Kamala Harris has a big problem. As the Democratic Party’s new-and-locked-in presidential nominee, the vice president has, one should say more precisely, a particular problem that stands out from others as inescapably ironic — and it will plague her all the way to Election Day.
It is that although Democrats want to rivet voter’s eyes to former President Donald Trump, Harris is bound to be the center of attention because she is the chief beneficiary of the party’s astonishing coup against its incumbent leader, President Joe Biden. The drama and denouement following Biden’s debate meltdown enthralled not just the nation but the world. We all watched as the Democratic establishment, with the notable exception so far of former President Barack Obama, stampeded to support Harris.
Everyone is going to look at what she is and where she came from.
Blue party bigwigs, most notably Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), ambushed Biden, but it won’t be them left standing in the glare of public scrutiny when the dust settles. It will be Harris, and it is she who must deal with voters’ natural demand to know what is going on and what she stands for. Democrats can’t expect to transition instantly from engineering a political week that will fill many history books to a posture of nothing to see here, time to move on.
Given the unpopularity of Biden, his administration, and his policies, Democrats decided long ago that their path back to the White House would be clear if they could make Trump look as bad and as prominent as possible. Their strategy could be summed up as “Look at the dirty authoritarian crook over there; don’t look at the incompetent and arrogant government of the past four years.” Democrats were obliged in this plan by hack partisan prosecutors, nudged by Biden himself, who produced indictments against Trump and ventilated his shameful sexual and financial history.
Harris and the Democrats endlessly refer to Trump’s 34 felony convictions in the extraordinarily dubious and contorted, but nevertheless successful, case brought against him for paying hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels. But this won’t be enough to deflect attention, which is bound to turn to Harris. Trump is already a known quantity, indeed too well known. Harris is, in comparison, a mystery.
Democrats can’t keep attention off their own leader. They tried to hide Biden from public view, but when he couldn’t hide any longer and came spectacularly unstuck in debate, it ensured that first he and then his successor would be scrutinized minutely. When he couldn’t hide, he also could not run. Harris has the same problem and she now owns the administration record and her own extreme left-wing voting record, which is just as bad. To whatever extent they know Harris, voters do not like her.
She embraced the Green New Deal and opposed all energy fracking and offshore drilling, coupling this job-killing, America-weakening proposal to an insouciant suggestion that Pennsylvania’s swing-state voters simply transition to other lines of work. She supported the George Floyd riots and said they should not stop even though they were inflicting billions of dollars of damage and trashing the rule of law.
Most egregiously, perhaps, was her failure to do anything to stop the flow of millions of illegal immigrants into America. Lickspittle lefty news media such as CNN and Axios are trying to muddy
or erase the record by quibbling over whether Harris was the “border czar.” But it was understood and reported three years ago that she and the administration wished it to be known she was taking command in the migrant crisis. Only now, when it is inconvenient in a presidential campaign to have her tagged with such a colossal policy wreck on a top voter issue, are the Democratic establishment and its media acolytes “correcting” the record.
So Harris et al. will spend the next 100 days pointing at Trump and moaning, as Biden did, that people should change the subject and talk about the Republican’s felony convictions and lies as though they haven’t been caught in one of the biggest lies and cover-ups in this nation’s history.
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But voters will be looking elsewhere and demanding answers to such questions as “Who is this apparently shallow Democratic leader who rose almost without a trace? Does she really believe this, and did she really say that?”
The election will not be a referendum on Trump, as Harris and what is notionally her party want it to be. It will be a comparison between a Republican past president with all his faults who was chosen by citizens and an arriviste former prosecutor with a maniacal laugh who is suddenly champion of the oldest political party in the world.