Kamala Harris’s self-enforced irrelevance is a warning to Republicans considering a running mate
Tiana Lowe Doescher
Video Embed
President Joe Biden is not popular, not with the general electorate, more than 3 in 5 of whom view the president unfavorably. Nor is Biden popular with his party, of which only a third, according to CNN’s latest polling, say Democrats should stick with Biden for the 2024 nomination. Compare that to the more than three-quarters of Democrats who backed President Barack Obama‘s renomination and more than half of Democrats who backed President Bill Clinton‘s renomination, after Ken Starr was appointed independent counsel to investigate Whitewater.
But thanks to the even more historic unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden’s second shot at the presidency is all but a given. With the first black and woman politician occupying the vice presidency, the party cannot allow anyone, let alone a rich, white man such as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), to leapfrog Harris. Thus, Biden is in a unique position in which Harris’s weakness only strengthens his hold on the top of the ticket.
FIRST LADY’S COVID-19 DIAGNOSIS REVIVES PANDEMIC POLITICS AND CONCERNS OVER BIDEN’S AGE
Yet Harris’s vice presidency has not come without its costs. As evidenced by the latest Biden biography by Franklin Foer, the former California senator has failed to serve as the crucial whip-wielding liaison to the Hill that then-Vice President Mike Pence did for then-President Donald Trump.
Could some of Harris’s sidelining be a product of Biden’s, shall we say, more traditional tendencies manifesting themselves as an implicit bias for the old boys’ club? Maybe, but Harris doesn’t exactly help herself. Over at New York magazine, Ben Jacobs has the details:
In one meeting with Republican senators intended to entice them to support bipartisan infrastructure legislation, she ended up chiding Roger Wicker of Mississippi about the state of the economy under Donald Trump, leading to Cabinet secretaries wanting to alternately pump their fists and cover their eyes. In another Oval Office meeting, this time with Joe Manchin shortly after Harris did a television interview with a West Virginia station that Manchin interpreted as a power play, she seemingly snubbed Manchin, not offering a handshake or acknowledgment as she left the room so the West Virginia senator could meet privately with Biden.
In 2016, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) recalled in his memoir his exasperation at being lectured by “Professor” Obama, lamenting that the then-president “didn’t waste any time trying to convince me of things I didn’t believe in, and I didn’t try to convince him either.”
Instead, “with Biden you didn’t waste a lot of time on things we knew we would never agree on,” the Kentucky Republican wrote. “I didn’t lecture him, he didn’t lecture me, we got down to the areas where there was possible agreement and we were able to get to an outcome — a very different experience from being in a negotiating setting with the president.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Biden, of course, was able to do this thanks to his 36 years of service in the Senate, which compensated for the fact that Obama only served three. Harris only served four years before becoming a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, two of which she spent jockeying for the presidency and the vice presidency. She certainly wasn’t ready for prime time then, and now, thanks to her inexperience in Congress and penchant for pissing off the very moderates any politician requires to broker a deal, she’s enforced her own irrelevance in the White House, relegated to Biden’s understudy, lest she mess up the machinations of the old boys’ club.
In CNN’s March polling, 3% of Democrats who wanted to change horses from Biden for the 2024 nomination specifically cited Harris as their favored alternative. It should come as little surprise that in August, that number dropped to 1%.