President Kamala would be the free world’s worst nightmare
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“We are so fortunate to have a real leader, a true friend, and a historic Vice President in Kamala Harris,” said Joe Biden last week. “We couldn’t do this without you, Kamala.”
“I am ready to serve,” Harris also told the Wall Street Journal. “There’s no question about that.”
It’s not hard to decipher what’s happening. After another terrible few days in which the increasingly geriatric Biden proved yet again that he is unable to lead, the White House is recalibrating its re-election message.
The plan is to keep pushing the line that Biden is, despite all appearances, mentally and physically fit – while reassuring Americans that, should the 81-year-old president have to move aside, Harris is his willing and highly able substitute.
The problem is that the public believe the second lie even less than they do the first. Everybody knows that, while Biden may be unfit to hold the highest office in the land, Harris is an even bigger disaster-in-waiting.
No matter how badly Biden is doing; ever since 2021, Harris has polled worse. As one Republican strategist puts it, “She’s the one politician in America who essentially can make Joe Biden look even semi-competent.”
The President still has moments of lucidity and wit; his younger veep does not. Harris talks in rotten world salads that make everybody feel queasy. She insists that anybody who has seen her doing her job “walks away fully aware of my capacity to lead”. Well, the first part is true: people who work with Kamala Harris walk away – her staff turn-over is very high. Harris has a reputation for being impossible – thin-skinned, grandiose and slow to grasp the point.
If you want an idea of Harris’s “capacity to lead”, look at the crisis at the US border. Early on in his administration, Biden gave her the task of handling America’s growing illegal immigration problem. Harris appeared to resent being given such a difficult issue, and therefore largely ignored it.
After a reporter pointed that, as “the border czar”, she had not in fact visited the border, she replied: “And I haven’t been to Europe!” She finally did visit Texas, after a trip to Guatemala in which she made an incoherent appeal for migrants to remain in their countries, only to then attack border patrol agents for mistreating migrants. In December, illegal border crossings from Mexico reached monthly record highs, the Democrats are scrambling to fix a major political problem in an election year, and Harris has moved on to a less taxing brief: talking about the threat Donald Trump poses to legal abortions.
Harris is only comfortable talking about identity politics. She has throughout her career weaponised her position as a minority woman and played the race and sex cards whenever challenged.
During Covid, she berated the inherent racism of a healthcare system that neglects black people. During the Black Lives Matter riots, she was criticised for praising the “movement” as “essential” and “brilliant”, and tweeted a link to a controversial bail fund for arrested protestors.
Americans are increasingly fed up of the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion agenda that Harris represents. But the Democrats are stuck with Harris – it would seem in large part because, having made her Vice President largely for the “historic” reason that she is the first woman of colour to hold the office, removing her now would invite accusations of racism.
Yet there’s no getting around the fact that Biden, if re-elected, looks very unlikely to make it through a second term. That means Harris, by default rather than victory, could well be the first woman to break through the so-called “glass ceiling” that blocked Hillary Clinton.
There’s desperate chatter about Michelle Obama being drafted in to replace Biden-Harris before the Democratic National Convention in August. But the Obamas have given no indication that they are willing to do that. So the Democrats are back to trying to rehabilitate Kamala’s image, something they have been trying and failing to do for almost four years.
In 2019, as part of her failed presidential campaign, Harris’s then team came up with the slogan: “Because you’ve waited long enough for a good night’s sleep”. Americans did not vote for her then, but four years later the whole country – and much of the West – is waking up to the nightmare that she could very well be their next Commander-in-Chief.
