California presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris has been campaigning in Iowa and apparently been telling the local poli-sci majors to "learn to code."

Here's a tweet of a tweet. There is no news item because, apparently, Harris has slipped so far in the polls that even her adoring press is not covering her:

does... does Kamala know how to code? https://t.co/jhGbiiiALq — i’m the rice president (@rice_prez) October 9, 2019

The scene is a beauty parlor, so it may well be that she told one of its Millennial denizens upset at her low-skill job after graduating from college with a useless major to learn code if she wants a better-paying job.

The problem, of course, is that it's a dismissive sort of advice to throw out to someone who might just be unsuited to learning code and, in any case, clearly had dreams of doing something else.

It also suggests she's opaque to the backstory of just how insulting it is to all sides to be told to "learn to code."

The backstory is this: reporters used to tell laid off coal-miners and other brawny hardhats upset at their layoffs during the Obama jobs recession to buck up to go "learn code" to restore their incomes.

It was a panacea...

When reporters started getting laid off and complaining about it in the years that followed, the Twitterati remembered the glib advice and threw it right back at them with glee: learn to code.

It was comical and ironic, because learning code, just starting with the basics such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript, never mind the more advanced languages, is quite difficult and takes intense precision, practice, and discipline.

For English, poli-sci, and liberal arts majors, who would be most likely to turn up in a field like journalism, it's even harder, which is why among those who really knew how to code, it was an inside joke. The people commanding the laid off reporters to learn code knew very well that these people would run screaming in terror once they got a whiff themselves of what they had advised the coal-miners to do.

Plus, why would a useless major in poli-sci be somehow a great addition to the coding field? Real coders weren't exactly enthusiastic.

Things got so bad that Jack, who runs Twitter, started banning those who mocked reporters with supercilious commands to learn code.

And now here we are: Kamala Harris is telling the beauty parlor denizens to...learn to code. Twitchy has some choice tweets curated to show how that went down. And there's more here from actual coders (developers) who know that most of these unwilling denizens aren't going to make it in coding.

This is just as supercilious and insulting as Twitterati archly telling reporters to learn to code, because in Harris's case, it's a glib way of excusing herself from answering any questions about how she'd create a good economy, something President Trump has done a spectacular job on. If you had just learned to code, you wouldn't have this lousy job, she seems to be saying. Don't ask me to create an economy with jobs for everyone, because I have no idea.

Which she doesn't. And all of that goes to show just how unsuited she is to the presidency.

Soon enough, Harris will be out of the race, and then the chain can continue: look forward to Harris being told to code when she's out on her ear.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot.