed something very different. But Kamala can only run as a change candidate by ignoring her past time in the administration. What other slogan could Kamala adopt except one that contends that the past does not matter because it’s past?

The Kamala campaign, running on her administration’s accomplishments and running away from them, championing the economy as both great and unfair, and the country as both wonderful and broken is rife with contradictions, but contradictions cannot exist when there is nothing to compare them to.

It’s a seductive slogan rooted in Oprahness and the gospel of self-forgiveness. Obama could inspire his followers, but Kamala is trying to crack the code of fake friend celebrity pop stars like Taylor Swift who offer fatuous expressions of sympathy, the pretense of commiseration and counsel moving on from everything. Kamala’s campaign amounts to little more than aging teen girl snark, artificial enthusiasm and calls to be gentle with yourself, drink some white wine and believe that better days are coming.

Obama and Kamala both speak to guilt but where Obama stood outside the great national white guilt, and offered atonement for it, Kamala stands inside it and offers forgetfulness as the solution to all things. Kamala and her supporters want to forget what they were, what happened and what they did. They want to move on from all the nameless things like the pandemic, the riots, the economy and the chaos. They don’t believe in inspiration anymore, all they want to do is leave it all behind.

It is the burdened who most want to be unburdened, and to believe that who we were is not who we are, and that what can be is not in any way defined by what was. What burdens does Kamala carry and what fingerprints can be found on her soul? Kamala laughs a fake laugh, smiles a fake laugh and tells her fans that if they pretend to smile and laugh that life will be good. Live a lie long enough and you will forget that you are lying. The performance becomes the actor. And isn’t that the secret to happiness?

Unburdening is Kamala’s way of cutting the Gordian knot. In her previous races, Kamala had no real idea of what people might want from her, but now she has tapped into the political panic attack of a party that had been spooked into thinking that it was on the verge of oblivion. But more than that she speaks to the disappointments of a party that saw little to celebrate about the last 4 years. Her supporters have struggled to convey what the administration’s accomplishments were.

But unburdened by what was, that no longer matters.

The Left has always been bent on erasing the past. Whether it was taking sledgehammers to statues or rewriting history, the past can be physically destroyed, or the secular messianism of the right side of history makes it something to flee, but Kamala transcends history with the joy of the lie. The past is weird. It’s full of non-DEI approved ideas. But most of all it makes you sad. And Kamala is never sad.

And that is to say that she is always fleeing her own emptiness and hollowness with artificial joy.

Kamala is joy incarnate. Laughing with her mouth, not her eyes, with her throat, not her heart, she banishes sadness through the magical waters of Lethe. When she looks up at the teleprompter or the sun, she sees only the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Unburdened by what has been, she can promise anything and be anyone, and most of all she can assure you that living a lie is the next best thing to living a better life. When you fake everything, Kamala’s life reveals, anything is possible.