If a November poll is to be believed, Kamala Harris is possibly the most unpopular vice president in history. That survey, by liberal USA Today, found that only 28 percent of Americans approved of her job performance. This is close to Republican ex-vice president Dick Cheney’s low, 30 percent, despite Harris’s benefitting from a degree of positive media coverage of which Cheney could only dream.
In fairness, this poll was an outlier, and Harris’s Real Clear Politics average is higher: 38.6 percent. Yet this is still well under water. Harris’s defenders, however, have an explanation:
“Harris faces unduly high standards,” as the Associated Press put it yesterday.
Of course, to couch the message the AP wanted to send as “news,” it followed its quoted headline with “experts say.” This was under a video that ostensibly proved the AP’s point, a clip featuring one “expert”: Rutgers University associate professor of political science Kelly Dittmar. And the academic talked about Harris for a total of 74 seconds (probably about 60 seconds longer than discussion of Harris’s substance warrants).
To be clear, many other apologists would make the same case. Harris has long been the pseudo-elites’ choice candidate because, being a woman and multiracial, she’s the media’s female Barack Obama.
Yet Harris lacks Obama’s political skill at demagoguery; thus did she have to drop out of the 2020 Democrat primaries before suffering the humiliation of losing her home state, California. Even Democrat voters just didn’t see her the way Democrat pseudo-elites desperately wanted them to.
But the “higher standards” rationale is nothing new. Among many singing this tune, race hustler Al Sharpton said in 2019 about Harris, “Women are held to a different standard, and black women especially are held to a different standard.”
They certainly are — a lower one.
In reality, Harris was selected as Joe Biden’s running mate only because Democrats believed they needed a woman on the ticket, and especially a “black” woman. Consider here that vice-presidential running mates historically were often chosen because they either balanced the ticket ideologically or represented a different geographical region (e.g., North or South) and thus attracted additional voters.
But Harris was ideologically on Biden’s page — that is, devoid of principle — and brought nothing to the table regionally. Democrats were going to win California by a wide margin in the general election no matter who was running. Her appeal was XX genotype and epidermal melanin content all the way.
Because Harris was chosen based on superficial standards, it’s not surprising that she doesn’t measure up to satisfactory ones. This isn’t the way Kelly Dittmar tells it, though. As she said, featured by the AP:
As much as we want to celebrate and spotlight Kamala Harris because of the history she’s making and the pivotal role she plays, we have to remember that she has been elected to what is more of a support role. And that doesn’t mean she’s not getting things done; we know that she’s been tasked with some of the most important policy issues, um, of our day, whether it be voting rights and immigration, um, among many others, where she’s been in those decision-making rooms. She’s been out — to the extent that she can be.
All of these things are pivotal, but, we don’t often credit the vice president with getting all these things done. So I think there’s been a tension in the standard to which she’s being held to [sic] or the expectations to which she’s being held as Kamala Harris I, versus Kamala Harris a vice president, um, in a very, very difficult time. And we’ve sees that tension in media, and we’ve certainly seen gender and race infuse some of that coverage because we know the expectations are always higher for women, and especially higher for women of color who are breaking into institutions that have been so deeply and historically white and male .
(And that’s an example of the Rutgers professoriate.)
Of course, “voting rights” in the above actually refers to voting wrongs (institutionalizing electoral fraud), and immigration is a mess, though that’s no doubt largely by design. Yet it’s not just that Harris can’t handle these issues — she can’t even handle questions about them.
Consider her response to NBC anchor Lester Holt on Today last June when he, pressing her on immigration, stressed, “You haven’t been to the border.”
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” she shot back. “And I mean, I don’t, understand the point that you’re making” (video below).
As the top commenter under the above video put it, “She needs to be reminded that the ‘border’ is in the country in which she is the VP of” — she’s not a leader in Europe.
Harris’s recent comments on current COVID-19 policy’s wanting nature, and whether it’s time to change course, were no better. As commentator Thomas Lifson wrote Sunday, making the case that Harris’s laughingstock image can’t be rehabilitated:
Last Thursday’s interview with Craig Melvin of Democrat-friendly NBC sealed her fate. The Zen koan-like statement, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day,” closes the case, a brilliantly meaningless platitude that seems to demand meditation, as if there must be some enlightenment lurking in the vast mental emptiness.
But of course, there isn’t. More and more people are reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the woman who is a heartbeat away from the presidency, whose incumbent is elderly and afflicted by dementia, is a dummy. I resisted that conclusion in part because, after all, she was elected California’s attorney general and senator and she is the daughter of two professors, but mostly out of fear for our nation. But as her ex-staffers multiply in number, reports are proliferating of those who know her up close privately saying that, yeah, she is that stupid.
The sole plausible explanation for her rise is disgraceful. When she was younger and prettier, she had a sexual relationship with a powerful married man [Willie Brown] decades older than she, and thanks to his influence in a corrupt one-party state whose media would never question a Democrat politician on the rise, she had high political office handed to her, ratified by voters dutifully accepting party dictates.
Lifson also presented a video (below), created by the Washington Free Beacon, of Kamala’s “greatest hits.”
Lifson is correct in saying that as epitomized by ex-vice president Dan Quayle’s plight (he was unfairly maligned as doltish), there “is no way to recover national political standing once a politician becomes a popular butt of humor, a punchline in a degrading joke.”
Unfortunately for Harris, real life is not like the 1979 film Being There, in which a naïve gardener’s simplistic remarks were mistaken for deep thoughts and vaulted him to prominence and success. And, should she ascend to the presidency, Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong-un will not be offering her cultural affirmative action.
