Well, the contest is over, folks.  The New York Times has made its selection for president for 2020, and all those Democrats out there can pack it up.  Sorry, Beto.  Too bad, Joe.  Bye-bye, Bernie.

The winner is...Kamala Harris!

That's how goofy things have become, what with the paper of record tipping its choice even before any of the debates is out or any of the Democratic candidates (you know it's going to be a Democrat they endorse) has made his case to voters.  The buildup is on.

Blogger Ann Althouse (hat tip: Instapundit) has gotten a load of the Times' latest Kamala-love headline (which I noticed, too, so I bet it's plenty of people who've noticed), showing Harris as the first person in the Times' lineup of names of Democrats running for president, in some fluff piece on how, well, they're running.  Althouse spotted another detail: that they placed Harris's op-ed calling for free health care right there in the top-right corner, which is prime real estate for a newspaper, as it is likely to be seen by readers, and something they rarely do for an op-ed. 

There plenty of evidence that's whom they are gunning for.  Harris has been engulfed in scandals, from misappropriation of LAPD guards to a defense of false prosecutorial testimony to sex harassment from her aides that she claims to know nothing about to deceptive videos.  I went to check on whether the Times gave any coverage to her last scrap with unethical behavior: her claim that she knew nothing about her top aide's involvement with sex harassment, which led to a $400,000 payout to a persecuted junior aide.  Guess what: the Times wrote nothing.  Do a search of "Larry Wallace" and "Kamala Harris," and nothing comes up.  Do that same search on Google, and there's an explosion of stories, all derived from the Sacramento Bee's scoop.  Funny how that happens.

She's also not all that popular.  She comes in dead last with 2% support among Democrats in a Harvard-Harris poll six months ago, which was the best I found, with Michael Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and all the others named ahead of her.  Her Twitter feed, before Twitter culled it, was found to be loaded with fake followers, bots that pump up her follower numbers, suggesting she has more influence than she really does.  Some politicians actually buy these bots for this purpose.

Another reason may be that she's not exactly nice, as winning politicians tend to be.  Based on what we have seen of her, she comes off as hard, mean, and intimidating – Vishinsky-like, actually, given her performance in the Democrats' fiasco over the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.  She lacks that smooth and mellifluous and weirdly optimistic/downerly quality that candidate Barack Obama once had.

Despite these negatives, the Times has signaled it's already in the tank for her.

Why her?  Well, she "looks like" Obama, being multi-racial with a black element, and obviously well educated, going to all the right sorts of schools.  Kind of brings back the Obama days, right?  With a #MeToo thrown in, given that she's female.  Harris also is rather good-looking, same as President Obama was, and good-looking enough to have been California Democratic powerdomo Willie Brown's mistress, which is how she got her leg up in politics.  Not exactly the right way to be good-looking, but they're not covering those things, right?

It's stylistic, and the Times has always been abnormally focused on style.  You know, like the famous crease in the pants, right?

She's also someone who wears the right clothes: stiff lawyer suits that make New York Times staffers, at least, comfortable.  She used to require her staffers to wear suits – and it's been reported that she yelled at them when they didn't.  That crease in the pants stuff is serious in the case of Kamala, because, you know, the lawyer thang.

The Democrats haven't even sorted out for themselves what kind of candidate they want to run against the populist President Trump, and here the Times is, weighing in to slant the race for its sort of person, the right sort of person, affirmative-actioned and from a proper deep blue coastal state.  It's as if this sort of persona is the establishment now, because the Times, being the Times, always goes with the establishment.  As for the voters, including the Democratic voters, well, let's see how this works out.