Kamala Harris’s Popularity: Do You Buy It?

In March of this year, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker called for Vice President Kamala Harris to do everyone a favor and resign her office. Harris was known then to “embarrass her boss with her sometimes inane, rambling remarks and a laugh that erupts from nowhere about nothing obvious to others.” Harris was, according to Parker (who hadn’t been privy to the universal omertà that would be later imposed across media), “a colossal failure as border czar.” And she could possibly be Biden’s “downfall” in 2024. She had an approval rating of just 37.2 percent. And there was “no reason to think her ranking would spike were she suddenly promoted.”

Harris is now rebranded as the face of a pleasant near-term future in which all political turmoil of the past decade is simply transcended by an assertion of an unexpected joyful emotion. She has nothing to do with the past administration, except to have been so proud of its leader’s gallantly selfless decision to exercise supererogatory nobility and enthusiastically walk away from political power, thereby granting us — and her — this chance at joy. No longer tied to Biden politically, she is running as the challenger, and making the dour, aberrant mood of American politics over the last decade, now solely represented by Trump, into the incumbent against which she is running.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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In March of this year, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker called for Vice President Kamala Harris to do everyone a favor and resign her office. Harris was known then to “embarrass her boss with her sometimes inane, rambling remarks and a laugh that erupts from nowhere about nothing obvious to others.” Harris was, according to Parker (who hadn’t been privy to the universal omertà that would be later imposed across media), “a colossal failure as border czar.” And she could possibly be Biden’s “downfall” in 2024. She had an approval rating of just 37.2 percent. And there was “no reason to think her ranking would spike were she suddenly promoted.”

Harris is now rebranded as the face of a pleasant near-term future in which all political turmoil of the past decade is simply transcended by an assertion of an unexpected joyful emotion. She has nothing to do with the past administration, except to have been so proud of its leader’s gallantly selfless decision to exercise supererogatory nobility and enthusiastically walk away from political power, thereby granting us — and her — this chance at joy. No longer tied to Biden politically, she is running as the challenger, and making the dour, aberrant mood of American politics over the last decade, now solely represented by Trump, into the incumbent against which she is running.