Wednesday, November 17, 2021

The Collapse of Kamala Harris

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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