Kamala Harris is trying to project herself as a successful vice president and as someone who has never been in the White House. Her efforts are failing.
There is a political party in the Knesset named “Shinui,” which in Hebrew means, “change.” Its leader, Yair Lapid, is the head of the opposition. He appears to know nothing about the concept of a “loyal opposition” and thinks that his only job is to criticize Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu every day of the week—even during a hot war, when unity is paramount. When his party ran for the Knesset for the first time, Lapid crowed that all of his candidates had never been in the Knesset before and were thus untainted by any corruption. I mused at the time that he could use that line “never before in the Knesset” exactly once. The next time around, he would need to come up with a new gimmick.
Kamala Harris is an enigma. On the one hand, her resume looks impressive, a child of immigrants who rose from local California politics to the position of vice president of the United States. But if you put down the paper and listen to her, you wonder how she got beyond running a hotdog stand on Lombard Street. She is incoherent. She creates word salads rather than answer fairly simple questions. She will not interview with an adversarial media outlet. She has almost no political accomplishments, and many of the actions she took in California as attorney general contributed to the current state of high crime in the state. Trump should be up 60 on her.
Harris’ major effort in her softball interviews has been to try to present herself as the solution to America’s many problems. Polls show that most Americans feel that America is going the wrong way, that its best days are behind her and/or their children will not have as good of a life as the one they enjoyed. Harris has offered few substantive policy ideas to address the concerns of worried citizens, and some of them she pilfered directly from Donald Trump. While Harris tries to present herself as the outside solution to Washington’s failures, Joe Biden is tying his VP to his hip.
Joe Biden is many things, mostly unprintable, but one thing he demands is loyalty. He is the one who declared that Kamala Harris would replace him as the head of the Democratic ticket. This was a big favor as the Obamas and others had their eyes on different candidates. Biden has no doubt been burned by Harris’ claim that things are bad (her VP selection, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, helpfully stated that the US could not endure another four years as they just had—under Biden and Harris). He on several occasions has pointed out that Harris was on board with everything they did and that she was a key player on the Biden team. When The View offered her the golden opportunity to say what she would have done differently than Joe Biden, Harris amazingly said that nothing came to mind. So on the one hand, she claims that things are bad and in need of urgent redress. But when given the opportunity to point out how she would do things better, she simply crawled back inside herself and toed the Biden line. Biden has of late put on a MAGA hat and more recently praised Governor Ron DeSantis, whom Harris had attacked as having failed during the two big hurricanes that have come to Florida.
As Harris herself has now said that she is fine with all that the Biden-Harris administration has done, then there is no doubt that Harris is not a solution, but rather a source of the problems facing Americans today. For example:
*She was the border czar who oversaw the importation of millions of illegal aliens. Even during Covid, while Americans were losing jobs for not getting vaccinated, illegal aliens from countries throughout the world poured over the border with zero concern for their health status.
*She was the one who cast the tie-breaking vote on the massive spending bill that created little but was a major driver for inflation that has brought food and gas prices up in reality by about 50 percent. One used to buy steaks under Trump. Now one hopes that there is enough money left in the bank to buy some eggs.
*She was “the last person in the room” as the US left Afghanistan in a helter-skelter departure, with people hanging onto departing plane wheels and 13 U.S. service members killed by a suicide bomber that had penetrated the outer airport perimeter. Billions in useful military equipment was left behind, and many hold that Putin and Hamas moved only after they witnessed the complete ineptitude of the current administration in their departure from Kabul.
*She has vociferously supported the trans and DEI agendas that have devastated universities and businesses. Women face the awful prospect of losing to their brother’s best friend who thinks he’s female. Years of training down the tube as a guy takes the hardware. University acceptance and tenure are driven by race and other factors that have no relationship to performance or meritocracy. Major companies are having serious problems as they promote individuals for the wrong reasons. Boeing is a major pusher for DEI; almost a week does not go by without a mishap with one of its planes.
While Covid did major damage during both the Trump and Biden administrations, it is the latter that has presided over the lawlessness, invasion, inflation, and foreign policy failures of the past four years. Due to Harris’ proximity to Joe Biden and her need for his voters, she cannot repudiate the policies that have done so much harm to the US. As Donald Trump asked her during their sole debate, why doesn’t she wake up Joe Biden and have him implement all of the policy ideas she claims to have? She cannot answer that question.
Someone like Gavin Newsom could have attacked Biden’s policies and nobody could claim that he is part of their enforcement. The Democrats dumped a dysfunctional presidential candidate and replaced him with an incompetent presidential candidate. Kamala Harris cannot rid herself of the failures of her tenure as vice president, and she cannot offer solutions without explaining why she does not put them into place today. Her interviews are generally awful and her word salads leave interviewers and audiences bewildered.
It seems the wheels are coming off of the Harris-Walz ticket. Interviews and debates do not go well, and people are tying their problems to Harris and not to Trump. Let’s hope that this is the beginning of the end for the Biden-Harris program.