Democrats are apparently more worried about hurting an overmatched vice president’s feelings than their stated goal of saving the republic.
Democrats are apparently more worried about hurting an overmatched vice president’s feelings than their stated goal of saving the republic.
‘A ll I ask of you is one thing that you’ll never do,” sings British pop star Morrissey on the final track of his classic 1992 album Your Arsenal. The moody Mancunian sings to a prospective lover, “Tell me that you love me,” but it might as well be a plea from the American public to President Joe Biden.
Voters are asking Biden to do the one thing that he’ll never do: Throw Vice President Kamala Harris overboard.
Typically, running mates represent only one piece of the election puzzle. The VP pick is meant to fortify some shortcoming in the nominee, such as when old-timer Biden himself calmed fears that newcomer Barack Obama was too inexperienced to serve as chief executive. Sarah Palin bolstered John McCain’s credibility with the working-class wing of his party. For Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan buttressed the nominee against attacks that he was a free-spending Massachusetts liberal. Mike Pence, a human sleeping pill, calmed fears that Donald Trump would be too out of control; Pence was a gift to the Evangelicals troubled by a thrice-married candidate whose past public utterances included revealing tidbits like not being “into anal.”
And in 2020, in order to soften some of his own past racial missteps, calm a nation rioting after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and fulfill a promise to select a woman, Biden picked Kamala Harris, who had been roundly rejected by her own party during its primary process.
But in 2024, Harris is not just a piece of the puzzle. She is the puzzle.
Biden, who finds himself down in the 2024 presidential polls in all the wrong swing states, is facing off against two stubborn adversaries: Donald Trump and Father Time. But while Trump is beatable, Father Time is famously undefeated. In NCAA Tournament parlance, the Grim Reaper is a No. 1 seed and Biden’s remaining cogent for the next four years is a longshot.
Democrats are publicly in denial about Biden’s age, lashing out against the New York Times for, among other things, publishing poll results showing that nearly eight in ten Americans believe the president is too old to continue. That includes 73 percent of people over 65, meaning people roughly Biden’s own age are looking at him and saying, “The old man’s lost it.” (Only 43 percent felt the same about Trump.)
In any sane political environment, Biden would have a release valve — that of a capable vice president who could take over in the event something happened to him while in office. But this is not a sane environment, and Biden is riding along with Harris, whose current approval rating of 37 percent is roughly that of salespeople who squirt lotion on you as you try to walk through the mall.
Thus, while a vice president would typically serve as a falling president’s parachute, Harris is instead the anvil following Wile E. Coyote on the way down, making Trump’s election eminently more possible. Democrats and Never Trumpers are fond of pointing out that “democracy is on the ballot” in 2024. But if that is true, they should be willing to take drastic steps to keep the American system of governance alive. Given that America has sent its young men and women to die in wars to keep democracy in place in foreign lands, hurting the feelings of an inconsequential vice president who is in over her head shouldn’t be that tough of an ask.
Of course, Biden will not toss Harris, so his only other option is to make her more palatable to voters. The trouble is that this is a nearly impossible task. For one, presidents don’t often cede the spotlight to their vice presidents. Doing so may seem like an admission that Biden’s cognitive engine might be coughing up smoke.
And a presidential Pygmalion act is unlikely given Harris’s challenges in portraying herself as a functional resident of planet Earth. She typically offers audiences a cornucopia of malapropisms, flubbed lines, and gaseous tangents that offer a value-per-word of near zero.
To wit: Take Harris’s speech at the U.S.-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Nations) summit in Washington, D.C., in 2022:
We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules and agreements, that we will convene to work together.
But Harris wasn’t quite done.
“We will work together,” she said in closing, with a flourish reminiscent of a glitching AI text program.
In a perfect scenario, Democrats would handle their presidential position by adopting the Pittsburgh Steelers’ strategy for handling quarterbacks: Bring in an old veteran who has won in the past (in this analogy, Russell Wilson), but have a young, promising backup in the wings (Justin Fields) who can take over if the old guy falters.
The trouble is Kamala Harris is not Justin Fields. She’s a quarterback who throws with the wrong hand and wears her helmet on her foot. Her ineptitude scares the sorts of voters who like Nikki Haley and despise Trump but who also realize that if Harris gets in the game, another catastrophic season is upon us.
It also hasn’t helped that Biden is currently using Harris in exactly the wrong way. Traditionally, the vice-presidential candidate serves as the nominee’s attack dog, dishing out red meat to his own party’s most stringent partisans in order to keep them from wandering off. And this has been Harris’s role to date: Last week, she took a trip to a Minnesota abortion clinic to assuage the fears of those who want the courts to reinstate unlimited abortion access by judicial fiat.
But given that Harris is already viewed so unfavorably by so many Americans, it would make more sense to actually soften her edges. Instead of having her spit fire, Team Biden should moderate her message as if she were at the top of the ticket. Are hard-core lefties going to abandon Biden and vote for Trump? Despite a few states in which some anti-Biden protest votes are showing up, it seems unlikely that, when push comes to shove, staunch progressives are going to want to help Trump.
The Biden campaign needs to convince middle America that Harris is someone they’d actually vote for, not just someone they’re stuck with if tragedy befalls Dark Brandon. Flip the traditional script — make Biden the robust fire-breather and Harris the commonsense, can-do type. (Of course, the chance this happens is roughly the same as Republicans electing Hunter Biden as their next speaker of the House.)
In the meantime, the gap between what political parties claim are “existential threats” and the seriousness with which the parties take them has never been wider. For years, Republicans have decried illegal immigration, yet they recently blocked a bipartisan bill to aid in combating it because Trump needs it as a campaign issue. Similarly, if Democrats warn that another Trump administration could mean the end of democracy, replacing Kamala Harris would demonstrate they actually mean it.