Vice President Kamala Harris wants to act like she is already the president. But she is not. And hurricane season is no time for playing pretend.
In between the devastation of Hurricane Helene and the landfall of Hurricane Milton, Harris took the time from fundraising with billionaires in California and hobnobbing with celebrities on television to attack Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for not taking the time to talk to her.
Harris called DeSantis “selfish” for not answering her phone calls and accused him of “playing political games” in a crisis.
DeSantis, who has spent years building up Florida’s capacity to withstand and respond to hurricanes, including the creation of the Florida State Guard, which has been instrumental in rescue and recovery from past and current disasters, was having none of it.
“We’ve been on an emergency footing for two weeks straight,” DeSantis told reporters who asked about the vice president’s criticism of him. “Around the clock, 24/7, we’ve been working, helping people prepare for Hurricane Helene, helping effectuate rescues of people after Hurricane Helene, helping people pick up the pieces of their lives after Helene, and then having to also turn around and prepare for major impacts from Hurricane Milton.”
“So, that’s been my sole focus,” DeSantis continued. “My focus has not been with dealing with Kamala Harris. … It’s not about you, Kamala. It’s about the people of Florida. … And I can tell you this: I’ve worked on these hurricanes with President Trump and President Biden. Neither of them ever tried to politicize it. She has never called me on any of the storms we’ve had since she’s been vice president until apparently now. Why, all of a sudden, is she trying to parachute in and inject herself when she’s never shown any interest in the past?”
We all know the answer to DeSantis’s question: Harris never cared about the hurricane victims of Florida until she wanted to make it a political issue because she was running for president.
For his part, the actual president, Joe Biden, took DeSantis’s side in this dispute, saying DeSantis had been doing great and had been “cooperative” and that Biden had even given DeSantis his personal phone number to make communications easier. Even as DeSantis has taken the reins and said he, rather than the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is running the show on hurricane response, Biden described DeSantis as “very gracious” to the administration for its assistance.
Harris still has not earned a single vote for the presidency. She did run in the 2020 cycle, but she dropped out of the primary in 2019 before a single vote was cast. However much she may not like it, Biden is still president, not her. He, not she, is the one who won the 2020 Democratic Party primary and then the general election. Harris had her chance to push Biden fully out the door this July. She declined. She was satisfied with taking the nomination and leaving him the White House.
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There were benefits and costs with that decision. The benefit was avoiding a nasty fight with a president who did not want to leave. But the cost is that as much as she may want to pretend to be an important person in times of crisis like now, she’s not. As DeSantis noted, she never tried to help out in past hurricanes, so why is she suddenly reaching out now?
In trying to pretend she is already president, Harris only has highlighted again why so many voters don’t trust her. She’s inauthentic, always trying to pretend to be something she’s not. She’s not from Oakland, she wasn’t a good prosecutor, she’s not a centrist Democrat, and she’s not president. And if she keeps embarrassing herself on the national stage, she never will be.