When is a tuna sandwich not a tuna sandwich? When it’s the press that speaks

SHARK SANDWICH: Nancy Rommelmann: When is a tuna sandwich not a tuna sandwich? When the press asks us to see Kamala Harris in the second coming of Julia Child.

If I try my best, I can muster a drop of admiration for the White House staff. They stuck to their jobs, and if that meant feeding the public a steady diet of phony sandwiches in an effort to keep Biden in power, no less sensible, then so be it. But I can’t summon that drop for the journalists enlisted to hand out the sandwiches. They had one job, to be the eyes and ears of the public, and they failed. Part of that failure can be attributed to a susceptibility to a Donald Trump-inspired brain fever, a fever that made some journalists realize that it was not only acceptable to act according to an alternative set of journalistic principles, it was noble, and that if it meant squinting enough to see a visibly failing 81-year-old man as the person most capable of leading the nation, they would do it. They had to do it. Animosity toward Trump was the power bloc he and the administration were counting on through 2028, and as stinking and rickety as it was, they could only let it go at their peril.

And then on Sunday, a deus ex machina happened. You can almost hear the collective relief of those on the political stage. No need to support old Joe anymore; in Harris, they had a new candidate to shine, and I imagine the nation’s editors worked twice as fast, looking for stories that would make the vice president seem, if not cuddly, at least endearing, and didn’t she do a cooking thing a few years ago?

Which is how we ended up with a bunch of national journalists sniffing out what scraps they could from a short-lived “Cooking With Kamala” YouTube series, in which — spoiler alert — the only dish Harris herself cooks entirely is a tuna sandwich.

“Hail Kamala the Great!” Neo writes:

The Democrats and the mainstream media have found a way to handle all of this. It involves three steps. The first is to reinvent Kamala as an ENERGY! EXCITING! FRESH! candidate, as if she had just landed on planet Xenon with no past. Her remarkably poor (and that’s being kind) record on the Biden administration’s failures will be ignored, in the hopes that Kamala 2.0 will resonate with the public. The second step will be to hammer home the idea that Republicans are threatening women’s “reproductive rights” and that Kamala and the Democrats will protect them. The third step will be to choose a more moderate running mate in order to preserve the fiction that Kamala will not govern from the far left.

There is no doubt, as Charles Cooke writes, that Kamala can win. But unlike Obama, (Bill) Clinton and Jimmy Carter when they first entered the national scene, she is not, to borrow Obama’s description of himself THE The audacity of hope, “a blank screen onto which people of very different political persuasions can project their own views.” And she doesn’t have the rock-star personalities of Obama and Bill Clinton, nor their undeniable talent for detail politics:

This won’t be like Obama for the media. She has a very public history of comments, has run for president before, and has held political positions in the administration, such as border official. This is going to be a tough call for them. https://t.co/YlAuH2dv1W

– Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 25, 2024

Classic reference in the title: