If Kamala Harris’s national political career ends here, then this final Zoom call to supporters is the cherry on top of the unfilled meringue shell.

And Kamala is that meringue shell – looks good and glossy, but until it actually holds something, it’s just an empty piece of baked fluff. And considering how the vice president looked and sounded during this Zoom call, “baked” might be the operative word. In a campaign filled with questionable decisions, releasing this video was a choice.

Who made that decision? We don’t know. But we do know that the Democrats took their favorite 29 seconds and sent it out into the world. Was this their way of making sure Kamala never runs for office again?

No video like this would ever have been released by a politician who is not hated by her staff. https://t.co/q7Mbbq5SzB

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) November 26, 2024

The first thing that comes to mind was the obvious question that burned around the internet.

Channeling the drunk aunt who’s a total mess but chases you down after every holiday dinner to give you unwanted life advice on your way out the door
pic.twitter.com/Hi4I0QDxGu

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) November 27, 2024

Kamala looks absolutely haggard in this video. That’s not the face of a woman who just got back from a restful Hawaiian vacation. That’s someone who was coping heavily by using the open bar at the resort, and is now trying to sober up and sound “adult” for the supporters in the room.

But even with the Shatner-like affect that Kamala is employing here, the words themselves are what we were hearing repeatedly during her entire campaign. Empty platitudes. Memorized catchphrases. And when in doubt, keep repeating what sounds good.

“I know this is an uncertain time. I’m clear-eyed about that,” Harris, looking dejected, said during a virtual meeting with her grassroots supporters.

“I know you’re clear-eyed about it, and it feels heavy,” she continued in her first public remarks since her concession speech at Howard University earlier this month.

“I just have to remind you, don’t you ever let anybody take your power from you,” Harris added. “You have the same power that you did before November 5th, and you have the same purpose that you did, and you have the same ability to engage and inspire.”

“We are all in this together, all right? We are all in this together,” Harris said near the end of her remarks, before wishing her supporters “a happy Thanksgiving.”

“I wish for you that you are surrounded by the people you love and who love you.

“I encourage you to be around family in whatever way you compose that family,” she continued.

“We are powerful, those of us who love our country, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

It’s obvious that the JOY! – along with a billion dollars in campaign funds, and more – has left the building. The only thing Kamala is finding “power” and “purpose” in is the next box of wine. If this is how she reacts to a political loss, how could she have possibly coped with the stress and demands of being president of the United States? Was she going to try and drink Vladimir Putin under the table at a future G20 summit, thinking she was Marion Ravenwood in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”?

Thankfully, we have avoided that possibility – even if Kamala Harris is telling her staff that she’s not going anywhere. Well, actually she is probably going back to California, but she apparently thinks she still has a political future.

But privately, the vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open — whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, “I am staying in the fight.”

She is expected to explore those and other possible paths forward with family members over the winter holiday season, according to five people in the Harris inner circle, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Her deliberations follow an extraordinary four months in which Harris went from President Joe Biden’s running mate to the top of the ticket, reenergizing Democrats before ultimately crashing on election night.

“She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months,” said one former Harris campaign aide. “The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships.”

No, Kamala is not going to “stay in the fight.” A person who was “staying” would have not appeared on a Zoom call looking washed out and hung over. Also, if she thinks Democrats are going to give her another shot at the top of the ticket, she’s hitting harder stuff than Franzia. An open primary in 2028 will be ten times more brutal on Kamala Harris than the 2020 primary was, because she already got top billing and couldn’t make fetch happen. And in the 2020 primary, she dropped out before a single vote was cast. Every single Democrat who throws their hat in the ring will have reams of data and video on Kamala Harris’s failures, and will not hesitate to use them to absolutely body slam her out of their way. Primaries are brutal like that, and Kamala has never survived a primary fist fight. How can she “stay in” something she’s never succeeded at?

Kamala Harris was handed the nomination, spent over a billion dollars, received overwhelmingly positive press coverage and still lost to Donald Trump.

This unflattering video was released to make it clear to her that she has no future in national politics. https://t.co/X0UufgyImR

— Peter Cook (@_Peter_Cook) November 27, 2024

This Zoom call probably wasn’t Kamala Harris’s political swan song, but if she was smart and surrounded by people who had political savvy, it would be. However, I think we’ve firmly established that Kamala is neither smart, nor surrounded by people with political smarts. So, she will likely try again – maybe in deep blue California, where she has a better chance of rebuilding her career. The hilarious thing is that given California’s track record with senators, Kamala Harris could have remained in office until she died, if she had wanted. But she was ambitious, got high off her own farts (and whatever else she was imbibing), and ran for president in 2020. That led her to be Joe Biden’s DEI pick for vice president, and as he declined, she was just waiting for that moment when he missed the stair step that would make her president. She really thought her moment had come when she was crowned as the nominee. Coming back down to earth has been apparently rough for Kamala Harris, but landing in the bottom of a wine glass is never a good answer.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click