While haters of Donald Trump often lambaste the former president’s messaging as painfully simplistic, even they have to admit that Vice President Kamala Harris‘s presidential campaign is rife with contradictions that verge on rendering the entire case for her candidacy incoherent.
Explaining her decision to host one of her final rallies in front of the White House, Harris said that she wanted the visual behind her because “it is in the White House that the work is going to get done,” as though the sitting vice president hasn’t had an office in the West Wing for the last 3 1/2 years and counting. Further, Harris’s “closing argument” that she is the unifier to offer Democrats and Republicans alike a seat at the table is fundamentally undercut when her own running mate says there is a “direct parallel” between a Trump rally and a pro-Hitler rally conducted a few months before the Nazis invaded Poland and began World War II.
And Harris’s appeal to camaraderie and civility categorically implodes when her boss, who, we often forget, is indeed still the sitting leader of the free world, deems half of the country “garbage.”
“Just the other day, a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage,” President Joe Biden said during video remarks right as Harris was preparing to take the stage outside his home. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
Despite the media’s best attempts to cover for Biden, blaming the remarks on his childhood stutter and claiming that the president actually was referring to the aforementioned Trump speaker, the only real conclusions for the reasonable person are thus: Either the man holding the nuclear codes is so senile he didn’t realize he was providing Trump the single greatest advertisement of his campaign, or Biden knew exactly what he was doing in saying what he really believes.
And if the latter is the case, it raises arguably the more intriguing question: How many Democrats actually want Harris to win the election?
Biden spent half a century loyally serving his party only to be publicly gelded by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and actor George Clooney once he actually succeeded in achieving the presidency he chased for his entire life. First lady Jill Biden famously distrusts Harris after the vice president insinuated that Biden was a racist during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and first son Hunter Biden is likely livid that his meal ticket, the family name in the Oval Office, has been revoked indefinitely. Joe Biden himself may want Harris to win out of instinctive party loyalty, but even if she did, she would be a de facto lame duck fighting a likely Republican Congress and a definitely livid electorate. How much of Biden’s legacy could she actually save?
If Harris loses, Biden gets written in the history books as the only person on the planet who ever beat the final boss of the American Left.
Hillary Clinton has a similar incentive structure. If Harris wins, she doesn’t only beat the former secretary of state as the first woman to shatter that famous and highest glass ceiling, but she does it as a biracial black and Asian American woman. By contrast, if Harris loses, Clinton can continue to cocoon her ego in the delusion that the country is simply too sexist for a strong woman in power. Even better if Harris loses both the Electoral College and the popular vote, the latter of which Clinton notably won in 2016.
When CNN brought Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) on air to clean up Biden’s “garbage” boondoggle, he displayed the razor-sharp political instinct that has to have Harris kicking herself for not choosing him over Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate.
“I’m giving you my fresh reaction to it,” Shapiro said after seeing the clip of Biden. “I would never insult the good people of Pennsylvania or any Americans even if they chose to support a candidate that I didn’t support.”
It’s possible that Shapiro is throwing Biden, and thus, Harris, under the bus out of sheer bitterness of being passed over for Walz, but his calculation is likely a little colder. Shapiro notoriously did not beg or prostrate himself during the veepstakes, perhaps reading the writing on the wall and realizing a late breaking replacement candidate given fewer than 100 days to run a below-replacement level campaign would be incapable of beating Trump and the single most professional campaign he’s mustered in a decade of practice. If Harris wins next week, Shapiro is out in the Pennsylvania wilderness for at least four years of Harris’s presidency and then possibly another eight of a guaranteed Republican rebound in response to eight years of Democratic control of the White House.
But if Harris loses? Shapiro’s possible promotion is expedited by four years at least if not 12. And without the taint of strong association to the most unpopular administration of this century, Shapiro would immediately ascend to the front of the 2028 discussion as soon as the end of next week. Ditto for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), or Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA). Even Pete Buttigieg, who has spent four years reaching out to Fox News and our “deplorable” half of the country as the transportation secretary, is probably better served as a temporary outsider than serving Biden’s understudy for yet another unpopular presidency.
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Sure, some Democrats have every reason to give their blood, sweat, and tears to Harris’s campaign. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has been waiting in the wings for 10 years for the chance at a Speaker’s gavel, and Pelosi has made it clear that vindicating her decision to wage war on Biden is now a personal mission. Former President Barack Obama knows his legacy would be downgraded from generational defining to a mere blip in history should Trump return ascendant to Washington, and Michelle Obama’s reemergence on the campaign trail proves that the former first lady, who famously hates politics, has emotional stakes in the game.
But the rest of the party may have accepted in private what Republicans have embraced in public: that the country did fine under Trump once before and will likely be fine again. Sometimes its better to cut one’s losses for a chance to regroup for the future than drag a lame duck incumbency over the finish line at the expense of the Democratic rising stars.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
