“The soundtrack suggested a Beyoncé concert.”

That’s the first line of Time magazine’s adulatory profile of Vice President Kamala Harris, titled “Her Hope,” or in the online version, “The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris.” 

The cover of the magazine was a glamorized image of Harris reminiscent of posters of President-to-be Barack Obama from 2008.

You really don’t need to read the piece—unless you want to lose your lunch—but there was one hilarious line that must be mentioned. Halfway through the profile, Time noted that Harris spurned its request for an interview.

Even in the friendliest of friendly media environments, Harris is still unwilling to step down from the clouds and sit through questions. That’s a remarkable attitude for someone trying to become president as a last-second replacement.

This isn’t the “reintroduction” of Harris; it’s a rebranding. It’s an almost complete fabrication of a presidential candidate whose strategy appears to be maintaining a royal detachment from politics and policy.

After years of echoing the Left’s hyperventilation about the end of democracy, the media have pulled out all the stops to make sure that Harris—who was simply chosen by her predecessor and by the Democratic Party elites without facing a single voter—is crowned as the next president of the United States.

“All hail Queen Kamala, first of her name” is what we are supposed to accept.

To make it so, we get a deluge of positive, uncritical stories about how Harris is bringing “joy” back to America, about how she is magical, even spectacular, and is one of the greatest politicians this country has ever seen.

This, despite the fact that not long ago they were calling her one of the worst candidates ever. Her 2019 presidential campaign was a disaster. She was deeply unlikable, a terrible campaigner, and washed out early in the Democratic presidential primaries despite enormous advantages.

What a difference a month makes.

Harris is being given all the advantages of an incumbent, while having all of the failures of the Biden administration wiped away. In some cases, her direct failures have been erased, Soviet-style, from the record.

Time magazine may have reached the nadir of the American Pravda genre with its slobbering, rapturous ode to the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, but the rest of the media landscape isn’t far behind.

She’s getting glamorous cover profiles in other outlets, too.

The media honeymoon is presumably expected to last forever.

Has this candidate been grilled on her policies?

Ha! What policies? Pay no attention to what you’ve heard about her having the most liberal record in the Senate. She’s got vibes.

Has Harris had to answer to the Democratic Party faithful?

Not at all.

Though the Left hoots and hollers about how unfair the Electoral College supposedly is and how it supposedly subverts pure democracy, the Democratic Party has somehow managed to pull off the least democratic presidential nominating process in generations.

Has Harris in any way been vetted for the office of the presidency?

Nope.

Harris hasn’t done a single sit-down interview with the press since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and our noble defenders of the First Amendment and a free press are apparently just fine with that.

Oh, apparently she let some members of the media travel with her and ask questions off the record. You’ll get answers from Harris vicariously through them.

The amount of unquestioning elite media adulation of Harris matches and, in some ways, even surpasses its treatment of Obama. 

When then-Sen. Obama emerged as a presidential candidate, the media had little interest in digging into his past beyond the carefully cultivated stories he wanted to tell.

It worked in 2008 with the “hope and change” campaign that ultimately catapulted him to the White House.

We are seeing a “hope and change” redux, but under even more absurd circumstances and with a politician who seems to have none of the natural political gifts Obama had.

Most Americans are highly displeased with the direction the Biden administration has taken the country. From the economy to immigration to the darkening international situation, there are plenty of areas in which the American people agree that we are going in the wrong direction as a country.

And I’d argue there are many, even more troubling, aspects of the Biden administration. It’s tried to foist “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and child gender-transition initiatives on the whole country. Most troubling of all, the Biden administration has clearly and aggressively weaponized the federal government against domestic opponents. 

Harris was in the White House when all of this was happening. She isn’t a clean-slate outsider like the way Obama was portrayed way back when. Yet, that’s what they want you to believe she is.

Whether this strategy succeeds or fails, something has certainly been revealed through all of this, if it hadn’t already been over the previous decade.

Most of the media have apparently abandoned all interest in finding the truth or in informing the people to enable them to make decisions about who leads the country and who doesn’t.

Everything is about manufacturing narratives, about gaslighting the American people when truth stands in the way of useful fiction, and about manipulating information and events to secure power for one side of the political spectrum.

That much of the media operates in this way so nakedly now is a testament to their perceived power over society and perhaps their hubris in thinking that most Americans don’t see through it.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past." 

This article was first published by The Daily Signal.