Much in the manner of the most famous modern crash-and-burn campaigns – George McGovern in 1972 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 – the signs are there that voters are starting to ask about Kamala Harris the political “toast” or “doom” question from which no presidential campaign can recover: “If she can’t even run a campaign, how can she run the country?”

The steady pattern since early September of questionable decisions, sudden turnabouts and self-induced controversies that have plagued the Harris campaign reached last week exactly the sort of crescendo seen at a similar point in the McGovern and Dukakis efforts: A stream of negative headlines from continuing revelations about the past record of the candidate and her running mate, attempts at clever tactical moves that become strategic debacles, the release of TV ads or videos that anyone outside the campaign finds incomprehensible or even mildly ridiculous, public appearances by the candidate and the campaign’s most prominent surrogates that draw backlash and worsen the problem they are supposed to fix, growing complaints by party professionals and operatives about campaign oversight or ineptitude, down-ballot candidates out abandoning the national ticket, and a campaign structure struggling to process  disturbing developments or disappointing news but even when it does coming up with solutions that seem more improvised exercises in self-therapy than effective political fixes.

This sort of thing has been seen before and with serious consequences. Here is the history:

Like Harris, McGovern had an embarrassing vice presidential pick in Thomas Eagleton (he was eventually forced to ask Eagleton to withdraw after pledging to back him “1,000 percent”) and then got attacked over and over on his far-left record while his reckless changes on policy positions made him subject to devastating Nixon  attack ad depicting the South Dakota senator as a political weathervane. So too, Dukakis had his share of recurring problems and self-inflicted wounds driven by a staff that had no strategy to counter charges that he was hopelessly liberal and then showed itself capable onlyof  trying to fix that problem with hard-to-understand tv spots as well as mystifying media events that included the infamous and rather comic moment when  in answer to criticisms of his national security bona fides he appeared riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting tank commander’s helmet.