Vice President Kamala Harris didn't have a very good Thursday. I was waiting for Hurricane Helene to kick my kiester all over the state of Georgia and I still had a better day than she did.
One of the "highlights" for Harris was President Joe Biden's appearance on "The View," where he talked about how Harris had been knee-deep in decisions on both foreign and domestic policy.
There's just one problem with that. The Biden administration's domestic and foreign policy has been an absolute disaster.
As Harris campaigns, she's been saddled with one question that she simply ignores: What stopped you from doing all this in the last three and a half years?
Biden's comments on "The View" only made that question more salient. If she was so involved, what stopped her from addressing literally anything she says she can fix if elected?
What this means is that Kamala Harris has really one option to escape from, well... *gestures at everything*
She needs to throw Biden under the bus.
Vice presidents don't really have the authority to roll out their own agenda. Her best hope in shielding herself from criticism for what she hasn't done would be to say that Biden is a senile, old man who doesn't know what pants are most of the time so he's wrong to say she was involved in policy discussion. Harris needs to argue that she wasn't allowed to address any of the concerns of Americans with any of the things she's absolutely sure would fix the problems.
Would that win her the election?
Probably not. Not in and of itself, anyway. She'd also have to make a lot of sense in her own right, something she's shown she's pathologically incapable of doing, but at least then she might have a shot.
And really, what's the downside? Anyone who loves Biden enough to get furious is still going to vote for her because they're terrified of a Trump presidency all over again. The people on the right aren't going to buy it, but they're not going to vote for her anyway. The only people it might impact are the people Harris would need to win over.
Sure, that'll make it harder to try and leverage incumbency to any degree while also pretending to be a Washington outsider, but that's not working for her anyway.
I just don't think she'll do it.
See, Kamala Harris doesn't think about anyone but her fellow leftists. If she did, she wouldn't have picked someone like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as a running mate. She'd have gone for someone more appealing to the center, giving those folks someone to vote for. Instead, she went with Walz, a man she had to know had some baggage from his much-touted military time to say nothing of his time as governor.
Harris needs someone to talk her into it, but if the people surrounding her couldn't talk her out of Walz, I don't think they'd talk her into dumping Biden.
So, while I think Harris throwing Biden under the bus is the right play, I don't think she will ever consider it. It's not loyalty to Biden so much as she's incapable of thinking beyond her progressive bubble.