Kamala Harris reminds everyone why we didn’t elect her president

The Democrats seem to be lost in the wilderness. But at least their former presidential candidate still has elephants for company.

On Wednesday evening, Kamala Harris returned to the public stage for the first time in months. And in her own way, she reminded us all how much we’ve missed her.

The event she spoke at was a California fundraiser for Emerge, an organization designed to help Democratic women enter politics. And if any Democratic women need a role model for how not to run for political office, Harris once again sure helped them out.

She used most of her 15 minutes to do boilerplate campaign stuff. She claimed that under the Trump administration, “instead of an administration working to advance America’s highest ideals, we are witnessing the wholesale abandonment of those ideals.”

Clearly she is appalled at a US administration doing things like securing the border and enforcing the law. These are certainly ideals she would never have approved of if she had been in office.

Harris also slammed into the tariffs question. Because if there is one question that all economists and trade experts always had on their minds in recent years, it was: “What would Kamala do?”

To the extent that she has any thoughts on the question of economics, she showed which side she is on.

She did so by expressing her support for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the two left-wing radicals who have spent recent weeks jetting around the country by private jet to tell everyone how well socialist economics can work.

But the true highlight of Kamala’s speech came when she dug into her familiar wine-mom technique. Then the memories really came flooding back — to the public, if not to her.

Flailing around with her hands and laughing before she had even said anything funny, she invoked the behavior of animals in the zoo. Quite literally.

In that grating manner she has of speaking to a roomful of adults as though they were a nursery full of pre-schoolers, she asked if anyone had seen the recent video of elephants in the San Diego Zoo.

Some of the room seemed to know what she was talking about. The others had that reaction Dems often had when Kamala’s old boss Joe Biden began one of his memory-lane stories from yesteryear.

“Please allow me, friends, to digress for a moment” she said, wringing her hands like a little girl on Christmas morning. Deeply amusing herself, she remembered to make an attempt at deeply amusing her audience.

“I’m asking for a show of hands,” she continued. “Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago — the one of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Google it if you’ve not seen it.”

The point that Harris was grasping at was that after the recent earthquake in San Diego, the local zoo released footage showing how the elephants there had behaved.

When the elephants felt the tremors, they immediately formed a circle in order to protect the youngest elephant. Or in Kamala’s retelling of the story, the elephants gathered around “to protect the most vulnerable.”

While telling this story, she nodded and raised her eyebrows meaningfully — once again as though she were reading stories for 3-year-olds in a public library.

“So that scene has been on my mind,” she continued, laughing hysterically. “Think about it,” she invited the audience, still nodding wisely. As though thinking is something no one would do unless Kamala Harris invited them to.

“What a powerful metaphor,” she continued, inviting the audience to marvel anew.

This being Kamala, the metaphor had to be explained. So a little of Kamala’s focus returned, and she recalled that there was a teleprompter she was meant to be trying to focus on nearby.

“We know those who try to incite fear are most effective when they divide and conquer, when they separate the herd, when they try to make everyone think they are alone,” she said. “But in the face of crisis, the lesson is: Don’t scatter. The instinct has to be to immediately find each other and to know that the circle will be strong.”

I marvel at the California audience who managed to pretend that this was some great insight. And I marvel even more at the idea that paying adults sat through this guff.

But most of all, I think we can all marvel that Kamala Harris thinks the country still wants this stuff. To return to her favorite metaphor, let me return to Kamala’s new favorite subject of elephants.

We must assume that Kamala would like us to forget her term in office and her horrible campaign. Perhaps she already has. Or at least is trying to.

But voters — like elephants — never forget. And America’s voters never should and never will.

Pay attention to Iran’s threats

Talking of missed bullets, it is worth turning attention to Iran.

The Iranian revolutionary government’s official media outlets recently marked President Trump’s first 100 days back in office.

One of the regime’s official media mouthpieces, Kayhan, printed an analysis calling Trump “narcissistic and delusional” and “a liar.”

That might sound like the sort of thing you could hear at any American-based anti-Trump fundraiser.

Except that the editor of Kayhan is Hossein Shariatmadari — a close associate of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ahead of Trump’s 100th day in office, the editor of Kayhan had a much clearer message for the American president.

Drawing on statements made by his friend the supreme leader, the editor of Kayhan recently wrote: “The day is not far off when a few bullets will be fired into Trump’s hollow head.”

This promise was given because only by killing Trump could Iran “avenge the blood of the martyr Qassem Soleimani.”

I hope that Homeland Security is keeping the most careful possible eye on protecting the US president.

But I hope it is also looking into the multiple foreign actors in the US who still excuse the Iranian regime and think it some kind of benign political force.