What will the fullness of time reveal about Kamala Harris’s achievements? She has exactly none, politically.
I was hoping I might escape 2025 — and ideally, the rest of my earthly days — without having to mention Kamala Harris again. Understand, I have been attempting to wash my hands of her ever since the end of last fall’s deranged presidential campaign, like Lady Macbeth furiously attempting to cleanse herself of shame and guilt, but most of all of hateful memory: “Out, damned politician! Out, I say!”
But nothing doing. After a brief and widely panned stint as a horror novelist — and an announcement that she would not be seeking the California governorship in 2026 — Harris continues to insist that (1) there are more pages yet to be written in her story; (2) those that have already been will reveal her to have been a political titan of her times. Yes, according to the New York Times, “Kamala Harris Isn’t Ready to Be Written Off”:
Her place in history is already secure, and she knows it.
“I understand the focus on ’28 and all that,” she said in the interview. “But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”
No there won’t. I’m sorry. I’m all out of polite condescension for Harris at this late date; she exhausted my patience somewhere around last August’s Democratic National Convention. But needless to say she will be remembered, if at all, for running a paralyzed campaign that failed to distinguish itself from Biden in any meaningful way, and primarily exhibited her own resounding inadequacy as a retail politician, election strategist, and decision-maker. When failed politicians see their reputations posthumously rehabilitated, it is because their substantive achievements have been reconsidered in the fullness of time.
What will the fullness of time reveal about Kamala Harris’s achievements? She has exactly none, politically. A showboat attorney general, a cipher as a senator, an invisible vice president, and a spectacularly failed emergency presidential candidate: Harris’s entire career has been nothing more than a series of steps up through the informal cursus honorum of Democratic politics, one spurred by her luck in being born checking nearly every desirable demographic box in Democratic politics.
So why wait for Congress to act? Those guys can barely keep the federal government’s lights on these days. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is both a Man of Executive Action and is known for his juvenile sense of humor. (After all, this is a man who currently hangs a picture of an autopen in White House’s “hall of presidents” in place of Joe Biden.) Since he’s always looking for another prank to pull on the Democratic administration he overthrew, I’m going to give him a free tip: Next summer he should temporarily display a giant stone carving of Kamala Harris’s head in a corner of some obscure federal building, and advertise it as The World’s Biggest Bust.