"The more you learn about Kamala Harris, the more formidable she appears."

David Brooks is in love again.*

She is an amazing amalgam of different elements...

As opposed to amalgams of the same element. Why mess up your alliteration with a redundancy? And why not an amazing amalgam of elegant elements? Keep the alliteration at least.

... highly educated elite meritocrat, Oakland street fighter, crusading, rough-elbow prosecutor, canny machine pol and telegenic rhetorical brawler. She is also probably the toughest and most hard-nosed progressive on the scene right now....

She went to a prestigious school.... before going to law school, zooming up the political ladder and marrying a partner at a prestigious law firm. She is famously comfortable in rooms of the very wealthy.

But in deciding to work as a prosecutor — rather than going to a law firm — Harris was immersing herself in the gritty world the rest of the achievatrons were rising away from....

The rest of the achievatrons... like I guess the "partner at a prestigious law firm" she acquired as one of the achievements Brooks admires.

Harris was a beneficiary of the machine of the California political giant Willie Brown, who she briefly dated... but Harris made it clear at one forum that there is no way she’s going to bend if Brown or his allies try to influence her....

To beat Trump, I suspect Democrats will want unity. They won’t want somebody who essentially runs against the Democratic establishment (Bernie Sanders); they’ll want somebody who embodies it (Harris). They’ll want somebody who seems able to pulverize Trump in a debate (Harris)....

Seems!

Harris’s fearless, cut-the-crap rhetorical style will probably serve her well in this pugilistic political moment.

Probably!

Can anyone provide me with a good video clip demonstrating "Harris’s fearless, cut-the-crap rhetorical style," something that looks like it could "pulverize Trump in a debate"? I've never noticed anything like that. I hear a flat, bland style of speech. I mean, that's okay with me. I'm not looking for excitement. But if you're going to lavishly praise her rhetorical style and predict the pulverization of Trump, you need some evidence.

ADDED: I googled "fiery speech from kamala harris" and got this "Nobody is above the law" business, but it's Harris reading in a flat, nasal voice and frequently looking down and stumbling. Show me something where she's thinking on the spot and saying words that come straight from her head that show a "fearless, cut-the-crap rhetorical style" that could "pulverize Trump in a debate."

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* I'm saying "again" because of the way Brooks gushed over Barack Obama in 2006. He famously said, "I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant.... and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president." Notice that's a spoken quote. Brooks didn't write that in a column. The column he wrote at the time was "Run, Barack, Run." Here's how Brooks wrote about Obama:

[Barack Obama] notes that it’s time to move beyond the political style of the baby boom generation. This is a style... that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad.

Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self — Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago — and he takes that conversation outward into the world....

He distrusts righteous anger and zeal. He does not demonize his opponents and tells audiences that he does not think George Bush is a bad man.

He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of any issue.... During our talk... he kept returning to his mode, which is conversation, deliberation and reconciliation....

"My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart."

"For the only time in my life, I cherished social gatherings: Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. There were two or three such occasions on Friday and more on Saturday, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room. We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night. After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced. For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girlfriend who drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, occasionally three in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in happy license. I didn’t...."

The prose of the poet Donald Hall, published in 2016 by the New Yorker, highlighted now because he died on Saturday. He was 89. Here's the NYT obituary — "Mr. Hall was one of the leading poets of his generation, frequently mentioned in the company of Robert Bly, James Wright and Galway Kinnell. In evoking a bucolic New England past and expressing a deep veneration of nature, he used simple and direct language, though often to surreal effect."

"She is standing slightly behind him, considerably more sombre. In buttoned-up black, her long, dark locks tumbling in abundant waves, she is Botticelli’s Venus as channelled by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark..."

"... an icon of the Calabasas Renaissance. Her pose is stiff, her jacket sleeves pushed up in a gesture of can-do, eighties-style power-dressing."

A description of Kim Kardashian, in "Kim Kardashian Meeting Donald Trump in the Oval Office Is a Nightmare We Can’t Wake Up From" by Naomi Fry in The New Yorker.

I blogged that because when I read it I got a twinge of envy from the realization that if I'd wanted to write a description, I wouldn't have come up with those details.

Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing. pic.twitter.com/uOy4UJ41JF

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018

I mean, there's the photo. We can all see it, but can we string together words like that? And yet, what is it about those 2 sentences that makes me think other people are the writers — the writer writers?

1. "buttoned-up... tumbling... channelled... pushed up" — we're entertained with swirling action, even though it's a static, formal, boring posed photograph. How did Fry see all that stuff? How did she arrange it so it's up, down, around, and back up again.

2. We've got cultural references: Botticelli’s Venus (I know what that is) somehow merged with ("channelled by") Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (which I would have thought I knew who she was but the reference to the Calabasas Renaissance is telling me I am an idiot to think that).

3. Those sleeves! So much happening there: "her jacket sleeves pushed up in a gesture of can-do, eighties-style power-dressing." I would have thought the can-do gesture was rolling up your sleeves, and that bunchy push-up look was something casual that people did in the 80s because of Don Johnson on "Miami Vice" and that the power dressing of the 80s was something else, something more northeastern and businesslike, not a Floridian police-work fantasy.

4. Those "long, dark locks tumbling in abundant waves." I would not have dared to use all those words. Like Coco Chanel with her "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off," I'd have looked at that sentence and felt obliged to strike one word out. One or three or four. And I couldn't bring myself to call hair "locks." Especially near "waves." I'd get influenced by the wateriness of "waves" and think of the locks in canals.

5. Why are we talking like this about a woman? She's a real human being. Is it okay to make her into some sort of clusterfuck of female iconography? I'd get stalled in some vague ethical cogitation and not save my time for putting out crafting that kind of prose.

"Oleaginous spiked on March 8th, after the word was used by New York Times columnist David Brooks, in reference to Senator Ted Cruz."

Says the Merriam-Webster Dictionary website.

Brooks is not the only writer who has seen fit to employ this adjective when describing the senator from Texas; a fair number of other pundits have decided that Cruz merits this less-than-flattering descriptor....

Oleaginous came to the English language in the 15th century from Latin via the Middle French. For several hundred years the word simply had such meanings as "resembling or having the properties of oil" and "containing or producing oil." In the early 19th century it began to be used in a figurative sense, to refer to people or things that were perhaps a little too slick....

"Oleaginous"? It's a big word, suitable for elite-media prose, where — when a man makes you think about oiliness — you can't just write something blatant and easy-to-understand like "greaseball":

usually offensive
:  a person of Hispanic or Mediterranean descent

"All but Rubio, Cruz, Trump and Carson should drop out."

Said Bob Schrum, one of 14 pundits asked by Politico after last night's debate to say who should drop out. Schrum's a Democratic strategist, but that doesn't necessarily make him wrong. I think 4 is cutting it too close, especially since one of them is Carson, and he hasn't taken much heat yet. I think 6 is the better number, and I'd definitely leave in Christie, who's been in the background lately but really stepped forward last night. I liked his former-prosecutor parries.

Ah, I see from the transcript, it was Fake Louis CK (Jim Cramer) who brought up the former prosecutor business.