When Kamala Harris was tapped to be the Vice President, I remember saying at the time that she was always pretty much assured the pick from the get-go. The Biden team wanted a prosecutor to go after Trump, and she was black, a woman, and a prosecutor. Form and function all in one convenient package.

That was the plan at the time, with leaks to the media in the run-up suggesting it. Since being tapped as Biden’s running mate, however, Harris has proven that her failed presidential bid wasn’t just a slip-up but rather who she is as a politician. She is not competent to run for the nation’s highest office, and she was a poor attack dog when it came to Trump.

Whether Trump fans like it or not, 2020 was Trump’s failure – from the handling of COVID to the lack of a clear message – and he lost to a quickly-dimming lightbulb and that lightbulb’s inept running mate.

Nearly four years later, there are several signs that President Joe Biden will be campaigning mostly from a basement again in 2024, and there are plenty of people who wish him off the 2024 ticket entirely. Given the chaotic state of the Republican primary so far, Democrats seem equal parts nervous and optimistic should the Republicans fail to put together a united front behind a strong candidate.

Today, the New York Times is running a nice little feature this morning on Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been hitting the campaign trail as the primary surrogate for Biden.

Once a rising star as a senator in California, Ms. Harris has for years been saddled by criticism of her performance as vice president. She has struggled with difficult assignments on issues such as the roots of illegal migration and the narrow path to enduring voting rights protections. Concerns about her future spread as Democrats pondered whether she would be a political liability for the ticket.

Ms. Harris’s recent moves are her latest attempt to silence those concerns and reclaim the momentum that propelled her to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s side as a candidate and into the White House in 2020.

“It’s good to have her out there,” said Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser for the Democratic National Committee, who added that the vice president’s decision to take on the Republican Party — assertively and in real time — was central to the campaign’s 2024 strategy.

The article notes that Harris began her campaigning by going to Florida to attack Ron DeSantis – which not only was factually wrong but managed to get other Republicans to join with her on the attack – and then heading off to Iowa to talk abortion politics not too far from an event several GOP candidates were speaking at. She is trying to do the job she was picked to do in 2020. She has a deeply sympathetic media behind her (though, for the life of me I can’t tell if they’re sympathetic because they like her or if they want to like her), and she is trying to do the best she can.

We can absolutely expect to see more of Harris and less of Biden. The Times article above notes that it allows Biden to stay “above the fray.” He wants every voter to forget that he’s been a divisive, far-left partisan who pays more attention to the extreme leftist base than he does normal Americans (and, no, there is nothing normal about a far-left base that wants Americans to buy unaffordable cars, eat bugs, and get rid of their gas stoves, and there is certainly nothing normal about their fascination with exposing deviant sexuality to children).

But, while Harris is appeasing the base right now, there’s no sign she is capable of uniting anyone, and 2024 is shaping up to be an election that will require a lot of uniting. The problem is, the people who need to be united are the people who are so dissatisfied with Biden’s performance so far. There is no way you can pass off what Biden’s done as “successful” by any measure. The economy seems to be recovering, at least by the numbers, but Americans are still paying higher prices, seeing higher energy costs, and feeling the pain in virtually all facets of the economy.

Sure, Harris can talk about race and abortion, but does she have the ability to convince Americans they are better off now than they were when Trump was in office?