Help me out here. Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate? How on Earth did that happen?

And what about the other guy? You know, the sitting president — Joe Biden? I realize he withdrew from the race in the constitutionally mandated manner, by posting a sullen document on X, the digital platform formerly known as Twitter. That was well done. Biden managed to make Elon Musk happy after all these years.

But why did Joe go? He never said. Actually, he made it clear that he thought his magnificent record in office “merited a second term.” If that was true, why not put it to the test, allowing those randos we call “the voters” to decide?

Biden had something like 14 million votes in the Democratic primaries. No one else had any. His obvious dottiness wasn’t the reason, either. He never owned up to it — and if he had, he’d have to explain how a man too mentally enfeebled to be a presidential candidate could continue to serve as president.

In the debate with Donald Trump that began the slide to oblivion, Biden’s empty eyes and zombie-like groaning, we were told, had to be written off as a really bad night.

He said he was quitting the race because saving “our democracy” was more important than “personal ambition.” Now, I happen to agree that Biden retiring permanently to the basement of his Delaware home is a boon to American democracy. But that was true from Inauguration Day — why did he inflict his personal ambition on us for three and a half years?

I’m an analyst. I don’t prophesy the future, but I’m supposed to know why the president of the United States suddenly wakes up one morning and decides to give up his candidacy. So I’m going to run with a conspiracy theory, because why not?

I believe Biden — and his human walker, Dr. Jill, and that Kissingerian strategist, Hunter — all believed he deserved a second term, but were pushed aside by the two kingmakers who secretly run the Democratic Party: George Clooney and the New York Times.

That still doesn’t get us to Harris. She’s the vice president, not the alternate candidate. If Biden faltered, she would automatically inherit the presidency but not his primary votes or delegates. The Democrats could have opted for an open convention.

They have a strong bench, or so we keep hearing. For example, there’s California’s Gavin Newsom, whose hair alone should be declared a national monument. There’s Hillary Clinton, who keeps banging against the glass ceiling like that annoying moth outside your window. And there are others, like Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, who are the best potential candidates of all because no one outside their immediate family has heard of them.

Instead, almost on a dare, the shakers and breakers of the party settled on the one candidate who has consistently polled more poorly than the president, and who, like Biden, has made an eternal enemy of the English language.

Harris sounds like a kindergarten teacher who has forgotten her lesson — her words scatter and float away like helium balloons into the clouds. In a Washington, DC, rife with impostors and empty suits, hers is a truly authentic lightness of being.

Her abrupt elevation has been called “a coup,” but it wasn’t. There were no tanks running over rioting Biden diehards — and the Democrats are entitled to anoint anyone they wish for the candidacy. It’s their party, as they say.

But the rapidity of the swap startled many inside the power structure. We know Biden was surprised because he needed a second tweet after the withdrawal announcement, essentially saying, “Kamala for, you know, that thing.” We know Harris was surprised because that’s her normal state of mind. We know the Democratic presidential campaign, which Harris inherited, was totally befuddled because it set out at once to invent a whole new person to be known, henceforth, as “Kamala Harris.” 

This pure abstinent creature had never been named “immigration czar,” had never been ranked “most liberal” in the Senate, had never donated to bail for violent criminals or advocated defunding the police.

It was telling, I should think, that the campaign preferred a Harris who had never done anything — a Harris who resembled a bout of amnesia, liberated from every memory of the past. Even with the assistance of a supine media, this replacement of a replacement is unlikely to catch on. If you want a blank slate, go for Whitmer. Harris, alas, is too memorable, in her own unique way.

Americans are eager to learn the political principles that motivate the new candidate. Her handlers, we have seen, would rather she not have any.

Her detractors seem equally divided between portrayals of Kamala the Airhead and Kamala the Communist. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but neither gets to the essence of the matter. The ideology espoused by Harris is technically labeled “California,” which academics define as “extreme performative endorsement of the latest thing.” It’s politics as fashion statement — as might be expected, a pastime of movie stars and the idle rich.

Thus Harris’ habitual attitude toward Israel has been condemnation: She boycotted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress, for example, and has made it plain she blames Israel, not Hamas, for the devastation in Gaza. These gestures have failed to influence the Israelis or change a single fact on the ground in Gaza — but it’s a cool look for the ruling class.

She’s also all in on racial identity, though in her karma chameleon way, she has sometimes chosen to emphasize the Indian ancestry of her mother, sometimes the black roots of her Jamaican father — making her, taken whole, the ideal woman of many colors.

When, in 2020, Joe Biden declared he was looking for someone “of color and/or a different gender” as the chief qualities for his vice president, Harris had all the bases covered. 

In the spirit of fashionable segregation, her campaign has organized supporters into groups according to race and sex: “Black Women for Kamala,” “White Women for Kamala,” “Latinas for Kamala,” etc. My favorite category is “White Dudes for Kamala,” which met online under the auspices of that rugged exemplar of Caucasian manhood, Pete Buttigieg. The first speaker, apparently, was a black dude.

But we shouldn’t make too much of this. The latest thing in California is never the latest thing for the United States of America. Harris seems aware of this troubling fact, and has already tiptoed away from previous stands on border funding, a fracking ban and Medicare for All.

I wouldn’t be surprised if her next online support group turned out to be “E Pluribus Unum for Kamala” — she’s a political chameleon on a journey across a treacherous landscape, non-California America, and she will continue to change colors to blend in with the unfamiliar background.

Whatever one thinks of these unusual tactics, they appear to be effective. Relieved to have a candidate who doesn’t drool in front of the cameras, the Democrats feel re-energized. The media, of course, have already crowned Harris Coconut Queen of the Universe.

The pollsters are talking about a significant bump in her favor, regaining much of the ground the doddering Biden had lost. It’s even odds that she will defeat Trump and become our next president. Maybe better, since the power and the glory of American culture, from Harvard to Hollywood, has aimed an immense monophonic Bronx cheer at the heedless Trump.

And here I return to my initial observation: Kamela Harris, president? Evidently, I have slipped into an alternate dimension of time and space, a region where the laws of probability have been abolished.

I offer these facts for your consideration.

Harris has no personal following. Why should she? She wasn’t going anywhere. She has no entourage of trusted experts to enlighten her on the issues — the experts were buzzing around Biden, who was supposed to be the candidate until he wasn’t. Her personality, in public, is comical, and in private it hasn’t exactly been a magnet to party activists or intellectuals. By all accounts, her staff hate her and go running for the doors at the first opportunity. Her name isn’t closely identified with a particular cause or issue.

She’s a pretty terrible politician. She underperformed as a vote-getter in deep blue California. She self-detonated before the first primary when, in 2020, she sought the presidential candidacy on her own merits. As might be expected from someone whose words break free of Earthly gravity, she’s a wretched debater. What Tulsi Gabbard did to her in the 2020 Democratic debates was horrifying to watch — the oratorical equivalent of Bambi vs. Godzilla. Her campaign never recovered from the thrashing.

Harris is like that feather in the wind at the end of “Forrest Gump.” She’s a historical accident. That, in less than four months, she could be the most powerful human on Earth, decider between war and peace, her manicured fingers flitting casually over the nuclear button, fills me with awe and astonishment over the inscrutable perversity of our age.