Despite the current criticism, a nomination will need to be won and barring the emergence of someone truly new and interesting, the Vice President will have massive name recognition, a fundraising network, and diversity credit which might well be enough to power her through a crowded field.
It didn’t take a political genius to predict Vice President Kamala Harris would crash and burn despite the joy and vibes pumped out by the mainstream media following her sudden coronation after President Joe Biden left the race last year. Anyone who’d even casually followed her, understood her to be one of those politicians whose high opinion of herself and regard in the media simply didn’t match her actual performance, far from it. In her entire career, she has only one state wide office in deep blue California, where anyone with a (D) next to their names regardless of whether they’re living or dead will outperform a reincarnated Abraham Lincoln. The one time she attempted to face voters in a national election before last year, she didn’t even make it to the actual facing of the voter’s part of the process, dropping out of the 2020 primary in 2019, two months before the first votes were cast despite being heralded as a top tier candidate. Given such a poor performance, it is likely she would have fallen into obscurity in the Senate, never to rise again without having some major moment to redefine herself, except then-candidate Joe Biden had promised to pick a female running mate and viewed her minority status as another asset. While assuming the Vice Presidency after he won in 2020, launched her on the national stage, she was widely considered out of her depth by Democrats and Republicans alike, having few if any accomplishments to speak of, a penchant for delivering incredibly sophomoric commentary on major issues, and was frequently sidelined by the Biden Administration, quickly considered a detriment rather than an asset. Of course, this all changed once President Biden withdrew from the race and they needed someone with the name recognition and pre-existing organization to take on President Trump. Despite these concerns and more, progressives – many of whom were arguing that Biden should stay in the race a day earlier – suddenly transformed themselves into trained seals and began clapping on demand for Vice President Harris, ascribing qualities to her that she manifestly never possessed in the past.
If the response to her recently released campaign memoir, 107 Days, and accompanying book tour is any indication, this phase of her political career is officially over. While many articles have been written about why she lost last year, frequently positing that she ran a too high minded campaign, little of the focus has been on the reality that she simply isn’t a very good politician until now. This time, however, even the most progressive outlets appear both baffled by her own explanation for the crushing defeat and what that says about the Democrat Party as a whole. Arwa Mahdawi, writing for The Guardian, certainly wasn’t clapping when declared the book offered “no closure, no hope,” claiming the “former presidential candidate sticks to the script in a memoir that will only cause further bad blood.” After noting that the former Vice President insisted she hadn’t spoken to her husband about the loss until she started writing, Ms. Mahdawi continued, “I don’t know if Harris found writing 107 Days cathartic, but reading it certainly wasn’t. Instead, the book, which unfolds in strictly chronological order, is a frustrating slog. It seems likely to alienate her critics further and provides no closure or hope for her supporters. Harris has always been accused of sounding phoney; criticism she brushes off in the book as sexism. When Charlamagne Tha God, host of popular radio show The Breakfast Club, observed that she came off as ‘very scripted’ on the campaign trail, she retorted that it was actually ‘discipline.’ The memoir was Harris’s opportunity to go off-script. Instead she sticks to her talking points.” Beyond making more than a few baffling statements, such as bragging about the Inflation Reduction Act as “the most consequential climate bill ever enacted into law,” wondering why Americans were “focused on the cost of things today” rather than “generous rebates” they might receive in the future, the Vice President was seemingly shocked that young people in particular voted based on their “perceived economic interests” rather than larger issues like abortion and democracy itself. “Part of the challenge with this very short campaign was that we had to focus on needs that felt more immediate, like how to deal with the grocery bill or the cost of childcare,” she rationalized what should have been obvious to any halfway decent politician.
Otherwise, two things appear to be of particular interest. First, her relationship with President Joe Biden personally and the overall administration, wherein she appeared to acknowledge that he was to mentally unfit to run for re-election without actually saying it and yet still seemed surprised she was expected to distance herself from him. While acknowledging that “His voice was no longer strong, his verbal stumbles more frequent,” “he felt so frail,” and the decision to run for reelection was “reckless,” she claimed she was simply too “loyal” to speak up and bizarrely insisted he was fit to be President anyway, somehow. “On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired,” she wrote. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.” Perhaps even worse, she appears to have taken no responsibility whatsoever despite being Vice President, and instead blamed the entire thing on the Biden family and his closest advisors, not once but twice. Of the family, she wrote “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.” Of his advisors, she claimed they refused to recognize her own unique strength and even when they did, they viewed it as a threat. “When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.” Perhaps even more bizarrely, she insisted that she herself didn’t get it when she fumbled a question on what she would do differently than her boss, claiming it was loyalty yet again.
The second segment generating headlines is when Vice President Harris claimed that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was her ideal running mate, but she couldn’t choose him because he was gay and was saddled with picking an ordinary white guy in Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who, perhaps needless to say the media immediately claimed was awesome beyond words as well. As she put it, “We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.” This statement prompted left-leaning statistician Nate Silver to accuse her, rightly in my view of “Demthink.” “What is Demthink? It’s what you’d end up with if you trained a large language model solely on the inner monologue of people who either work in Democratic politics or watch MSNBC for eight hours a day…The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else.” As an example, Mr. Silver noted the process by which Vice President Harris was selected as Joe Biden’s running mate in the first place, alluded to earlier. Harris, despite her poor performance in the 2019/20 primary, had perfectly fine qualifications to be Biden’s running mate. But Democrats very explicitly framed her selection to be about her racial and gender identity (go back and read the contemporaneous reporting if you doubt me). Even if you did choose Harris for those reasons, it’s not smart to say the quiet part out loud.” Thus “If Harris had written in her memoir that, you know what, we looked at the question from every angle, and ultimately we concluded that a gay vice presidential nominee would cost us too many votes — that the country isn’t ready quite yet — I’d at least give her credit for honesty. Instead, though, we got Demthink. Harris wrote of what seems to be an implicit point-scoring system: you want to stay in the Goldilocks zone of just the right amount of diversity. Of course, the conventional wisdom within Demthink is that you can’t just nominate two white guys. But Democrats already had a ‘Black woman married to a Jewish man,’ on the ticket, dangerously close to the threshold for what the country would tolerate. Only a straight white man — and preferably not a member of a religious minority group either — could keep things in the right range.”
If anything, The Guardian’s Nesrine Malik was even harsher, declaring “Kamala Harris’s election memoir shows just how deluded the Democrats still are. This unapologetic trawl through a doomed campaign reveals a celebrity-obsessed party high on its own supply. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.” In her view, “The book reveals a politician who is all about the machinery of politics, rather than one with conviction spurred by a sense of duty, or a coherent and specific set of values that differentiate her.” Ultimately, she concluded “The answer to the question ‘what went wrong’ isn’t ‘we didn’t have enough time’ to establish Harris. It was that Harris, even now, with all the time to reflect and be honest with herself, is a politician who invests too much in presentation, and entirely exculpates herself of failures because she was dealt a bad political hand. What can you say besides, ‘to be this age and still not know yourself.’” While I have little doubt Democrats remain deluded, writing so just yesterday, I would also not be surprised if the general panning of the book in particular and Vice President Harris in general is a short-lived phenomenon. As we saw when President Biden secured the nomination after the political equivalent of playing musical chairs to find someone, anyone who wasn’t Biden only to be lauded as one of the greatest politicians of our time, suddenly finding all his previous sins washed clean, and when Vice President Harris suddenly transformed from a broadly disliked number two into a star candidate, history has a way of repeating itself in the Democrat Party. Come 2028 there will be a nomination to be won (bestowed?) and barring the emergence of someone truly new and interesting, the Vice President will have massive name recognition, a fundraising network, and diversity credit which might well be enough to power her through a crowded field. Though Gavin “Cobra Kai” Newsom has been getting a lot of attention lately, a rich white man will certainly be subject to a lot of accusations that he is simply too rich and white, accusations, Vice President Harris can capitalize on with little political skill. If she does that successfully, all of this will be immediately forgotten, replaced with joy and vibes once again because there will be a Republican to defeat and that’s the only thing that will matter.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 