Kamala Harris’ closing message to women couldn’t be more condescending: If you 补谤别苍’迟 voting for me, it must be because a man won’t let you.
Her campaign treats women as prisoners of their own marriages and relationships, as if the only way a woman can be free is if she’s wedded to the Democratic Party.
The vice president has an especially big problem with married women: They voted for Donald Trump 52% to 47% over the Biden-Harris ticket four years ago.
But what if those weren’t really wo尘别苍’蝉 votes — what if they were 尘别苍’蝉 votes, cast by women too scared to stand up for themselves?
Harris stand-ins Michelle Obama and Liz Cheney have been out on the campaign trail and on TV pushing this patronizing line in recent days.
“If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter,” Obama lectured a Michigan audience.
What woman needs a former first lady to remind her of that?
Yet in the eyes of Team Harris, any woman who isn’t openly supporting the Democrat must be a hostage to false consciousness — or to an ogre husband.
A smarmy new ad from the pro-Harris group Vote Common Good presumes women are afraid of their husbands and have to be sneaky to cast a rebellious ballot.
“Did you make the right choice?” a man in the spot asks after his wife votes.
“Sure did, honey,” she replies with a sly smile as a syrupy voiceover from Julia Roberts intones, “Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.”
In Harris’ America — or the America feverishly imagined by her supporters — women are most definitely the weaker sex and don’t dare talk honestly to the men they love about their vote.
Needless to say, that’s a damning comment on how Harris’ allies see marriage, too.
For them, it’s an inherently oppressive institution: Wives are just serfs or slaves.
And even in marriage, this last-ditch stratagem implies, men and women are lonely individuals who can’t trust or depend on each other; they can only depend on the party and its omnipresent leader.
No wonder married women go Republican!
Election-year politics is divisive enough outside of the home, yet the Harris camp believes victory depends on stirring up political rivalries within the family itself.
CR Wiley, a pastor and conservative author living in Washington state, reports he was recently visited by a Democratic canvasser who insisted on talking to Mrs. Wiley — evidently in the hopes that she, a registered Republican, would be receptive to the Harris pitch … as long as her husband wasn’t around.
For all the Harris campaign’s harping on the privacy of the voting booth, it seems to have little respect for the privacy of the home — or even the bathroom.
Ms. magazine has highlighted an underground campaign promoting Harris’ paranoid narrative right where women most expect to be left alone.
Activists are placing Post-It notes with the “Voting is a secret” theme (and, of course, a nagging reminder to vote for Harris) in ladies’ room stalls.
Harris and her allies don’t allow women privacy from their politicking anywhere.
They can’t afford to.
The campaign is desperate, and its last hope is to make women feel powerless unless they vote for Harris.
But married women 补谤别苍’迟 powerless, and even single women don’t want to be pursued into the bathroom by a campaign determined to wear down all resistance.
She may be a woman herself, but Harris wants to be Big Brother, with a message of paranoia and fear one can’t escape.
Yes, the voting booth is private.
Women don’t need Kamala Harris to tell them that.
Instead, they just might use their secret ballots to tell her, in the most open and public way possible, exactly what they can think of the Democrats’ demeaning assumptions.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.