The Synthetic Candidate

Some final thoughts on a historically inane election

I suspect most iPhone owners don’t realize that the pictures their phones take aren’t real. Or at least, they’re not an accurate representation of reality. When you take a picture with an iPhone, it actually takes a series of pictures, and then merges them into an image that ostensibly combines the best elements of each. The computer in your phone automatically adjusts skin tone, reduces image noise, and can even add light sources that didn’t exist in real life. What comes out on the other side isn’t quite the world as it is, but an optimized version of it.

For most people, that’s great; you get far fewer terrible pictures, because the blemishes in them are basically airbrushed out. But you also get fewer pictures that are in any way special. They all have sort of a processed uniformity and mediocrity to them, like a drive-thru burger. And they’re all subtly, but fundamentally, fake.

This algorithmic image optimization roughly describes what the media have tried unsuccessfully to do for the Democratic nominee for the past three months. Kamala Harris is a catastrophically awful candidate. I suspect that just about everyone in the Democratic establishment is well aware of this. But the campaign has tried its best to exploit the abbreviated campaign calendar to Photoshop over her glaring flaws for just long enough to allow voters in the swing states to suspend their disbelief and check the box for Harris out of sheer exhaustion with Donald Trump. Their goal wasn’t to transform her into a dazzling political superhero like Barack Obama — this is still the real world we’re living in — but to make her, like an iPhone photo, into the most manicured version of herself: vibrant, inoffensive, and broadly palatable to a mass market audience.

At first, the effort was crude and transparent. Kamala simply avoided any media interviews or unscripted events with voters, appearing before crowds and cameras only in the most stage-managed format available to her: the political mega-rally. Even then, some in the media covered for her. But when teleprompters alone couldn’t sustain a decisive lead over Trump, the campaign reluctantly began to push her out in the spotlight without her training wheels on. She had one good night with the presidential debate, or, more accurately, Trump had a terrible night. Then she had a series of disastrous sit-downs with the most pliant reporters and late night hosts on television, along with one barely passable interview with an adversarial Fox News. Yet even as it became obvious to everyone with eyes that the Democratic nominee was a politically talentless, empty-headed marionette with no actual beliefs and even less personal magnetism, the media stuck with its image optimization strategy. As recently as this weekend, in a fawning profile, the New York Times excused Harris’ lack of gifts as an orator as a reflection of her “scorn” for “fancy speeches,” while mythologizing the depth and thoroughness of her policy preparation — a purported virtue that has hardly been in evidence on the campaign trail — and “the briefing books ravaged by her copious marginalia.”

But even the journalists themselves have seemed to stop believing their own post-processing algorithm. In his CNN town hall, it was hard to miss the look of weary skepticism on Anderson Cooper’s face as Harris refused to even pretend to answer question after question, whether from voters or from Cooper himself. In a pundit roundtable, even David Axelrod conceded that “when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city.”

Trump is a revolting candidate in ways too familiar to enumerate. But Harris is terrible in a way that seems almost deliberately calibrated to flatter him by contrast. The fundamental falseness of her candidacy make his defects look like something rare and special in politics: something honest.

That isn’t to say that Trump is an honest politician — he isn’t. It’s to say that he doesn’t hide his warts. He presents himself as what he is, no matter how much his campaign handlers try to obfuscate it. It’s both his superpower and his Achilles Heel. It’s why he lost the debate to Harris and it’s why he may win the election.

Trump’s inherent advantage is that it just so happens that this fidelity to reality is the scarcest of virtues in our synthetic age, and becoming more so as AI advances. We’ve grown nostalgic for it. As smartphone photos have come to constitute virtually every image we see in our newsfeeds, the unprocessed look of a picture taken with a real camera has become ever more distinctive. That’s not to say that such pictures are better — they’re usually worse, since their technical deficiencies are plain to see. But they possess a certain authenticity that’s missing from their digitally optimized counterparts. The appeal of this unfiltered reality is so strong that recent years have seen a renaissance in film photography.

This is the appeal of Donald Trump. He’s an analogue politician in a digital world. Again, as any photographer, filmmaker, or recording artist will tell you, analogue isn’t necessarily superior to what has replaced it, and in many respects, it’s decidedly lesser. But there’s something about it that’s just missing from the near-perfect technologies that now render the mediated backdrop of our daily lives. When it appears, we are drawn to it, as much to reject the artificiality of our era as to embrace whatever it is that we perceive as “authentic” about what came before it.

Kamala Harris is an entirely synthetic product. But she’s not even a good one. Just as Apple’s microprocessor isn’t going to turn your Yosemite vacation selfie into an Ansel Adams, the media can’t turn Kamala into Bill Clinton, or even Hillary Clinton for that matter. The best they can do is make her into a blandly agreeable, well-polished totem. But even that would require a bare minimum of political talent or basic human charm that she simply lacks.

So voters are now left with two repulsive personalities to choose from. One of them, however, is at least real. The other is a poorly executed deep fake. In these final moments of the election, this is what it comes down to. And my guess is that Americans are going to choose the jalopy that isn’t being sold to them as a gem.