By Noah Rothman
Friday, March 24, 2023
Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt is always a must-read,
but this morning’s Jolt on Joe Biden’s increasing
frustration with his running mate ahead of their 2024 reelection race is
especially worthwhile.
The Reuters dispatch that prompted Jim’s piece paints a
portrait of President Biden peering down from Olympian heights upon the rabble
that make up the Democratic leadership class and despairing. He alone can meet
the challenges posed by the opposition and hold the party’s unwieldy coalition
together at the same time. Although the White House sources who spoke with
Reuters concede that Vice President Kamala Harris meets the baseline
constitutional requirements to serve in her role, they deem her especially
unequal to those challenges. And the report is rendered even more excruciating
by its unpersuasive efforts to drum up some voices of support for Harris.
One of Harris’s backers, who registered her confidence in
the vice president anonymously, resorted to extortion. “You cannot replace your
first Black woman vice president and think that Black people and women are
going to just vote for you,” said the “former White House official.” “He needs
her.”
Does he really, though? The black Democratic
primary vote as progressives imagine it has not matched up with the reality of
the black vote as Joe Biden appealed to it and, ultimately, captured it. During
the 2020 primaries, the candidates to Biden’s left — including Harris herself —
tried repeatedly to embroil him in racial controversy. All their attempts
failed.
Candidates such as Elizabeth Warren advocated
“race-conscious laws” that would tilt the scales of justice to favor equitable
outcomes over just outcomes. We don’t know what Warren meant by that precisely —
I doubt she knows what she meant. But if we treat the phrase as a stand-in for
affirmative-action policies, there’s little indication that black voters find
them attractive.
In 2016, when the Supreme Court determined that colleges
could continue to consider race as a factor in admissions, Gallup found that just 35 percent of non-Hispanic
black adults approved of the ruling. That attitude hasn’t changed in the intervening years. The Pew Research Center later asked how respondents felt
about “companies and organizations” factoring race into their “decisions about
hiring and promotion,” and 54 percent of African-Americans said they were
hostile to the idea.
Likewise, candidates from Senator Cory Booker to Deval Patrick to, yes, Kamala Harris tried
to get to Biden’s left on a range of other racial issues, from the virtue of
1970s-era school-busing experiments to reparations for slavery. None of them
succeeded, in part because the priorities of progressive voters did not align
with those of the average black voter. Joe Biden arguably owes his nomination —
and, therefore, the presidency — to the women and African-American primary voters who saved his
candidacy.
Harris dropped out of the race before she won a single
vote in any state, so the proposition that she alone can capture the female and
black votes is unfalsifiable. But it’s unlikely that Harris’s campaign would
have flamed out as early as it did if the cloying assertion from Harris’s
allies that she represents the key to unlocking the support of those core
Democratic constituencies were true.
Another of Harris’s backers who had the courage to
identify herself, veteran Democratic campaign staffer Lis Smith, believes the
2024 campaign “could be her moment to shine” because she “is at her best when
she gets back to her prosecutorial roots and when she can really make a case.”
This, too, presupposes that Harris has not already had opportunities to “shine”
by reprising her role as a seasoned litigator. But she has already
had such opportunities, and she’s failed to seize them.
Few former prosecutors have shown less capacity for
follow-through when they issue extraordinary allegations. And it’s not like
Harris hasn’t had ample opportunity to showcase her alleged prosecutorial
talents. Recall just a handful of the many contrived viral moments that the media
touted as Harris’s star turns, and you’ll see what I mean.
During Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s
confirmation hearings, the then-senator Harris quizzed Kavanaugh leadingly
about what sounded like a particularly sordid meeting he’d taken with “President
Trump’s personal lawyer.” Harris made no concrete allegations about the
meeting, but the loaded insinuations had progressive commentators’ mouths
watering.
Harris’s “background as a seasoned prosecutor was on full
display,” insisted Filipa Ioannou in SFGATE. She was anointed the leader of a
“Democratic revolt.” It was the moment when, according to
one Ohio-based Democratic organizer, voters began to “talk about what a badass she is.” But
the cliffhanger was never resolved. Harris produced no evidence of any meeting
and never elaborated on what she believed was discussed. She declined even to
speculate about the matter further. The supposedly career-making moment went
nowhere.
When Harris launched her presidential campaign, she sat
down with CNN’s Jake Tapper and told him that we should just “eliminate all
that” when asked about her Medicare-for-all plan. By “all that,” she meant the
entire private health-insurance industry. The scandal her remarks ignited
engulfed her candidacy, and she subsequently abandoned her position and became
more “open to the more moderate health-reform plans, which would preserve the
industry,” according to the flaccid on-background comments an unnamed campaign
advisor sheepishly provided CNN.
Then there was Harris’s attack on then-candidate Biden
for being a little too cozy with the segregationist Democrats with whom he’d
worked as a young senator. Again, Harris never fleshed out precisely what it
was she was alleging. Was Biden himself racist? Was he simply willing to
overlook racism in his party’s caucus to climb the political ladder? She
evinced none of the courage of her own convictions we might expect from such a
charge, going only so far as to say that Biden’s record “was
hurtful to me.”
Even the viral moment that likely catapulted her into the
vice presidency — her defense of busing, which Biden supposedly opposed because
of his segregationist associations — went nowhere. “That little girl was me,”
she said to the audience’s applause after telling the story of a California
girl who was bused into an integrated school.
We might assume that the point of this story was to
endorse the re-implementation of busing programs, but Harris did not go that
far. Why? Maybe because busing failed on its own merits. It had no reparative effect on
race relations — indeed, it became a new point of racial tension — and it
was unpopular with the very constituencies to whom Harris
was trying to ingratiate herself. A competent prosecutor might have known as
much and not bothered with this doomed crusade in the first place.
Perhaps these arguments are the best that Harris’s allies
can do, but that says more about her than about them. Their endorsements only
prove that Joe Biden’s supporters are right to worry about the burden with whom
they’ve saddled themselves.
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