DEMOCRATS’ KAMALA HARRIS PROBLEM. The Democratic Party has a unique problem when it considers the 2024 presidential election. Joe Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history, will be 82 at the end of his first term. There is widespread speculation he will not run for reelection, although he insists he will. The suspicion among many in the political world that Biden will not run again threatens to turn him into a first-term lame duck. Or perhaps it already has.
The situation has naturally resulted in attention being paid to Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be Biden’s obvious successor should he not run. To say Harris has not shone in the job would be an understatement. Her defenders say Biden has given her some impossible tasks, such as slowing the flow of illegal border crossers from the Northern Triangle countries and passing the Democrats’ doomed voting procedure bills on Capitol Hill, although she specifically asked for the second job.
Harris was set up to fail, some of those defenders say — and fail she has. She has little or no progress to show on her portfolio, and the public gives her even lower ratings than Biden. In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, just 37% of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of Harris, versus 55% who had an unfavorable opinion. A Politico/Morning Consult poll taken at the time showed an almost identical 39% favorable and 53% unfavorable result.
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
Harris’s fortunes are not helped by her tendency to say odd things, or to say things oddly, in public. The most recent was her soliloquy on Monday on the “passage of time.” Harris had visited a community center in Sunset, Louisiana, to talk about high-speed internet access. Afterward, she struggled to describe what she had discussed with local officials and workers. This is from her remarks:
The governor and I and we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children and what that means to the future of our nation…
To be charitable, just say it was a head-scratcher. The point is that Harris, now in her second year as vice president, has not made much of a favorable impression on the voters or inside the administration. Now, a soon-to-be-released book details some of the tensions she has created. In This Will Not Pass, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns write, “One senator close to her, describing Harris’s frustration level as ‘up in the stratosphere,’ lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy.’ Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”
Martin and Burns report that Biden noticed that anti-Harris leaks out of the White House were hurting Harris, and he threatened to fire anyone behind them. But the damage was already done. According to the book, Kate Bedingfield, who is the White House communications director, got sick of accusations that the White House was somehow “mismanaging” Harris. “In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations,” Martin and Burns write. “Her Senate office had been mess and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff.”
For her part, Harris, the first woman vice president of color, stewed over her sense that the Biden team looked down on her. According to the book, she sent a top aide to complain that White House aides did not stand when she entered a room, which she took as a “sign of disrespect.” Burns and Martin continue: “Some of Harris’s advisers believed the president’s almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved. Harris worried that Biden’s staff looked down on her; she fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious.”
And even though Biden took some steps to stand behind Harris, it’s fair to say that all was not positive toward Harris in the Biden household. The book reports that during the campaign, candidate wife Jill Biden was not thrilled when the vice presidential search focused on Harris, who had fiercely attacked her husband on racial issues. “Speaking in confidence with a close adviser to her husband’s campaign, the future First Lady posed a pointed question. There are millions of people in the United States, she began. Why, she asked, do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?”
Maybe some others in the White House are asking that question now.
It’s hard to exaggerate how odd the Biden-Harris situation is for Democrats. A first-term president is expected to run for reelection. No president wants to be a lame duck in his first years in office. And yet that is where Biden could be headed. And that shines an especially intense light on the question of succession, and the first in line: a very unpopular, very problematic Vice President Kamala Harris.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
