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“I want every little girl across our country to know this: You can do anything — even if it has never been done before” said an Aug. 26 X post from the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign. It’s vapid and cliché, the kind of feel-good, self-help-speak that should be avoided during the serious business of electing the leader of the free world. Yet it speaks to an uncomfortable truth for women closely following this campaign.

Kamala Harris is treading new ground as the first female vice president and someone with a serious shot at becoming America’s first female president. You don’t have to be a DEI enthusiast to recognize that the first female president will have a special place in the history books as the culmination of the centuries-long fight for women’s rights in the United States.

That’s also why it’s so awful to have a female presidential candidate who is so obviously not up to the job.

Americans Would Elect a Woman, But This One Isn’t Ready

Surveys suggest Americans are willing, even eager, to vote for female candidates. Harris’ campaign is predicated on this.

Publicly, the campaign hand-wrings about how sexism against women is a formidable obstacle that the trailblazing Kamala must overcome. In a country of nearly 170 million registered voters, undoubtedly at least a few simply won’t vote for any woman. Female candidates’ looks, wardrobe decisions, and personal histories likely are generally subject to greater press scrutiny than that of the average male candidate.

Yet it’s also clear that Kamala’s sex is her greatest asset. President Joe Biden publicly declared her sex and race drove his decision to give her the nod for the vice presidency. When the Democratic power structure decided to toss out Biden, they were banking on Kamala’s “historic” demographic features exciting her base and giving unaligned centrists enough of a reason to overcome their broad dissatisfaction with this administration’s governing record to vote Democrat.

Media coverage of Harris has been indisputably and shamelessly fawning. Any notion of “sexist” coverage of her looks, voice, and laugh has been overwhelmed by corporate media trumpeting every vacuous marketing trope her campaign offers. She is brat and girl boss; she is rising, inspiring, the incarnation of joy. She persisted!

Not only are they dutifully skating over her record as vice president and decades of disastrous policy positions, they are following the campaign-approved script created to transform Kamala into the ultimate Instagram influencer. Like any good salesman, the media is helping sell their audience — particularly women — on the idea that Kamala’s icon status can rub off on them.

These marketing tactics are ones we parents try to explain to our impressionable children and preteens. You don’t actually become any more like Ariana Grande by paying three times as much for a lip gloss sold under her brand name. Mr. Beast’s candy bar is just a candy bar. Nothing magical happens when you eat it, it’s just gone.

Kamala’s campaign bets that impressionable, ill-informed voters don’t understand this. They are working with the media to encourage voters — especially young women — to take the bait and believe that they can suddenly become “brat” or “girl boss” or “joy” by buying everything peddled by the Harris-Walz campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

The challenge is to break this spell and reach these women with the truth: Voting for Harris, the incumbent, won’t improve your situation. You will still be underemployed, buried in debt, and struggling to afford groceries and your car payments. Worse, likely you will soon find that you inadvertently signed up to perpetuate a set of policies — from grocery store price controls to more inflationary spending to additional tax hikes — that will make your situation even worse.

The Campaign Women Deserve

Harris could have offered Americans a very different campaign. She could have boldly defended the Biden-Harris administration as a success that deserves another four years or explained how, as president, she would pivot on a few critical policy areas.

Americans might have given her points for admitting that mistakes were made, in good faith, under President Biden and Harris’ watch. Americans might have appreciated the honesty of saying that three years in office taught her important lessons and she plans to course correct. She could have fearlessly revisited her 2020 primary statements and described the process by which she has come to moderate her positions.

She hasn’t done that. Instead, she shamelessly embraced the campaign and media’s shield to become the most scripted and coddled presidential candidate in history. She allowed her surrogates to flip-flop for her.

Deep Inside, Kamala Knows She’s Incompetent

She enabled the Trump campaign to make Kamala vs. Kamala ads that expose her competing policy positions and reveal her as a chameleon. She confirmed the suspicion that her party doesn’t trust her to handle serious questions or to articulate her party’s policy agenda. They believe she must be kept with notes behind a teleprompter.

Hillary Clinton didn’t act like this. Nikki Haley didn’t ask a man to tag along for big interviews. Why is Kalama allowing herself to be treated like she’s incompetent?

It’s because of the worst truth of all: she believes it too. You can see her self-doubt during any unscripted moment. Each sentence is a dangerous high-wire act. She’s in her head, second-guessing every word she utters, hearing herself get tongue-tied and falling back on the verbal tics her campaign coaches have clearly flagged as poison.

She Can’t Even Do a CNN Interview Herself

For all the DNC hype and media celebration of juiced poll numbers, her confidence is shot. The build-up for the CNN interview with Dana Bash was too great and the attempts to rig it shamelessly obvious. Americans know pre-taped, spliced-together interviews are exactly what Democrats used to fool the public into believing Biden was sharp as ever.

Americans know Walz was chosen to chaperone the interview in case Kamala started babbling about the importance of time or spinning herself into another well-worn rabbit hole. Her campaign carefully picked the friendliest interviewer on the friendliest network that can be counted on to prescreen questions, edit answers, leave embarrassing flubs on the cutting room floor, and spin the interview the moment it hits.

The timing says it all, with a careful release on the Thursday before Labor Day, when Americans won’t pay much attention and the entire media complex can be counted on to snap into playing defense.

American women know the stink of a scam: Scammers bank on the shipping time being long enough that the payment has gone through and you won’t have any recourse after you’ve unwrapped the package and realized you’ve been duped. Scammers don’t care about angry reviews and pledges to never patronize them again.

From the perspective of the DNC, you’ve cast your vote and helped purchase the product they wanted you to: a president controlled by the Democrat machine which will continue to mismanage federal power. They don’t have to try to sell to you again for years.

The DNC and Harris campaign missed one big thing: American women are smarter than this. Yes, many of us do look forward to the day that we have a Madame President, but not enough to buy the scam being sold to us today. We know we deserve better.

Carrie Lukas is president of Independent Women’s Forum. Follow her on X at @carrielukas.