From Nixon's fireplace, we limped along empty Presidential-seeming PR-Chimera candidate ‘messiahs’ with leaden hollow legs and soft, moldable clay feet. And now, as Trump re-makes and re-writes continuance Act Two, I can no longer keep quiet about the monsters which we made, including Trump. Trump filled a Democrat-engineered power vacuum. 

Until the DNC sees its truly ugly face in the mirror, we can expect America to glow cherry-red.

Katherine Smith PhD

I. Lightning in the Laboratory

Opening Scene

I remember the night of November 4, 2008 - streaks of tears on my face, neighbors on the street, strangers embracing strangers. Barack Obama's words hung suspended like scripture: "There is something happening… they know in their hearts this time must be different."

Seventeen years later, I am not left with scripture but with ashes. Somewhere down the line from "Yes We Can" to "Hope and Data Slides," we stopped shaping leaders and started shaping monsters - patchwork messiahs cobbled together with polling data and donor money. They stand on clay feet and fall under the weight of their own braggadocio.

Trump, Hegseth, Bondi and Kristi Noem filling the Hillary and Kamala campaign power-vacuums is the spare change Obama promised us. The most hated people since George W. are the Clinton-Harris legacy of 2025.

II. The First Monsters (1976–1992)

Jimmy Carter - The Miswired Moralist

He was sold to us as the moral compass outsider, the president to heal a post-Watergate nation. We constructed him of Sunday-school virtues, energy policy know-how, and Washington outsider frills. The glue never stuck. His sermons resonated as penance in a hopefully hungry country, and Reagan's smile blew the experiment off the lawn. Carter's sermonizing life of human rights marched straight into Gaza 2023–2025 Genocide.

Bill Clinton - The First Frankenstein

Clinton's creature was a masterpiece of triangulation sculpture: "I feel your pain" heart, Sister Souljah disavowal arm, NAFTA spine. He did what the consultants instructed him to do - and it worked. It also rehardwired the party's DNA for further calculation. He won elections but forfeited the party's conscience for balanced budgets, business donor checks and used PR Consultant non-issues.

The Clinton Years and the PR Politics Age

Bill Clinton's presidency was the heyday of the PR consultant. His gift was not policy, but showmanship, a presidency to perform to greatest impact on the night-time chat programs on CNN and the Sunday morning chat programs. Not the politics of the union hall or picket line - but the politics of the green room, the focus group, the paid gun consultant's memo.

Clinton strategist Dick Morris coined the term "triangulation," Clinton-era voodoo: stand above left and right, steal the most marketable sound bite from each, and sell as common sense. It was less leadership than advertising.

The Consultant's Agenda Masquerading as the People

Clinton's best one-liners were pseudo-issues sold as tipping points, crafted to appease contributors, suburban swing voters, and cable news experts.

• "Ending Welfare as We Know It" - a focus-grouped-over phrase that pleased Wall Street and reassured Reagan Democrats.

• The "Sister Souljah Moment" - a staged condemnation of a Black activist-rap artist, not to change policy, but to convey a TV-message to white suburban voters: I am not at the mercy of the radicals.

• Balanced Budget Evangelism - the deficit was made into an ethical crisis on CNN. Clinton made fiscal virtue the motto of his administration, including counting a budget surplus while cutting public investment, a victory boasted about but far from lived in real kitchens where wages stayed flat.

• Small-Ball Culture War Mysteries - midnight basketball, the V-chip, and school uniforms were all neither policy paradigm shifts but consultant-written vehicles for being "pro-family" without endangering the corporations that foment cultural decay.

• The 1994 Crime Bill - the pollster's nightmare of "tough on crime" politics, codifying mass ethnic incarceration. Clinton's C.O.P.S. (Community Oriented Policing Services) was and continues to be Orwellian Newspeak for Secret Police, harbinger of present-day Fusion Centers.

• NAFTA as Destiny - free trade sold as an economic moonshot. The PR campaign promised to create jobs; what it delivered was a hemorrhage of manufacturing and a political wound that would not heal.

III. The Half-Baked Clones (2000–2004)

Gore’s charisma chest never married with his “lockbox” brain. Kerry’s war-hero chest was joined with the brain of a Senate technocrat who notoriously stated, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

The bogeymen existed on paper but did not reside in flesh-and-blood voters. They were focus-grouped into thin air - and voters detected the scent of embalming fluid. The Supreme Court injected George W. into Gore’s PR-Campaign vacuous breech.

IV. The Masterpiece Illusion (2008–2016)

Obama was the most brilliant Frankenstein's Messiah to date: Hope & Change soul, post-racial epidermis, Silicon Valley motherboard, grassroots motor. For that momentary flash, we believed he was one of us. Then Wall Street bailouts, drone wars, and the quiet burial of the grassroots movement that put him in office stymied us in our tracks. Yes We Can became Yes, We Tried.

Obama's Black Cool Hand Luke Persona and the Drone War

Barack Obama was a virtuoso of nonviolent rhetoric in the midst of endless war. He spoke of hope and dignity, invoked Martin Luther King Jr., and sold himself as post-partisan healer. His two terms, however, resulted in escalating drone warfare - Hellfire missiles raining down from hidden skies.

He was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in the morning and had a "kill list" meeting in the afternoon.

Obama was a master at the split-screen presidency: dramatic speeches to the people, behind-the-scenes accommodations to the Pentagon. His White House approved more arms deliveries to Israel than any administration ever, continuing to keep Gaza under blockade. Every dead civilian was consumed in antiseptic "collateral damage" jargon, as if language could wash away the blood.

Obama's unyielding attitude - professorial equanimity - itself becomes a metaphor for something greater: America's wars went quiet, far away, and endless during his presidency. He sold solidity with one hand while operating the machinery of endless war with the other.

Hillary Clinton - The Over-Engineered Prototype Hype (2008–2016)

Hillary Clinton was the most vetted Democratic Party nominee in history - a Frankenstein candidate made up of résumés, résumés of résumés, and consultant white papers taped onto an inevitability frame. She possessed the credentials, the bundlers, the war chest, the think-tank appendages. What she lacked was breath.

She was constructed to be "Madam President" before the people were even consulted as to whether or not they wanted one. Slogans like "Stronger Together" that had been focus-grouped weren't rallying cries but embalming fluid. She was everything the labs had perfected - data-driven messaging, Wall Street donor circuitry, Silicon Valley PR muscle - but the critical spark was lacking in her construction.

Her tumble was not her scandal file, nor egoism on her rival's part, but the cold reality of it all. She lurches along in stuttering steps like Frankenstein's monster with wires in her neck, powerless to revive the people except as a horror-stricken compulsion. Her loss in 2016 was more Trump's charm than voters destroying the Democratic laboratory's control panel in terror.

Hillary was the failed monster who established the lab could not replicate life anymore.

V. The Monster's Monster (2016–2020)

Donald Trump is no different. He is our payback for decades of hollow politics. Every closed factory, every broken health care promise, every cultural obsession with pronouns instead of paychecks - we built this backlash ourselves.

And what did Democrats deliver? "I'm With Her." "Pokémon Go to the polls." "Malarkey." Slogans as empty as the consultants who blessed them.

VI. The Late-age Patchwork Disaster (2020–2024)

Joe Biden - The Stumbling Creature

"Scranton Joe" branch on "Credit Card Senator" body. A unifying voicebox to a tune-out crowd. He sold himself as the man who would restore the soul of the country. And citizens got potholes instead of bridges.

The Prosperity Sermon and the Bomb Bay Doors

Outside the White House for four years, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. preached at the podium, casting a benevolent priestly glow over an unruly congregation. His speeches rang with promise: a steady hand, a moral compass, and slow repair of a fractured republic.

But offstage, the other book kept things in the real world: even as he urged Americans to "heal," his administration quietly authorized billions of dollars' worth of weapons sales - Hellfire missiles, guided bombs, and JDAM kits - to Israel while Gaza was being reduced to rubble.

The contradiction is no accident: it is the new American script - read the comforting words to the public while defense contractor stocks tick up.

Prosperity, yes - but for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

Stability, yes - but won with F-16s and JDAM brute force.

The Biden legacy will not be the economic charts he championed, but the double vision of a smiling president selling stability at home and fomenting catastrophe abroad.

Kamala Harris - The Beta-Test Bust (2024)

Kamala Harris was cobbled together as the next prototype to come out of the Democratic assembly line - the Silicon Valley retake on Hillary's over-engineered prototype. She was built out of biography first: Black, South Asian, woman, West Coast, prosecutor's toughness with progressive finish. On the donor slide deck she was flawless. In the laboratory she appeared invincible. On the campaign trail she was already in trouble.

Her laugh - tight and hollow - was the unwitting soundtrack to a candidacy marketed as fate. She had the résumé, the endorsers, the fund sources, the identity portfolio blessed by DEI. She never had air, though. Not even when she was Vice President. She never was anything but a focus-grouped specter, someone who had mastered the art of smiling but not participating.

As Biden's presidency breathed its last, the gurus booted her to the forefront as the fated successor. But 2024 unveiled her as the monster who remained lifeless. Citizens did not respond to "save democracy" mantras that sounded more of Help-desk than a call to destiny. The Biden coalition that had held ground broke. Swing states broke. She lost the map and the myth.

Her campaign was history’s bitter reminder that you can craft identity boxes but not charm, you can spend billions on ads but not on trust, you can inherit a party but not inherit the people. On Election Night, the lab’s lights flashed, the wires smoldered, and the Beta-Test folded under its own programming.

Kamala Harris was the Democratic Frankenstein who died on the operating table – proof that inevitability is not equal to vitality. Harris was and is Vaporware, lines and lines of useless PR-code.

VII. The Autopsy Report

• Consultant Capture: Contenders built such PowerPoint slide presentations.

• Working-Class Abandonment: The party was the essence of the college-educated and credentialed.

• Fear of Risk: No more risk-taking platforms, only safe ones.

Hillary Clinton 2016 and Kamala Harris 2024: Campaign Messaging Misfires:

Both campaigns rooted their speeches in symbolic identity and elite-focused appeals, assuming these would energize turnout.

Branch One: Identity as a Standalone Engine

·       Empowering Women - historical firsts, glass-ceiling metaphors, personal achievement narratives.

·       Diversity & DEI - celebration of female multiculturalism, female equity initiatives, pronoun correctness, corporate-style inclusion statements.

Outcome: Fired up donors, Twitter, and activist elites, but did not materially move working-class or swing voters.

Branch Two: Culture Signaling

·       “Wokeness” culture messages - critiques of opponents’ social attitudes, campus curricula, and elitist norms.

·       Media/celebrity endorsements - assumption that high-profile backers would cascade into votes.

Outcome: Created polarized chatter but failed to generate broad enthusiasm or ballot turnout.

Branch Three: Abstract Threat Framing

·       Democracy at risk / authoritarian warnings - “vote to save the Republic” rhetoric.

Outcome: Resonated with core supporters, ignored by hesitant or economically anxious voters; lacked emotional traction in swing districts.

Branch Four: Symbolic Policy Appeals

·       Climate virtue-signaling, non-material policy points - aspirational statements without immediate, tangible voter benefit.

Outcome: Engaged issue activists, did little to shift persuadables.

Leaves: Resulting voter response

·       Enthusiasm confined to already-committed bases.

·       Swing, working-class, and low-turnout demographics remained unmoved and under-mobilized.

·       Post-mortem consensus: frothy symbolic, identity-heavy, elite-focused feminist and DEI-speeches cannot substitute for economic, material, or competence-oriented personal appeals.

VIII. Break the Laboratory

By now, most Democrats, most liberals (not Woke people, just working class environmentalists, et al) know the Democrats do not listen. They did not listen under Carter, and they are still not listening. In the midterms and in 2028, we pretty well know for certain they will listen to consultants, pollsters, PR firms and be furiously stitching together more Chimera Monster ‘candidates’ from non-issue spare-parts. This pumping lightning into losers is something Democrats have become really good at.

The proof is right in front of the American people: Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jon Ossoff, Josh Shapiro, Raphael Warnock, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis, Rahm Emanuel, Mark Kelly, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, and Jasmine Crockett.

They all have PR-Firms and Hired Pollsters. They all speak in carefully curated “speech”-snippet sound bites. They all promote non-causes in high emotion voices to fire bases and to exclude working classes. Even the men on the list espouse Trans-this and Empower-women-that sound bites – complete non-issues for actual voters. Look closely and you will see Frankenstein-stitching, Chimera-Monster Capital-“D” laced handiwork on all of them.. They are all Scorpions asking for a frog-back ride across the stream.

Obama essentially promised to save the Earth - On March 26, 2013, President Barack Obama signed H.R. 933, an appropriations bill that included a provision critics dubbed the "Monsanto Protection Act. "Formally known as the "Farmer Assurance Provision," the controversial rider limited the ability of federal courts to stop the sale or planting of genetically engineered (GMO) crops.

The task is simple: Stop creating Frankensteins. Stop worshipping the polls. Find leaders with steel spines, not left-wing propaganda, Paid PR-isms and DEI-clay feet. Stop Grooming Obamas, Clintons and Harris’s as King and Queen Potentates to rule for Corporatocracy. They all promise backbone, and they all “grant intimacy” to corporate Globalist America with bent spines.

Otherwise, we are forever the wild scientists, cringing in fear as our own monster sets fire to the village - and scratching our heads as we try to work out why the villagers are applauding the fire.

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The Monsters: the Democratic Party's Dystopian Frankenstein Candidates

Katherine Smith PhD