The Kamala Harris Insurance Policy

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 27, 2023

 

Sure, Joe Biden’s reelection prospects don’t look great today. Inflation remains stubbornly high, the president’s advanced age and its attendant infirmities are a bipartisan concern, and his family’s legal woes are only getting worse, threatening to consume his administration. But things change.

 

The Federal Reserve now forecasts that its efforts to rein in inflation will not produce a recession. The southern border is still a mess, but it’s not the mess many predicted it would be after pandemic-related enforcement policies sunsetted. The Ukrainian counteroffensive in which the administration has invested both political and hard capital is producing green shoots. The violent-crime rate in some of the nation’s most besieged cities appears to be declining. Republicans need an insurance policy if the issues they are leveraging against the Biden administration in 2023 lose salience in 2024. Fortunately, they have one in the form of Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

On Thursday, the Messenger reporters Amie Parnes and Marc Caputo chronicled the response the GOP’s 2024 field has adopted to efforts by the Biden administration to elevate Harris’s profile. Harris, they write, serves as Biden’s “campaign trail attack dog,” training her fire on the party’s presidential aspirants and drawing theirs away from the president. At least, that is the traditional dynamic. But Joe Biden faces a unique predicament in the fact that the GOP’s criticisms of Harris are explicit critiques of the president’s judgment and cognitive decline.

 

“I think the American people should know if you’re voting for Biden, you know, you are effectively voting for Harris to be the president of the United States,” Ron DeSantis remarked. “I pray every night for Joe Biden’s good health,” Chris Christie concurred. “Not only because he’s our president but because of who our vice president is.” Asked if she would support Donald Trump as the GOP nominee, Nikki Haley said she would if only to avoid the prospect of a President Kamala Harris. For his part, Trump welcomed the prospect of “running against Kamala.”

 

Conventionally, the role vice presidents serve the incumbent administration on the campaign trail is two-fold. First, they make baser political arguments against their opponents that allow the president to hover at an Olympian distance above the political fray. Second, they absorb the attacks that would otherwise be directed at the president or deflect those criticisms away from the Oval Office. Harris has so far been unable to execute either imperative effectively, and that is becoming a source of anxiety among Biden’s allies. That is the impression a casual reader might take away from Marquette University professor Julia Azari’s piece for Politico, amusingly titled, “Why Kamala Harris Is a Better VP Than You Think.” The piece is an effort to retroactively condition the nation to the idea that Harris is actually good at her job.

 

The evidence marshaled in support of Azari’s proposition is thin. It rests primarily on why her accidents of birth render her an effective representative of the Democratic Party’s self-image and aid her efforts to keep the party’s coalition intact. Beyond that, the piece devotes lengthy digressions to examining past vice presidents and their conduct, which she implicitly suggests compare favorably with Harris’s.

 

But then there is this:

 

Harris fits into this model pretty clearly — she’s been given important and difficult issues to address. Like some other post-Mondale vice presidents — Al Gore for example — she’s been assigned to head up specific policy areas, like abortion and reproductive rights, voting rights and immigration, as well as some other foreign policy assignments. . . . In other words, Harris has been identified with a portfolio that’s connected to key Democratic priorities and is also consistent with the descriptive representation expected of her.

 

Azari eventually acknowledges that the portfolio with which Harris has been saddled is a Gordian knot. Either her party lacks the votes in Congress to pursue the policy remedies it wants to see, or the party has no interest in resolving the issues Harris is assigned and burdened her with the mission only so the administration couldn’t be accused of ignoring them. Some might call that treatment abuse — I certainly have.

 

“In the final analysis,” Azari concludes, Harris’s “political difficulties, and their causes, are nebulous and hard to pin down. Kind of like the vice presidency itself.” This final shrug hardly justifies the definitive conclusion retailed in Politico’s headline. Azari is correct insofar as it’s not at all uncommon for the veep to serve as an administration’s lightning rod. Harris is not, however, redirecting negative energy away from the president but toward him. In that sense, Harris’s vice presidency is, indeed, historic.