Kamala Harris Is Not the Democrats’ Savior

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race has turned Democrats’ tears of sorrow into tears of joy. In short order after he announced his exit Sunday, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him and Democrats hurried to consolidate around her.

It didn’t take long for the premature celebrations to start.

On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough declared that “Democrats have to be feeling pretty good this morning and insisted that Republicans are “freaking out.”

“What is that feeling… ah, the knot in my stomach and the weight on my heart have lifted. I have hope for democracy,” mused The Washington Post ‘s Jennifer Rubin as a rainbow bloomed overhead.

“That sound you hear is the Trump campaign ripping up a detailed, brilliant, and suddenly useless blueprint for beating Joe Biden,” submitted The Atlantic ‘s Tim Alberta .

As if.

Don’t get it twisted, Harris is an upgrade over Biden in that she can complete her thoughts more often and has a slightly higher ceiling as a result. But with the exception of the age issue, Harris still suffers from all of the electoral vulnerabilities her boss does — and then some.

The Trump campaign doesn’t need to throw out the blueprint it drew up to beat Biden, it needs to double down on it.

Kamala Harris is not a fresh face that Democrats can construct a positive narrative about and that voters can project their wants on to. She’s a known and unpopular entity with no proven political chops, a radical record and the baggage of a failed administration and the scandal that drove Biden out of the race on her shoulders.

She has, after all, already run one presidential campaign — and it’s course should worry Democrats for more reasons than one. Plagued by infighting, a lack of a cohesive message, and its principal’s lack of charisma, it crashed and burned fast, ending before the Iowa Caucus.

Worse yet for Democrats, Harris endorsed a number of radical positions during her own campaign and after joining Biden’s. She not only championed Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All scheme, but called for the outlawing of private health insurance. She not only espoused the open the Democratic Party’s open borders ideology, but hinted that she might support what would amount to the disbandment of ICE. She not only promised mass amnesty for illegal immigrants, but said she would make it happen without an act of Congress. She not only applauded Los Angeles for cutting its police department’s budget, she urged her followers to donate to a bail fund for the criminals who wreaked havoc in Minneapolis during the summer of 2020.

None of these are popular positions with the general electorate, and neither is Harris herself.

According to FiveThirtyEight, 38.7% of the country approves and 55.8% disapproves of Biden’s performance in office. Harris barely fares any better, as 38.6% approve and 50.4% disapprove. Just because she hasn’t yet sunk to the depths Biden has isn’t any reason to pop champagne, especially when you consider that the difference is likely attributable only to her being slightly less visible.

Moreover — and this is the kicker — Harris is absolutely complicit in the cover-up of Biden’s decline.

Time and time again, Harris lied about the president’s condition, calling him “tireless,” “vibrant,” and insisting that he was ahead of everyone else in every room he walked into. Even after his disastrous debate performance last month, Harris told Americans not to believe their lying eyes.

In fact, she’s more than complicit, she was arguably his chief accomplice.

So yes, Harris is an improvement over Biden. But now she has to defend not only his dismal record, but the even more extreme version of it she ran on in 2020, all the while explaining to the American people why she participated in the scandal that was Biden’s reelection campaign.

In that way, Harris — and her party — are still very much burdened by what has been.