Will Hollywood’s Glam Issue Damage Kamala Harris?

I took an extended stroll across the neighborhood this week. These unnerving ‘Darkish Brandon’ marketing campaign indicators—those with fiery, X-ray imaginative and prescient eyes on an enormous Biden head—have been gone. However the Harris for President indicators hadn’t proven up but.

Any day now, after all, they’ll. A fast on-line examine confirmed a full array of Harris gear for already sale, a lot of it ‘awaiting success,’ given the abrupt shift within the Democrats’ Presidential alignment.

Inevitably, a whole lot of the garden indicators will wind up right here, on the affluent North finish of Santa Monica, the place progressive politics are just about taken as a right. Nonetheless, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s most popular successor, could be wishing these of us, her neighbors, kind of, would cool it only a bit.

In any case, this isn’t a good time for a candidate to be recognized with the very heartland of entitlement.

North-of-Montana Ave. Santa Monica is definitely Kamala-adjacent. Harris and her husband, the lawyer Douglas Emhoff, personal a house in adjoining Brentwood, in a leafy stretch that ranges from the long-time Mel Brooks place on Santa Monica’s La Mesa Drive to the outdated Marilyn Monroe dwelling close to Gretna Inexperienced Method, and up the hill above Sundown, the place Michael Ovitz and O. J. as soon as held sway.

Homes are roomy and generally massive. Safety is attentive. The taco vans alongside the Brentwood Nation Membership are the place day labor dines. Locals usually tend to lunch within the Brentwood Nation Mart, the place Michael Mann and his friends held courtroom by way of the years, and meat from the butcher counter sells by the quarter-pound, making an eighty-dollar rib-eye at first look look reasonably priced.

Harris and Emhoff make a degree of frequenting El Cholo, an unpretentious Mexican restaurant nearer to downtown Santa Monica. However proper by way of her Vice-Presidential years, Harris and Emhoff have appeared snug within the extra northerly leisure enclave, the place well-known faces and people who signify or produce or direct them are simply one other truth of life. I’ve run into Jon Favreau strolling, Ben Affleck dropping a child off at college, and Gwyneth Paltrow scooting into the wine retailer, presumably on her approach to go to together with her mom, Blythe Danner. Brokers. Writers. Plenty of producers. At one level, Shirley Temple. Come to think about it, my spouse grew up in a home that had belonged to Stan Laurel, and a few shut buddies up the road obtained their place from a Laemmle.

That is Celeb Land—a really great distance from Butler, Pa., the place Trump was attacked (and close to the place I spent childhood in a manufacturing unit city, Ford Metropolis). Butler is extra like East Palestine, Ohio, the place the prepare derailed, not far-off.

In some years, granted, the glamour issue is a plus. It actually helped Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even Trump, although the latter two, not less than, had nice fame with out matching movie star assist. And star backing actually didn’t damage Invoice Clinton or Barack Obama.

However it’s a a lot more durable equation this 12 months. Hollywood is politically suspect, having banged the drum and handed the hat for Biden solely days earlier than declaring him unfit to run. Present enterprise donors dumped their very own candidate—who complained bitterly of betrayal by the elite—solely to flock, inside hours of Biden’s resignation, to Harris, his inheritor.

It’d work. However it was unseemly—the form of factor you may pull if you’re packaging a film, however not if you’re asking for belief from a voters that’s sore about inflation, apprehensive about international battle, and uninterested in attempting to determine whether or not anybody in authorities or the media ever offers in easy fact.

The prompt flood of Hollywood cash to Harris is welcome, I’m certain. However movie star endorsements, even from George Clooney, gained’t be an enormous assist this 12 months. And Brentwood will in all probability depend for lower than Butler.