Kamala’s very own basement campaign

Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t show up to the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention on Wednesday. You might have missed that buried in all the pearl-clutching over former President Donald Trump’s cracks on her. About half the people I spoke to in Washington Thursday thought they’d seen her there or that maybe she’d Zoomed in for a video interview. Nope.

She cited several reasons, including the funeral of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) and an otherwise busy schedule, but it’s not just this one event. Harris hasn’t done a single real interview since her unceremonious coronation 12 days ago. She’s given some speeches and read off a couple of teleprompters, but no actual interviews.

Polling shows Harris narrowing Trump’s lead, with some even showing her overtaking him in swing states where he was leading Biden previously.

It can be hard to remember amid the frantic pace of American politics, but as recently as 13 days ago, we were told the most important thing a presidential candidate can do is take hard questions in an unscripted environment. That’s true, by the way. You get a far better idea of who a candidate actually is when you get past the scripted speeches and quotes from anonymous aides.

But never mind that now. Those were the rules for when America’s newsmen wanted a different candidate to beat Trump. Now the aim is simply to beat Trump.

We’ve seen this all before, when the phrase “basement campaign” was introduced to describe Joe Biden’s commitment to dodging journalists and even supporters in 2020. That year, we saw the nominee beam into our living rooms from his literal basement and even accept the nomination in an empty auditorium. His friends in the media covered for him, blaming COVID while relentlessly attacking Trump — and it worked.

There can be no blaming COVID now. It's not age, dementia, or a “stutter” either. This time, we’re faced with a press corps that knows Harris is so bad on the fly that even a sit-down with NBC’s Lester Holt can generate years of bad headlines.

And so far, it’s working. Polling shows Harris narrowing Trump’s lead, with some even showing her overtaking him in swing states where he was leading Biden previously. She sits back and gives carefully coordinated speeches while her media pals heap on calling Trump Hitler, this time for saying Harris advertised her Indian heritage when she first entered politics (“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t”).

How long can she go on hiding? She's got one more week of Olympics coverage, complemented by a renewal of the “honeymoon” when she announces her running mate. And then it’s the Democratic National Convention, which is threatened by an increasingly volatile war in the Middle East but still wraps the candidate in a carefully choreographed cocoon.

And then it’s September.

Abigail Shrier: Republicans are going after Kamala all wrong

New York Times:Pro-Palestinian groups seek to thwart Josh Shapiro’s chances for Harris’s V.P.

Blaze News: Kamala Harris (and Shapiro’s) long, anti-Catholic history

Daily Caller: Shapiro targeted counselors who didn’t gender-transition kids

Glenn Beck: The media’s new strategy

Blaze News: Harris Faulkner 'so disappointed’ in convention interview’s tone

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The fire rises: City Journal: It’s not about ‘cat ladies’

Women from Jennifer Aniston on down have gone on record publicly lamenting having “put their career before their family” or “having waited too long.” Over and over again, you hear good people say they wished someone had warned them. It’s easy to forget amidst the wailing and gnashing at JD Vance’s joke that the United States has a birth-rate problem, and at its root, the problem is cultural. Of course, you’ll never get a thoughtful conversation when there’s an opportunity to “YASS QUEEN” and dunk on Republicans. Lexi Boccuzzi writes:

The most uncomfortable topics are often the most important. Young people’s lack of desire to build families suggests a lack of hope for the future — an alien sentiment in the United States.

I saw this firsthand as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, home to many childless, soon-to-be elites. I wrote columns in our school paper expressing my concerns about hookup culture, transactional relationships, and the lack of prioritization of dating. These columns often received the most pushback. In a pre-professional culture like Penn’s, claiming that marriage and family were our greatest contributions to society was often taboo, particularly for women. But why?