Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from becoming the first woman president, the first Asian president, the first woman-of-color president. Big wins all around, right? So why are the Democrats so nervous? They appear to be on the verge of calling in the Henry Wallace treatment and dumping Harris before Joe Biden runs for president again, this time with the election weeks before his 82nd birthday, in 2024.
“People think she’s f***ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent,” one Democratic operative told Axios. White House aides use earthy language like “sh**show” to describe Harris’s “poorly managed” office. It’s “an abusive environment,” a staffer “with direct knowledge” told Politico, adding, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like sh**.”
What if Biden should decline to run for reelection as an octogenarian? Harris, as his lady in waiting, would almost have to be the party’s designated successor because she is black and female. To replace her, according to the party’s prevailing thought codes and its media enablers, would be racist and sexist. Yet the prospect of riding into battle behind Kamala Harris’s generalship has every Dem in D.C. reaching for the Maalox, if not the Ativan or maybe the hemlock.
Dems including “many current senior administration figures,” says Axios, do not think she could beat any potential foe, from Lord Voldemort to Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Donald Trump. If the options facing the American voter on a future ballot turn out to be “Kamala Harris” and “Literally Anyone Else,” Harris is going to be not just an underdog but a longshot.
She’s a lady whose trademark gambit—the deranged cackle, which she Jokerishly emits anytime she can’t answer a question—makes Hillary Clinton seem as lovable as a litter of golden-retriever puppies.
Unlike Hillary, Harris does not make people feel sorry for her for having been ritually humiliated in her marriage to an intern-abusing lech. Unlike Hillary, Harris doesn’t make people think “She earned it” or “She paid her dues.”
The voters understand that Harris is in the position she currently occupies for a completely unearned reason. She is a woman of color, Biden promised Dem primary voters he’d run with a woman, then a woman of color, and this wild-eyed, tone-deaf, unbelievably toxic and yet somehow colorless candidate was the best he could grab from a very limited menu of offerings.
The Biden administration seems at a loss about what to do with Harris. Everything she touches crumbles to dust. When Biden made her “border czar” in March and COVID-infected illegal immigrants began flooding into the country, she laughed and informed interviewers that she was in no hurry to go down and see things for herself.
When Lester Holt of NBC pressed her on the question of why she hadn’t gone to the border, she famously replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t—I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” Laughing dismissively, responding with a non sequitur, and then confessing she doesn’t understand the rudiments of politics (even the easiest rules, such as the one about appearing to take problems seriously while photographers snap away).
She didn’t even bother with a perfunctory toe-touch in El Paso until June, and the crisis continues to boil over. Several high-level Biden-administration officials, including the attorney general, the secretary of state, and the head of DHS, attended a border-security meeting in Mexico City on October 8; Harris spent the day posing for photos at a day-care center in New Jersey.
Team Kamala thinks Biden doesn’t want competition from his No. 2. So Joe Biden is setting her up to fail? If so, that would appear to be Biden’s one unambiguous success.
This section is courtesy of the Kyle Smith National Review October 2021 article titled “Cackling Kamala”.