Kamala's Long Weekend
/President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris caused a stir this weekend by tweeting out fun posts regarding the long weekend. Biden posted one with him and a young woman eating ice cream, suggesting we stay cool. Harris attracted more attention on social media after tweeting a picture of herself smiling, telling Americans to enjoy the long weekend.
We all want to enjoy the long weekend, and most will spend it grilling and bonding with family members (something this administration would have urged against a few weeks ago, due to Covid, before rapidly changing their minds). Some are enjoying vacations, fleeing to amusement parks like Cedar Point or Disneyland. But given that today is Memorial Day, their tweets were in incredibly poor taste.
Memorial Day, for many Americans, is a solemn day for remembering those who bravely served in the military and passed in the line of duty. Americans pay tribute by visiting memorial sites, spending time with veterans, and engaging in other patriotic activities.
Americans may treat the holiday as an opportunity to party, but Biden and Harris aren’t like most Americans. He’s the commander-in-chief, and she’s a heartbeat away from fulfilling that role. Of course, they posted Memorial Day tweets honoring fallen soldiers today. Biden had two sons who served, and he speaks very affectionately of Beau, who passed from cancer. But what they tweeted today can’t erase the outrage and Twitter trends from Sunday.
In perspective, this is a blip in what Americans should be outraged about. Biden just revealed his budget with a hefty price tag of $6 trillion, and it does not include Hyde Amendment protections, prohibiting taxpayer dollars from funding abortions. The media and Biden Administration are also playing catchup to the “lab leak” outbreak theory of Covid-19’s origins, something they deemed a conspiracy when uttered by Trump. The crisis on the southern border also remains a crisis.
But if you have experience working on the comms side of politics, their tweets are a big professional fumble. If you work for a state party, elected official, or so on, you know people—including the media—watch your page. Forgetting a holiday or putting out a graphic with a typo can easily become news stories. Even outrage posts from followers are a major concern. It’s astonishing these posts would go out.
Kamala Harris is a narcissist. It’s very on-brand for her to tweet out a picture of herself being the focus of the Memorial Day weekend. She’s more like an influencer on Instagram rather than a VP. She’s being groomed to look like a figurehead rather than lead in any significant way, like with the border crisis. Biden’s social media team seems obsessed with the image of Joe with shades and licking ice cream, thinking it makes him look a cool and harmless old man, while they push through their radical agendas. Perhaps their social media teams were amateurs and didn’t anticipate the backlash. Perhaps they were thoughtless, and the significance of Memorial Day escapes them. Perhaps their goal was to trigger the right, post a message on Memorial Day, then make fun of right-wingers who outraged over nothing.
Some on the left have tried to misdirect by throwing President Donald Trump under the bus, bringing up The Atlantic’s hit-piece, claiming Trump called the military “losers and suckers.” This has been denied by several elected officials and debunked. To be fair, Trump’s tweets did also often cause a stir. But mature people would learn from examples they don’t like rather than using them as an opportunity to play whataboutism and defend bad behaviors of politicians they don’t like.
The Biden Administration should be more careful with their posts and more thoughtful to Americans who lost a loved one in service. Yes, they did acknowledge fallen soldiers on Memorial Day, but Biden has a bit of an image problem when it comes to the military. Robert Gates, who served as the defense secretary under Obama, believed Biden had “issues” with the military. He also said Biden had been wrong on every single foreign policy issue and didn’t know if he’d be a good commander-in-chief. Nevertheless, the role is on Biden’s shoulders.
Biden could at least pretend like he’s up for the task.
