Center square on The View or bust.

Although she can't go that route, can she? She can't speak extemporaneously and her brain rebels against her taking any actual position (except for being ecstatically pro-abortion).

If she does "find her voice" and start spouting out her hard left positions again, everyone will know she was a filthy liar when she ran in 2024.

So maybe she does have no other choice but to make a doomed run at another office.

Kamala Harris has been lying low since her defeat in the presidential race, unwinding with family and senior aides in Hawaii before heading back to the nation's capital.

But privately, the vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open -- whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, "I am staying in the fight."

She is expected to explore those and other possible paths forward with family members over the winter holiday season, according to five people in the Harris inner circle, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Her deliberations follow an extraordinary four months in which Harris went from President Joe Biden's running mate to the top of the ticket, reenergizing Democrats before ultimately crashing on election night.

"She doesn't have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months," said one former Harris campaign aide. "The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships."

Oh she wants to start a Global Clinton Initiative-like grift that poses as a charity but actually exists to pay her a salary, pay for her staff, pay travel including car and chaufeur and pay for a ritzy complex of offices in a major city.

I don't think people will pay for that, though. She has no political future and therefore no one is interested in paying her for future political favors she cannot deliver on.

Most immediately, Harris and her advisers are working to define how and when she will speak out against Donald Trump and reassert her own role in the Democratic Party. Closing out her term as vice president, she's set to preside over certifying the November election she lost to Trump, and then appear at the once-and-future president's inauguration on Jan. 20.

"There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won't be a vacuum for long," a person close to Harris said.

Is there? Is there such a desire?

At the same time, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will have a long checklist to plow through before they leave the Naval Observatory for good.

They have to decide whether they'll take up permanent residence at their home in Los Angeles, or establish a base elsewhere. No matter where Harris and her family live, some around her have expressed concerns about safety, as her Secret Service protection expires six months after stepping away.

Everyone fears that without the Secret Service, Slugger Emhoff will start punching her.

Following her meteoric rise in Washington and California, there are internal questions about standing up a federal committee to raise money. It will be the first time in two decades that the former senator and career prosecutor will be out of public office. That means she'll be standing up a personal office and nurturing her massive online presence without the organizing principle of day-to-day governing.

...

But others close to Harris believe that the current news cycle and speed at which the Democratic Party might start making decisions will force Harris, who tends to deliberate for long periods, to make some early decisions.

She ran for president without settling on a position profile. So this could take a while.

In interviews with Harris aides and confidants, as well as Democratic luminaries, there's broad acknowledgment that Harris represents an "X factor" in the next Democratic primary.

She will not be a factor of any letter. She already got zero primary votes in a primary, and that was before people knew she could not run a campaign or win a presidential election.

The good news for Harris, according to her allies, is that her standing in the party increased the longer that she ran her short campaign, which is rare in electoral politics. Her allies believe that the toxicity that surrounded John Kerry or Hillary Clinton after their losses is unlikely to taint Harris' political future in the same way.

What?

They point to her running a race as a more moderate candidate (a break from her 2019 primary run) as a boon to whatever choice she ends up making as the party seems poised to do its own writ large move to the center.

"She proved a lot of skeptics wrong as a political athlete. And her standing with the public is as good as any Democrats with the name I.D. that she has," a Harris ally told POLITICO.

Okay sure.

A snap poll of the 2028 field found Harris at 41 percent, a significant lead over the others: Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gretchen Whitmer, JB Pritzker, Andy Beshear and several others who all were in single digits.

I mean, this does point out something important: We can goof on Harris's chances for being the nominee again, but... who else do they have?

But Harris' advantages are not unique. Similar surveys taken in the two months after the 2016 campaign, for example, found Clinton with a large lead for 2020, with majorities of Democrats saying they wanted her to run in the next cycle.

"I can't conceivably imagine the party turning to her a second time," said one Democratic strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly.

If she opts not to run in 2028, the earliest clues about her political future could come around whether she runs to succeed Newsom in California, a prospect POLITICO first reported in May. Her office pushed back strongly at the time. Yet the mere idea of her running again in California has frozen the field and kept some fundraisers on the sidelines.

While there's disagreement among people who know Harris well about what office she should run for, there's emerging consensus that she probably can't do both -- compete for governor and then turn around and start a presidential campaign a few weeks later.

The calendar alone would make that difficult, with the 2028 primary gearing up immediately after the midterm elections. Harris confidants also point to the demands on a governor's time, and the expectation of the electorate that she would stay home and dig into the state's mounting challenges around the high cost of living, homelessness and crime.

"It's a real job," is how one of the people close to her put it, contending they were at first dismissive of the idea she might do it, but now feel like it's possible.

Has she ever had a real job? The prospect must be daunting for her.

...

"She is not someone who makes rash decisions. She takes, sometimes, a painfully long time to make decisions. So I would pretty much guarantee you she has no idea what her next move is," said Brian Brokaw, a former Harris aide who has remained close to her circle.

"Could she run for governor? Yes. Do I think she wants to run for governor? Probably not. Could she win? Definitely. Would she like the job? I don't know. Could she run for president again? Yes," Brokaw said. "Would she have a whole bunch of skepticism from the outset, because she has run in a full-length Democratic primary where [in 2019] she didn't even make it long enough to be in the Iowa caucus, and then she was the nominee this year?"

I saw someone speculate that this nonsense article was pushed to Politico so that Harris can continue fundraising to pay off her $18 million debt.