LET'S GO RETCONNING WITH KATHLEEN PARKER

Donald Trump says that Kamala Harris "has a very low IQ." Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post's moonlight-and-magnolias version of Peggy Noonan, says essentially the same thing, but politely, bless her heart:

Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.

(Really? I like her voice. I think it has a Lauren Bacall quality to it.)

Harris is no Barack Obama, Harris writes:

As New York magazine heralds “Kamalot” on its cover, The Movement is being sold as Obama 2008....

Strategy isn’t policy and, except for Harris’s radiant smile, 2024 is nothing like 2008. Obama was more than just a pretty face. He brought a keen intellect to the arena and remains the most eloquent, effective orator of our time. Harris remains the person she has been for the past 3½ years: a sometimes bumbling beauty with a stride that conveys confidence if not precisely competence.

Did Parker always feel this way about Obama? She insists that she did.

Twenty years ago, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama, then merely a state senator from Illinois, stepped out onto the stage, a lanky vision of grace and beauty, and mesmerized the crowd with his message: “There is not a liberal America, and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a Black America, and a White America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There is the United States of America.”

Spellbound as anyone else, I elbowed fellow journalist Carl Cannon and said, “We’ve just heard the first Black president of the United States.”

Parker did write a column praising Obama for that 2004 speech, singling out (of course) that moment of outreach to . But did she spend 2008 praising Obama for his intellect and eloquence? I hope you're sitting down for this one: She did not.

Here's Parker in January 2008:

Whatever his qualifications for the job, the crowds chanting "O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma!" betray an undertow of hysteria. This is not the candidate of reason, but of passion. Of emotion. Sen. Good Vibes.

... Obama's [Iowa victory] speech was grandiose prose and inspiring rhetoric. But what does it mean? It means nothing, but it sounded so good, who wants to cause trouble? We're feelin' good for the first time in a while and that's what matters.

Obama isn't just the inevitable dream candidate. He is the self-object of Oprah Nation, love child of the therapeutic generation. What he brings to the table no one quite knows. But what he delivers to the couch is human Prozac.

He may or may not be the right man to fill the Oval Office, but Americans will feel too good to notice.

The following month, she took the word "hysteria" and spun it into a column full of misogyny:

Reports of women weeping and swooning ... have become frequent events in the heavenly realm of Obi-Wan Obama.

... "We are the ones we've been waiting for,” he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.

Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus.

Well, you don't see any men fainting in Obi's presence.

And as for Obama's "keen intellect":

So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

... Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent — hence thousands of years of religion — but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.

Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.

And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.

Here's how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling: "When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa ...”

... Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

This is standard-issue conservatism in our time: The current top Democrat is a sworn enemy of civilization or reason or logic, not like Democrats of the past, who were actually decent people -- except that when those past Democrats were new on the scene, they were the existential threats. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was a drug-addicted commie America-hater; years later, Barack Obama was the great menace, not like that nice Bill Clinton. When Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee, we were told that she was the radical leftist in the family. And now Parker remembers Obama as a towering intellect, not like that ditzy broad Kamala. But in real time Parker thought Obama was leading a movement of ditzy broads. She can't retcon this.