If there was ever a case against affirmative action, it would be the sitting vice president.
All of the things opponents of race quotas say — that they inspire mediocrity, lead to lower standards, and set unqualified people up for failure — are precisely what we’re seeing in the shockingly poor job performance of Kamala Harris.
President Biden has admitted he chose her as his running mate, first and foremost, because she is a woman. “I’ll pick a woman to be vice president,” he declared during a Democratic primary debate. And black Democrat leaders, during last year’s threatening race riots, demanded his choice also be black. Qualifications for the actual White House weren’t really part of the equation. That’s what got us here.
Politico on Wednesday reported Harris’s staff “is experiencing low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials.” An unnamed source in the story said, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like sh-t.”
Remember when Harris’s boss said, “If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot”? Hmm. What if he reads it in the news?
One significant breakdown in Harris’s office reportedly involved her clumsy trip to the southern border last week — which anyone could have predicted would be a ridiculous episode, given how Harris and her staff handled the issue all along.
After President Biden gleefully created a border crisis and just as gleefully dropped it in his vice president’s lap, Harris and her team did nothing but attempt to convince the corporate media that the vice president isn’t really expected to do anything about the border per se. No, her aides said, it’s Republicans trying to make the border Harris’ responsibility. Her real job is to transform the crumbling, destitute nations of Central America into utopias, brimming with economic opportunity.
That border mess – with hundreds of thousands of impoverished migrants running into the care of American taxpayers – well, that was beneath Harris.
In April, the first full month that Harris was “in charge” of the border, U.S. authorities encountered nearly 179,000 migrants, up from 173,000 the previous month. In May, the number climbed again to 180,000.
But that’s not her fault! Harris is busy working on “root causes” in Guatemala!
She did, however, make it to the border last week. And it was an embarrassment. She went to the El Paso sector, where the total number of migrants encountered so far this fiscal year is less than half of that at the depressingly overwhelmed Rio Grande Valley sector. That’s like saying you’re taking a trip to Mexico to learn about the culture and then staying at the Hard Rock resort in Cancun.
Harris’s most notable accomplishment during her relatively short time in the Senate was looking angry on camera during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing as she asked him whether he had ever spoken to anyone at a massive law firm about the Mueller investigation.
Nowhere but Washington does that look good on a resume.
The one thing Harris actually can claim great credit for is the thing she most distanced herself from during the 2020 Democratic primary. As attorney general in San Francisco, Harris prosecuted parents whose children were chronically absent from school. She was successful in seeing truancy decline and she encouraged the practice statewide when she was elected California’s attorney general. But then she ran for the presidential nomination of a party that prefers not to acknowledge criminal conduct, so she pretended not to have been involved with her truancy crackdown at all.
While at the border, Harris said she spoke with migrant children at the detention facility. “They were asking me questions: ‘How do you become the first woman vice president?’” she said.
Harris didn’t say what her answer was. But if she was being honest, it would have been something like: “Well, girls, I was lucky enough to be a black woman and have Stacey Abrams as the alternative.”
