Though she may be a heartbeat away from the presidency, Kamala Harris has done very little to prove herself as providing anything substantive or valuable to the Biden administration.
While it is evident to (almost) everyone that Biden chose her as his running mate because of her race, sex, and age, it’s questionable whether she has figured that out yet. Though the media seems to have finally caught on.
Writing in the New York Times, Jeffrey Frank observes that Harris “hasn’t been given the sort of immersive experiences or sustained, high-profile tasks that would deepen and broaden her expertise in ways Americans could see and appreciate,” which seems to contradict the expectation that Harris would inevitably take over the job once Biden got his “I am the president” fix. They weren’t exactly subtle about it, either. A couple of months after taking office, the White House sent out a directive to all agencies informing them to “please be sure to reference the current administration as the ‘Biden-Harris Administration’ in official public communications.”
Except that all appears to be a mirage.
“In the nearly two years since Mr. Biden tapped Ms. Harris as his running mate in August 2020, we’ve learned that her bonds with Mr. Biden and key administration officials are relatively thin,” Frank writes. “It’s no small matter that she’s had only a handful of private lunches this year with Mr. Biden.”
Frank makes little effort to defend Harris’s weakness and even cites the recently published book written by NYT reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, and how it “describes how Mr. Biden’s advisers were willing to overlook Ms. Harris’s weaknesses in favor of Mr. Biden’s immediate political interests and saw that her chief value came from helping to win the 2020 election.”
Did he need to read that in a book to figure that out? Harris has always been a lackluster politician who ran an uninspiring presidential campaign plagued by poor messaging, infighting, and a lousy candidate. Not only did she drop out before primary voting had even started, but her most significant moment of the primary campaign was when she essentially accused Biden of being racist.
Frank also observed that “there’s little evidence that the Biden White House feels much of the urgency felt by General Eisenhower to enhance the role and preparedness of the person who might inherit the presidency at any moment.”
Ain’t that the truth? This is hardly new information either. There have long been rumors that Kamala Harris is not happy with the role she’s been playing as vice president. The few moments she gets to prove herself have been utter disasters that have forced the White House to clean up her mess. Her allies even believe that Joe Biden set her up to fail with “trash” assignments like the border crisis and election reform. Last year there were rumors of a potential vice-presidential vacancy.
Those were unlikely, but Biden’s contracting of COVID-19 has given us plenty of reason to be concerned — at least more concerned than usual — about a different vacancy that could put Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. That risk is very real, and the fact that the Biden administration is doing nothing to prepare her for potentially taking over tells you how little Biden’s people think of her.
It’s bad enough that they’d sooner gamble the presidency on Biden’s health than groom her to take over. Frankly, we all lose either way.