It sparked the cringe heard around the World Wide Web.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., dropped the most botched baby boomer attempt to kick it with the cool kids in her bid to run for president of the United States.
“One nation under a groove,” she captioned her so-called MOOD MIX video. “Gettin’ down just for the funk of it.”
Published by “The Late Show with Steven Colbert” — whose ring will reportedly be kissed by none other than Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., tonight as she announces her own presidential bid — Harris’ video just marks another data point in the truly tragic trend of politicians attempting the “it” factor but producing the “ick” factor instead.
Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s teeth cleaning? I don’t want to see it. (And it certainly doesn’t make my calves cramp.)
Elizabeth Warren’s husband awkwardly squirming as she pretends to kick it with a beer even when the Massachusetts senator is so obviously a chardonnay gal? That’ll be a no from me, chief.
Harris butchering the names of beloved rap trio and “Push It” legends as “Salt and Pepper”? Well, now I just feel personally attacked.
Sure, Democrats may be trying to ride the wave of cool kid socialist and millennial congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., but this latest parade of pathetic showboating stems from a deeper void left by former President Barack Obama.
Obama was cool, in no small part because he didn’t try to be. He just had the “it” factor.
Yes, he spent his youth smoking joints in the foothills of Hawaiian volcanoes and snorted coke at Columbia. But he was also an insufferably nerdy dad who reveled in making his daughters squirm at his bad puns during the annual White House turkey pardon. He didn’t try to act like an overgrown man-child.
President Trump, for all of his huffing and puffing today, created a the model for a generation of the cool, gilded, womanizing, wealthy playboy. He exemplified an ’80s-era recklessness that might not translate well into our contemporary wokeness, but rendered Trump with a strong air of authenticity.
Even Ocasio-Cortez isn’t strictly cool, but she’s real. She feels like an honest-to-God millennial who’d split an avocado toast with you and tell you who to swipe right for on Tinder. She’s a little nerdy, a little too righteous, a little too patronizing. But she still has the “it” factor, that air of realness that shows she’s totally comfortable in her own skin and, more importantly, in her own brand.
On behalf of my entire generation, I’m calling for a cease-fire on these aesthetic atrocities from wannabe presidents. Uncle Joe, announce your run in a Delaware diner. Dark Horse Klobuchar, lean into your lawyerly and Midwestern appeal. You don’t have to act like a millennial to appeal to a millennial. There’s a reason young conservatives love the staid and shrewd “Cocaine Mitch” and young liberals follow the curmudgeonly and unapologetic “Birdie Sanders.”
Perhaps this sounds more Generation X of me than anything, but from one millennial to a crop full of boomers, my advice distills to this: Just be yourself. It’ll be a hell of a lot less pathetic than whatever the last two weeks have been.
