There’s a little game the national media have enjoyed playing in recent weeks wherein they talk about Kamala Harris floundering in her role and then guess what she can do to fix it. It’s all stupid because it presumes Harris is actually at all interested in being vice president.
She’s not. Harris was an affirmative action hire, and her interest in the job was limited to the photo-ops she could partake in as a woman of color in the White House.
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan was the latest player of the game with a column last week under the stern headline, “Kamala Harris Needs to Get Serious.”
Who doesn’t love a schoolmarm?
“We face grave challenges — China, Russia, the endurance of the American economy,” wrote Noonan. “Who leads us matters. Ms. Harris should set her mind primarily on the deep and profound responsibilities of the job she may have to fill. She should do this as an act of will. Only secondarily should she be thinking about her political prospects.”
It’s so naive. Harris is not going to “get serious” about her role because she never believed it was serious to begin with. She didn’t become Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate because she was a serious person for that serious job. He hired her because he said he was going to pick a woman, and in the year of the left’s George Floyd riots, there was no way that woman wasn’t going to be black.
She had no other qualifications. Democrats rejected her in the party’s presidential primaries, and she dropped out before even the first contest. Her sole contribution to Biden was her status as a black woman. And there has been no indication that Harris is interested in doing anything other than looking in charge, even as she shirks all responsibility.
She was named in control of the border more than half a year ago, but the number of illegal alien crossings has consistently remained at record highs. Not her fault, she’s just there to study “root causes”! She was supposed to navigate a terrible voting deregulation bill through Congress, and it has gone nowhere. Don’t blame her, she’s dealing with racism and sexism!
Harris thought this was going to be one long media relations gig wherein she got to look good on camera as the first woman of color in the White House. To make that work, she needed to look busy. Unfortunately for her, claiming to be busy while not actually fixing problems isn’t really compatible in terms of making people believe you’re important. The result is an approval rating that’s lower than Dick Cheney’s.
Harris’s latest media interview showed no signs that she’s actually interested in becoming the person who might have to take her boss’s place. She got short on questions from the San Francisco Chronicle about accountability but had a lot to say about her office’s new decor. She was defensive about criticism but happy to pose looking busy with other women in a government office.
That’s what she wants the job to be and how she believes it should go. Stop trying to make her something she isn’t.
