Vice President Kamala Harris says that she is “ready to serve.” Whether she officially tops the ticket or not, Harris is the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, and she knows it just as everyone else does.
It was always a popular (and sound) theory to think that President Joe Biden would not finish a second term. He took office older than when Ronald Reagan, the previous oldest president, left office while allegedly dealing with Alzheimer’s disease. It would take a near miracle for Biden to get through eight years of one of the most demanding jobs on the planet in order to leave office on Inauguration Day in 2029 at the age of 86 and not a day sooner.
That was further cemented in the past week. Special counsel Robert Hur found that Biden did mishandle classified documents, but that no jury would convict him of the crime because he would be seen as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who could not have the “mental state of willfulness” to commit a felony. According to Hur, Biden could not remember what years he was vice president or what year, within several years, his son Beau Biden died.
To try and dispute this, Biden went out into a press conference where he rambled his way into forgetting where he received the rosary he has worn since his son died and that Egypt is not Mexico. This followed a week of Biden recalling recent conversations he had with long-dead foreign leaders. Biden’s memory is shot. He hides from the press and the public because his memory is gone. He likely won’t make it through the first year of his second term if he is reelected.
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Harris is the real Democratic nominee. That is true whether Biden holds out through the election and steps down shortly into his second term, and it will be true if Biden suddenly drops out before the election at any point. Harris is the token black woman that Biden and Democrats promoted for no other reason than to check those boxes, and she can’t be replaced on the ticket or tossed aside at the convention. Whether Biden drops out tomorrow or resigns in March 2025, Kamala Harris is the Democratic heir.
The 2024 campaign should be just as much about her as it is about Biden because Harris will become president at some point should Biden win reelection. She may have originally been a token appointee, but joining Biden has always been about her own presidential ambitions. If Republicans lose in 2024, those ambitions will be realized.