The Devious Art of Shutting up

When I was on the city council and mayor of Lake Elsinore, I helped people I thought would be good for the city to get elected.

Sometimes I was right, but sometimes I was wrong.

And in two cases I was very wrong.  One engineered the removal of a dedicated city manager for her political advantage and the other became twisted by power and all of the “new friends” you get after you get elected (hint for people thinking about running for office: you will get new “friends” – trust your old friends more.)

But that other one had a strategy that – as an ex-reporter at the time – I could never have conceived of:  just refuse to talk to the press or anyone else for that matter.

As you slip into even greater unconscionable corruption, he just stopped answering questions and, he realized,  more than likely he woukd not be held accountable.

Saying words can be turned against you – shutting up cannot, at least so specifically. And it worked.

And that’s working for Kamala Harris…so far.

But, unlike Harris, both of those council people it turned out were the kind of folks who could not forgive a favor – they had somehow convinced themselves of their own worth and value and honesty (they were wrong, but it is a very convenient psychologically to think that way.)

Harris’ shutting up does not involve not forgiving a favor, but is actually worse. Her refusal to talk to the press unscripted is more than a tic, a deft campaign strategy.  It is her at least tacit agreement that she understands how badly speaking people in public has gone and can go.

Imagine you are potentially 11 weeks from becoming the most powerful person on the planet and your advisors tell you to shut up because they do not trust you not to make an absolute mess of  speaking extemporaneously.

Imagine how you would feel about that kind of “advice.”

An intelligent person who worked their own way – no one actually (entirely) does that but it most certainly does not take a village – to (potentially) the top of the greasy political ladder would be infuriated.  

The insult to your intelligence is not even implied – it’s right there: you are too stupid to be trusted to speak without being told what to say.

You think you are about to be President of the United States and people are telling you that you are an idiot that must be muzzled.

And you take it, and you take the advice, and you shut up. What does that say about you, that you know you are not bright enough to handle the job?  Obviously, yes.

And then what does it say about you that – despite your inner core knowing you cannot do the job – that you still go ahead and try to do it anyway, no matter who gets hurt by you self-acknowledged inherent incompetence?

Equationally, there are appropriate political tactics to use in a presidential race. Donald Trump, for example, most likely has the exact opposite problem: he talks too much. Think back to the Biden debate: for the first hour he stayed relatively quiet, had a great quip about no one being able to understand what Biden said, etc.  

But in the last thirty minutes, Trump – who had been champing at the bit the whole time – opened his mouth and gave his opponents fodder for the future.

Trump says things off the cuff, sometimes silly, sometimes very off-putting. But his supporters – as has been said many times before – take him seriously but not literally while his detractors do the opposite – hence the nearly unbridgeable gap, save for the five or six percent of the country that could go either way when it comes to Election Day.

The arguments against Trump are dressed up policy debates and his inherent “existential threat”  to democracy itself, but in fact are about the mortgage payments and the private school bills of the deep statians.  

Kamala is different from Trump – she knows she can get away with saying nothing that she herself first actually thought. The deep statians will prop her up as they did the pathetic Joe Biden after they realized they had no other chance.

Like Biden, they know that she is not up for the job and have forced her into simply repeating Biden’s “campaign from the basement and blame covid” strategy of 2020.

And she will take the insults because – at some deep, lizard brain level –  she agrees.

She knows.

She knows her political career was completely manufactured for her by various and sundry members of the San Francisco power cabal. She knows that if she hadn’t hooked up with Willie Brown she would be nowhere near Sacramento, let alone DC.

Her political persona was created out of whole cloth and simply draped upon her, save for the identity thing. It was handy she was black (Jamaican, and/or Indian, whichever was more convenient at the time) at the beginning – now, it’s crucial.

As shown by her implicit acceptance of everyone around here thinking of her – accurately – as the midwit lightweight she is, she can’t even contemplate anything except servicing all those who have gotten her so tantalizingly close to the biggest of chairs in the world.

Harris can neither forgive nor appreciate favors – she can only repay them.

And that’s what will happen if she is elected – those that made her district attorney, attorney general, and then senator will come calling.

Actually, they already have. They are the people telling her to stay quiet.

And that’s why she keeps her mouth shut.

Madam President, indeed.