Kamala Harris: the Play within the Play?

Jean Hagen and Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain

My favorite musical is Singin' in the Rain, largely because of its famous song-and-dance numbers. The simple romantic plot occurs against the backdrop of the transition from silent to talking pictures, and the cartoonish villain is Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont, who forces ingenue Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) to dub over Lina's high-pitched screech so that Lina can keep her leading-lady status.

Amherst professor Hadley Arkes likens Kamala Harris to Lina Lamont: [bold added]

Movie buffs often look for a film that catches the political moment. Before Joe Biden dropped out, it might have been “The Last Hurrah” (1958). Now it’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), a picture about the emergence of the “talkies” in the mid-1920s, when sound was added to films.

The shock came when glamorous figures suddenly had to speak and, in some cases, their voices and accents made the audience cringe. The captivating siren, threatened with exposure in “Singin’ in the Rain,” is the invincible, unteachable Lina Lamont. In the movie, Lina is played by the veteran Jean Hagen, but the turnabout comes in our own politics, where she is played by Kamala Harris.

Or rather, Ms. Harris is now our Lina Lamont, who must be carefully guarded by her handlers and barred from speaking, for her own good (and that of the Democratic Party). That her managers have kept her shielded and confined to scripted performances confirms their own judgment that she simply isn’t up to it.

In “Singin’ in the Rain,” Lina’s songs are dubbed while she lip-synchs. Ms. Harris can make the sounds; the point of resemblance is that the words aren’t hers. So it was, one might say, for all presidents between Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama. Calvin Coolidge used to plead that he had to decline so many invitations to speak because he didn’t have the time to do the research. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speechwriter Sam Rosenman knew the style and sensibility of the patrician figure for whom he was trying to write. With Ms. Harris, there is no fixed persona or style, confirmed in writing and speech. She is something for her writers to invent.

In real life Jean Hagen was an excellent actress who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Singin'.

It would be an ironic life-imitates-art twist against Prof. Harkes' thesis if Kamala Harris were a Jean Hagen who performs well in unscripted moments, and that her "drunken Kamala" and "word salad Kamala" videos were all her being captured in a weak moment or even an act (is she really that Machievallian?).