Harris Announces Running Mate
from a field of strong contenders, VP Kamala Harris has chosen her running mate: a ball of pastry dough.
After the last of President Joseph Biden’s liver bile calcified into sediment, triggering an abstruse clause in the Constitution disqualifying him from the presidency, and Kamala Harris announced her candidacy, the question has been: will she choose a running mate?
The answer to that has been, “hopefully yes, as the president, she’ll have to make even tougher decisions than that, so hopefully she can make up her mind about a running mate.”
The next question has been: “whom will she choose — or is it who?”
It’s whom. And the whom she is picking out of an array of exciting options—Ben Shapiro’s cousin; a man who owns more Carl’s Jrs than anyone else on planet Earth; a billiard ball that’s been in space; Pete Buttigieg; and a fresh package of catnip—is a ball of pastry dough.
“We don’t know what kind of pastry dough it will turn out to be,” political analyst Chouj Cherouex told me when we corresponded via carrier pigeon late last night. “It could be choux pastry, shortbread, or that flaky stuff they use in croissants. But because we don’t know, it’s hard to have an opinion on it.”
And that seems to be precisely Harris’s strategy.
Voters’ Two Cents
“I don’t have any strong feelings,” one voter in Long Beach told me this morning. “The vice president could be a wad of chewing gum and I’d still vote for Kamala [Harris].”
“It seems fine,” another said. “As long as it never molested any children and doesn’t say much, I don’t really care. Honestly, even if it had, I’m still voting for her.”
“I don’t give a damn if her running mate is Neil Armstrong,” said a third voter, wearing a CLOSE THE BORDERS t-shirt stained with mustard. “I’ll be voting for Donald Trump so I can get my anthracite coal mine back from the federal government. It collapsed in 2008, killing fifty-two Mexicans I hired them to save on operating costs. But Trump says he’s gonna let me reopen the mine. Now I just need a pool pump to get all the water outta there.”
I asked this voter if he would consider voting for Harris if she had selected Donald Trump as her running mate. His nose started to bleed. I had to perform CPR.
Humble Origins
The ball of pastry dough has its humble origins in an Annie’s Pretzels factory in Duluth, Minnesota. It was differentiated from its family because the bakers saw, “innocuous charisma.”
It then got a job teaching and coaching in the Minneapolis public school system. As demonstrated by the title of an NBC News investigation into the VP candidate’s career, “the Ball of Pastry’s former students and players remember it as a teacher and a coach,” he had a perfectly average, inoffensive, unremarkable tenure. It was remembered, “as a teacher,” and “as a coach.”
“Harris really couldn’t have picked anyone better,” Cherouex said. “I can’t even remember if the ball of pastry has a name. Or what it has done. Has it ever spoken in its life? Has it ever bothered anyone, ever?”
“It doesn’t matter at all to me,” one final voter said to me at the end of a long, strange canvass of Long Beach California, “I decided years ago who I’m voting for.”