The Democratic National Committee, that wheezing relic of a once-serious political party, has lately taken to auditioning its leadership the way a bankrupt regional theatre casts a summer stock revival: by asking which actress most perfectly embodies the brochure. The result, in the late unlamented year of 2024, was Vice President Kamala Harris, elevated without a single primary vote, handed the nomination like a participation ribbon, and then dispatched to the electorate with all the gravitas of a laughing emoji. She lost, of course, and lost badly, yet the machine that selected her still hums along, polishing its pronouns and congratulating itself on its exquisite sensitivity.
One struggles to recall a more perfectly pathetic figure in American politics. Harris’s public performances combined the rhetorical precision of a malfunctioning chatbot with the moral urgency of a corporate diversity seminar. Asked to name the price of a loaf of bread, she once replied that groceries were an “opportunity structure.” When pressed on border policy, she offered the immortal observation that the border was, in fact, a border. Her campaign events resembled hostage videos in which the captive had been told that enthusiasm was optional but giggling was mandatory. The woman could not complete a declarative sentence without sounding as though she had just discovered the concept of verbs.
And now, in the fresh disgrace of December 2025, she has gifted us this gem from a New York Times profile, delivered with the serene self-regard of a wax-museum exhibit: “There will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any Vice President of the United States ever was.” It is the sort of utterance that demands to be read aloud in a darkened room, lest the sheer tonnage of its delusion collapse the furniture.
"They govern, when they govern at all, as though the country were a particularly fractious faculty lounge."
And yet the real indictment belongs not to Harris, that unfortunate marionette, but to the puppeteers who yanked her strings. The Democratic establishment has become a closed guild of credentialed mediocrities who have never met a payroll, balanced a budget, or endured the indignity of a performance review. Their idea of economic populism is to discover, every four years, that eggs have become expensive and to blame the poultry farmers for their insensitivity. Their notion of foreign policy is to issue strongly worded tweets about the importance of norms. They govern, when they govern at all, as though the country were a particularly fractious faculty lounge in which the chief crisis is an insufficient number of gender-neutral bathrooms.
These people should be sent, en masse, to staff the night shift at a Midwestern Wendy’s. Let them discover what it feels like to deal with actual human beings who have neither the time nor the inclination to decode the latest acronym salad about intersectional praxis. Let them learn the exquisite terror of the Frosty machine breaking down at 11:47 p.m. while a line of exhausted truckers waits for their only meal of the day. Let them master the delicate art of explaining to a mother of three that the credit-card reader is down and no, the coupons expired last Thursday. Only then might they acquire the humility required to speak to the country without sounding like a malfunctioning HR bot.
Instead, they remain sequestered in their glass-walled consultancies, marinating in the smug certainty that the American people simply failed to appreciate their sophistication. They dream, still, of Michelle Obama descending like a deus ex machina to save them from the consequences of their own incompetence, because nothing quite says “fresh start” like recycling the spouse of the previous saviour. They have mistaken celebrity for competence, sentimentality for strategy, and the ability to quote Audre Lorde for the ability to win an election.
The party of Roosevelt and Truman has become the party of focus groups and feelings circles. It deserves not merely defeat; it deserves irrelevance. Until its leadership is forced to confront the simple, brutal arithmetic of real life (rent, groceries, diesel fuel, daycare), it will continue to offer the electorate nothing but exquisitely branded emptiness. Perhaps a few years behind the counter, asking whether the gentleman would like to make that a combo, would finally teach them the difference between governing a nation and curating a vibe.
