Kamala Harris Is Every Bit as Smart as My 7-Year-Old Son Was

True is true, and fair is fair. Give credit where credit is due. Kamala Harris is every bit as smart as my 7-year-old son was at that age.

First, about my boy. He now is in his 30s, a delightful guy, the funniest person I ever have known, sharp as a whip, and maybe the cleverest and most insightful mind I ever have encountered. For people who care about such things, he graduated college Phi Beta Kappa. All kinds of good stuff. But this is not about today’s boychik. It is about a quarter-century ago. And about Kamala Harris.

Set the stage: He was 7 years old. We cannot judge a kid that age based on the standards we would apply to a college grad or to a mature assembly-line worker with real-world life experience. We are talking 7 years old.

There was always something unique about him, a readiness and ability to think creatively outside the box. Sure, lots of his ideas then — on the surface — sounded ridiculous. Laughably so, even when he was dead serious. But it is in the Jewish tradition of Talmudic study to encourage asking serious questions, to encourage independent creative thinking, not merely to capitulate to external norms and “common wisdom.” If we deferred purely to the “common wisdom,” there is no way we could have survived 3,300 years as so small a numerical minority with a shared idea. We would have been absorbed into Judaic oblivion long ago, centuries ago, millennia ago.

We see that even now among Jews who indeed are obsessed with melting into the pot. They begin by melting. By the time their kids inherit their indifference and desperation to shed their heritage, they have dissolved. Look at the notorious ones. Bernie Sanders? His only biological son is non-Jewish. George Soros’ Alex is engaged to a Muslim who fasts on Ramadan. Doug Emhoff’s daughter, Ella, insists she is not Jewish and  raises money for Gaza. All gone — like a pottery that has cracked, like grass that has withered, like the flower that has faded, like the shadow that has passed, like the cloud that has vanished, like the wind that has blown, like the dust that has blown in the wind, and like a fleeting dream.

But for those Jews who do not break but embrace the faith, the cultural underpinnings of Judaic heritage breed enormous possibilities. The challenge — thus the problem — is that Judaism requires competent parenting for the system to work. If the parents are Judaically ignorant, if they affiliate outside traditional observance and instead leverage Jewish culture for their own secular and leftist purposes, then the result is disastrous. Just look around at the Trotskys from Bernie Sanders on down who have emerged to hate Israel. I wonder whether Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar rub their eyes and even can believe it as the likes of Bernie Sanders come running to support them as they call for the destruction of Israel and the implicit murder of that country’s eight million Jews. You see those “Jewish” haters on the news, arm-in-arm with Arab Muslim foreign students chanting slogans supporting Hamas and Hezbollah: “Jewish Voice for Peace,” “J Street,” “Students for Justice in Palestine.” The only saving grace is that most of those “Jews” are not Jews anyway. Born to non-Jewish maternal lines, whether to outright non-Jewish mothers or maternal grandmothers, or “Marilyn Monroe converted” in “ceremonies” that are nonsense, they ain’t Jews.

OK, back to my boy. So he is 7 years old, encouraged both to think grandly and safely outside the box but also to respect both parental authority and schoolteacher authority when “his elders” explain why some thoughts need fine-tuning, why the best creative thinking emerges from the humility of also listening to and respecting other voices of experience and reason. Well, one day he comes to me and says, “Aba (Dad), may I ask you a question about global warming?”

I respond “Of course.” First, I explain to him the difference between the anti-American-industry nonsense propagated about “man-made climate change” versus the truly scientific fact that G-d’s earth does indeed go through temperature-shifting cycles, as it has throughout all history. And then I ask “What’s on your mind?”

He says he has been thinking about it, since it came up in science class, and he is wondering why no one has tried this solution that occurs to him. (Again, he is 7.):

Oh, are all the temperatures too high? Why can’t “they” have an emergency worldwide meeting at the United Nations, gathering the presidents and kings of every country in every continent on the planet, and agree to a worldwide plan that, on a date certain and time certain — let’s say next Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern Time in the United States — every single person, all at once, in every single house and apartment at every single spot in the world, all at the very same time, will all …

… TURN ON THEIR AIR CONDITIONERS TO THE MAXIMUM!

I stood there, stunned. He was dead serious. I paused, sat down. In the Jewish tradition, I did not laugh at him or make fun of him and his idea. Rather, I talked it through with him. I explained and gave him a very proud hug. (I hugged him often. My first wife, the one I divorced, criticized me anytime I hugged him. My bad. I couldn’t help it.) He has never stopped thinking creatively outside the box. I could give dozens of examples, and, as he matured, those ideas got deeper and deeper. As I noted earlier, by the time he graduated from college, he won cash awards in two different academic departments and was admitted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Recently, after hearing and then reading about a Kamala Harris blue-ribbon, gold-standard public policy proposal she purportedly came up with all by herself, I was transported back in time, thinking once again about my son and his proposed solution, 25 years ago, to “end global warming.” And I realized that I had been looking upon Kamala Harris unfairly. It is wrong and unfair to criticize her for failing to think like a grown person in her 50s when in fact she thinks adequately as would be expected from a precocious 7-year-old. When asked what she will do about runaway inflation that four years of her governance has caused — food prices so high that families are skipping a meal daily, energy prices so high that people cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in the winter or cool them in the summer, prices so high at the pump that people cannot afford to drive — she emerged with a remarkable solution:

Oh, are all the prices too high? Well, why can’t we have a meeting of all our great leaders in Congress and agree to a nationwide plan that, on a date certain and time certain — let’s say next Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern Time in the United States — every single person, all at once, in every single house and apartment at every single spot in the United States, all at the very same time, will all …

… CUT ALL PRICES TO THE MAXIMUM!

And that will cure inflation: price controls. Just cut all the prices. Then they won’t be so high.

If I were Willie Brown, I would give her a very proud hug.

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