As part of an effort at damage control, one week out from his disastrous debate performance against President Trump in Atlanta, President Joe Biden sat for an interview on July 4 with Philadelphia radio station WURD, which bills itself as “the only African-American owned and operated talk radio station in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
In the interview, Biden predictably sought to stem his post-debate freefall in the polls by touting his record on race-based identity hiring, and, incredibly on this friendly turf with the questions teed-up ahead of time by Biden’s handlers, he still botched his lines about his full embrace of DEI principles that favor color over qualifications.
Attempting his familiar boast about being the first leader to serve alongside both a black president and a black vice president, Biden laid yet another verbal egg, telling listeners, “I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman, to serve with a black president.”
Before Biden’s 90-minute debate implosion last week in front of 50 million viewers rendered her comments plainly risible, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre – a celebrated DEI hire herself – insisted that such on-tape gaffes, as well as recent videos of the President wandering off camera at the G7 summit and being guided off stage by President Obama at a Hollywood fundraiser, were in fact “misinformation,” “deep fakes” and “cheap fakes,” in which “the Republican Party [was] really manipulating what was being said.”
As Democrat leaders and donors press Biden to step down from the top of the party’s ticket in November, many are turning to Vice President Harris as the inevitable choice to replace him in that role. If Democrats end up in fact giving Biden the heave-ho and replacing him with Harris, they face just as big of a problem as Biden’s clear lack of mental fitness for the job – defending both Harris’s selection as his running mate in 2020, and her wanting record since taking office. In Karine Jean-Pierre’s parlance, Harris could arguably stand as the country’s first “Veep-fake” to hold the number-two elected position in the federal government.
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In choosing his running mate in 2020, Biden genuflected predictably, proudly, and publicly at his party’s altar of DEI identity politics. In a March debate before securing the Democrat nomination, Biden sought to bolster his position in the race by announcing flat-out he would pick a woman to be his vice president. “If I’m elected president, my Cabinet, my administration will look like the country, and I commit that I will appoint a, pick a woman to be vice president,” he said.
Once he became the nominee, Biden caved to pressure from over 200 black women activists in his party, including the Black Voters Matter Fund, who that spring demanded he picks not just a woman, but a black woman as his number-two. Their entreaty was bolstered by polling in June that showed 46% of Democrats said it was “important” to pick “a woman of color” as vice president, in the wake of the BLM/Defund the Police riots following the death of George Floyd.
True to the merit-free canons of DEI hiring, Biden selected Harris as his running mate in August to check that identity box, despite her rock-bottom performance in the Democrat primary, where she pulled out of the race two months before the Iowa caucuses, standing in sixth place with 3% in the polls.
Biden picked Harris six weeks after she encouraged contributions to a fund involved in bailing out jailed BLM rioters in Minnesota for participating in unrest that caused two deaths, and over $350 million in damages to 1,300 properties, close to 100 of which were burned to the ground, largely in black-owned neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. Weeks after that, Harris encouraged participants in the deadly and destructive protests to continue to Election Day, telling CBS’s Stephen Colbert, “They’re not going to let up and they should not and we should not.”
As Biden considered throwing his hat into the ring for the Democrat nomination in the spring of 2019, Harris said publicly she believed several women who accused Biden of unwanted touching. In a debate two months later, Harris excoriated Biden on his record supporting segregationist senators in the 1970s, and “working with them to oppose [racial school] busing,” a federally mandated practice from which she claimed to have benefited personally as a second grader.
Since assuming office in January 2021, Harris’s record as vice president has delivered meager results and her string of embarrassing gaffes. Early in his term, Biden tasked Harris with handling the border crisis, and in a matter of months she was called out by NBC’s Lester Holt for refusing to visit the border.
In the three years since that interview, Harris has presided over the biggest collapse in border security in the nation’s history, with over 10 million illegal immigrants, including hundreds on the terror watch list, flowing into the country on her watch.
Biden also gave Harris responsibility for Democrats’ push to resist reforms in dozens of states aimed at improving election integrity, including expanding voter-ID laws and limiting fraud through greater safeguards around absentee balloting and early voting. Despite Harris’s all-out campaign with activists and lawmakers for legislation that would provide a federal check on these state reform efforts, her maneuvers were blocked by a Republican Senate filibuster one year to the day since she assumed office.
Harris’s cringeworthy moments during her tenure are too many to mention. From her awkward laughing at inappropriate times, including cackling at a 2022 news conference with the Polish prime minister, to her staged pedantry with child actors in a video on space exploration filmed at the Vice President’s residence as Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021. She offers a highlight reel of confusion and humiliation not far from her boss’s own regular public miscues.
No wonder working for Harris has become one of the least popular jobs in Washington, with her turnstile office suffering from high turnover and low morale. Summarizing the downbeat Harris office vibe in a book published earlier this year, two leading chroniclers of Democrat politics wrote that “Harris…aides describe[ed] a toxic climate riven with factionalism and mismanagement…They refused to characterize the experience of working for Harris, apart from offering a three-word assessment. It was, they said: ‘Game of Thrones.’”
Most recently, after the debate debacle, Harris is having to defend her long record of covering up Biden’s mental collapse over the last four years, so much so that she faces calls for impeachment over her regular statements insisting her boss was on top of his game. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said Wednesday, “Kamala Harris should be impeached for lying to America about the state of President Biden’s mental capacity to carry out the powers and duties of the office — and shirking her unique constitutional obligation to take the necessary steps to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
Without a doubt, Harris’s wanting performance as a candidate, her DEI-fueled selection to her current job, her dismal performance in office, and her nonstop lying to the American people about Biden’s mental condition should give anyone pause who is sizing her up for a promotion. Indeed, as Democrat leaders and donors look for a swift and credible off-ramp in the wake of Biden’s political collapse after last week’s debate, a real examination of his number-two’s record suggests it’s harder than many of them think to make the case for Harris as a certain trumpet for their Party going into November.
Mr. Ullyot is a former Deputy Assistant to President Trump, and author of the forthcoming book “The Biden Betrayal: Weak and Woke on the World Stage.”
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