Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It is also a seductive tool for the Democratic Party in the final days of the 2024 presidential election. You see it everywhere in the official activities of the Democratic campaign. WinBlue donations are increasing rapidly! Harris is still ahead in the polls! Democracy is at stake!

Amidst the din of denial are worrying little hints of bravado, always a sure sign that the denier only half-believes the denial at best.

That’s not surprising. Denial is the reliable product of despair: the realization that the goal has been achieved, even if it is only partially acknowledged.

Harris’ numbers among men of all races are in the tank. The only exception is the brittle ephebes of the media and the academy. They are there with their Chardonnay, their pronoun lists and aging Covid masks to post Harris Walz signs on their front lawns and warn about the dangerous tyrant Donald Trump.

But this is a tiny, psychologically insignificant cohort. For this reason, the Harris-Walz campaign was driven to desperate measures. Over the last week or two they have deployed a miserable litany of feints and diversionary tactics.

Some were unforced errors, such as the news broadcast 60 minutes released a preview of his interview with Harris, which prominently featured one of her signature calorie-free word salad emissions. CBS deleted that answer when it aired the full interview and replaced it with an innocuous answer to another question. But the damage was done. The original answer was widely derided. The slammed replacement sparked anger and contempt for CBS’s unfortunate, typical Harris behavior.

My favorite piece of pandering was the truly awful “I’m a man and I’m voting for Harris” ad. It was rightly derided as “the crassest political commercial ever.”

Like many others, I initially thought it was a parody, an anti-Harris production meant to make fun of her and her vice president, Tim Walz. That was certainly the effect. But it turns out that the half-dozen men in the ad weren’t random XY chromosome carriers who happened to support Harris for president. No, they were apparently B-list actors recruited to deliver their lines.

And which lines those were. An actor who claimed to know something about cars said, “Do you think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor?” I eat carburetors for breakfast.” I’m thinking about offering a reward to anyone who can tell me what that means.

An enterprising commentator discovered the ad’s author – Jacob Reed, who wrote for late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel – and the actors’ real biographies. Let’s just say that no one seems to be a poster boy for masculinity. The comments were brutal. “No testosterone was used in the creation of this ad”; “A real man immediately recognizes that there isn’t a single real man in this pathetic, man-shattering Beta propaganda video”; “From the party that can’t tell you what a woman is”; “As a man, I believe I left this ad with a yeast infection.”

Then there was Tim Walz’s “pheasant hunting” wheeze. I use the scare quotes because no pheasants were harmed in the production of this farce. Walz and a handful of reporters, dressed in identical, brand-new hunting gear, walk across a field without weapons. Did they want to catch the pheasant by hand and strangle it?

Eventually, Walz gets a shotgun, but it was the wrong weapon for hunting – a semi-automatic weapon, not a break-barreled weapon. Not that it matters. One commentator noted, “Dick Cheney appears to be the safest shooter in the world because of his skills with guns. Maybe that’s why Cheney supported him.”

Walz has been compared alternately to the cartoon character Elmer Fudd and Governor Mike Dukakis. Readers with long memories will recall how Dukakis tried to appear tough during the 1988 presidential campaign by driving around in an army tank with a helmet that was too big. It marked the end of his election campaign.

I predicted that Donald Trump would win in a landslide before Joe Biden was forced out of the race in July and Kamala Harris was suddenly thrust into the vacant top spot. First, the Democrats put on a brave show. Harris enjoyed a slight boost at the Democratic National Convention. Despite a barrage of lies, she more or less held her own in her only debate with Trump.

But soon after Labor Day in early September, cracks began to appear. In 2020, Joe Biden won the presidency by just 44,000 votes in a handful of swing states. This was in the middle of the national panic over Covid. This time the Democrats don’t have a Chinese virus to help them. You know all this. Hence their panic. It’s completely justified.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books