A few months back, a friend of mine opined that "In 2008, Barack Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate because Joe was the only member of the Senate dumber than Barack. In 2020, it seems like Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate for the same reason."
Now, as national Democrats are faced with Joe Biden's ongoing (and accelerating) mental and physical deterioration, Vice President Kamala Harris has stepped up, announcing that she is ready to serve.
Vice President Harris said she’s ready for the presidency in an interview last week, amid concerns about President Biden’s age.
“I am ready to serve. There’s no question about that,” Harris told the Wall Street Journal when asked about the challenge of convincing voters she’s up for the job.
Those who see her work are “fully aware” of her “capacity to lead,” Harris said in the interview, just days before a special counsel report stoked renewed questions about Biden’s age and mental aptitude.
Special counsel Robert Hur decided against bringing charges against the president over his mishandling of classified documents, but his report on the probe called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
She's ready to serve? We all know how she got her start in politics. With that in mind, let's look at her service so far.
While Attorney General in California, she attempted to keep inmates in jail longer to take advantage of them for cheap labor. Her 2016 Presidential campaign was a disaster; she was ripped to shreds in a debate by Tulsi Gabbard and ended up dropping out of the race before the first primary. She ended up as Joe Biden's running mate because Biden had promised to pick "a woman of color," and while she met the requirements of plumbing and melanin content, one has to wonder if there wasn't a little bit of consideration that having her as VP was Joe's best possible life-insurance policy.
Her work as "border czar" has been, shall we say, less than stellar.
Axios reported on Monday that Harris and her aides made it clear early on that her responsibilities started and ended with working on root causes and factors driving immigration from countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, known as the Northern Triangle.
President Biden tasked Harris to take on the root causes of the border crisis.
"She's been at best ineffective, and at worst sporadically engaged and not seeing it was her responsibility. It's an opportunity for her, and she didn't fill the breach," a former Biden administration official told the media outlet.
And now the Democrats are being faced with the very real possibility of going into the November elections with this person as the incumbent.
See Related: MTTP - The Incredible Shrinking President
While polling has been pretty suspect since the 2016 election (at least), if we look at VP Harris's approval ratings as they are, she rates somewhere around root canals as far as enjoying the approval of the American people. Granted, if she should somehow end up as the incumbent and the 2024 Democrat candidate, she will inevitably draw about a third of the vote. That is the percentage, more or less, of the American people who would vote "D" if the candidate was an artichoke and the campaign ads all featured Peter Lorre reading the Manhattan phone book.
Kamala Harris may think she's ready to serve as president. She may be able to convince the aforementioned one-third of die-hard Democrat voters that she's ready to serve as president. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time, and it's hard to imagine that Kamala Harris could fool enough of the people to get elected Commander in Chief, even if Joe Biden leaves office and places her in that catbird seat before November.
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