By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
Last week, a poll by Suffolk University revealed
that just 28 percent of American voters approve of the job Vice President
Harris is doing. That result is shocking . . . ly high.
That America’s voters disdain Harris as much as they
obviously do gives me an extraordinary amount of hope for our future. In
December of 2019, I celebrated Harris’s departure from the presidential
primary with a “good riddance” that turned out to be woefully premature: “May
Harris’s failed attempt,” I hoped, serve to “destroy her career and sully her
reputation for all time.” Alas, the first part did not happen; on the contrary,
Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the most potent office in
the land. But the second part? Well, I got that in abundance. We are now ten
months into this baleful presidency, and already Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history. And they say
Christmas doesn’t come early!
Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as
unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets
the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because
she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked
because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of
high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for
not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth,
there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a
talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than
they were before she arrived.
At CNN this week, Donna Brazile suggested that the White House should keep “the vice
president on the road almost constantly” — which sounded like an eminently
pragmatic way of ensuring that Harris remains safely out of the way until I
realized that Brazile was envisioning Harris using those trips to talk to
American voters. Harris, Brazile added, “is a wonderful messenger.” But is
she? Really? Think back over Harris’s entire career. Can you find
a single utterance of hers that has so much as approached being
compelling or worthwhile? I doubt it. Harris is not interesting, she’s not
substantive, she’s not provocative, or innovative, or wry. She’s not funny.
She’s not amiable. She’s not accomplished or persuasive or adroit. She’s a
heedless, cowardly, cackling cipher — an insipid, itinerant woolgatherer, whose
first instinct in any situation is to resort to farcical platitudes or to suggest wanly that we should all have a “conversation
about that.” Were she to be cast in a kids’ movie, it would not be as the hero,
but as the ghastly mid-level bureaucrat who sends the hero’s dog to the pound
halfway through the second act. All in all, there is no reason for anyone to be
shocked by Harris’s failure, because there was no reason to anticipate that
she’d end up as anything else. Presidential campaigns start off as vanity
exercises in which overpaid marketing teams present their candidate as their
candidate wishes ideally to be seen. When Harris was such a candidate, she
gained 3 percent support in the polls. What, exactly, did her team think was
going to happen when she was forced into the real world?
And what did Joe Biden think? Whatever it was, the gamble
clearly did not come off. Were Biden more popular — and more alive — the
disesteem in which his vice president is held might serve as a mere
inconvenience. “Ah well,” he might think, “at least she’s not a threat.”
But Joe Biden is not popular — and he’s not obviously alive, either — which
makes his having chosen such a dud of an heir apparent a “big f***ing deal.” Absent a Nixon-Agnew-style
cataclysm, the next cast of Democratic primary voters is going to have to
choose one of three excruciating courses for 2024: (1) ask an 82-year-old Joe
Biden to run for the White House again; (2) ask Kamala Harris to step in and
take the reins; or (3) rip the party apart with a vigorously contested primary
that, given the long lead-times that mark American politics, would last in one
form or another for the lion’s share of Joe Biden’s post-midterm presidency.
You hate to see it.
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