It’s near-certain that President Biden won’t make it through a second term. It’s not at all unlikely that he won’t make it through the 2024 election. From the way he’s been carrying on lately, he may not make it until the end of the year. And even if he does make it through the election, his understudy is even more alarming.
Suffice it to say, voters are none too confident that Biden will last long as president even if he makes it through another election.
The latest Harvard Harris poll shows most Americans (66%) think he is too old to run in 2024.
This leaves us with Kamala Harris, his vacuous veep.
Never has so much ridden on a vice presidential candidate with so little to offer.
GOP hopeful Nikki Haley is banking on it: “I think that we can all be very clear . . . that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely,” she said.
Haley, 51, would like nothing better than the contest to come down to two women of Indian descent, only one of whom can string together a coherent sentence.
I’ve long suspected that, in 2008, Barack Obama selected as his running mate/life insurance the only guy in the Senate that was dumber than he was. And Joe Biden, in selecting his VP nominee, applied that same principle. But at least she checked all the right diversity boxes, as much good as it’s done her.
Harris can talk about abortion all day long.
She can appear on MSNBC with Joy Reid every night.
It won’t help because she is too weird.
Unlike Fetterman, Harris hasn’t had a stroke.
But here is a random sampling of her official utterances, which always sound more wacky tobacky than West Wing wisdom:
“It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.”
“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.”
“We will work together and continue to work together to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work.”
“I love Venn diagrams. I do. I love Venn diagrams. The three circles.”
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
President Biden is losing it. His behavior gets stranger day by day. His decades-long history of corruption is coming to light (and we thought the Clintons were bad!) He is the most inept President since James Buchanan and the most deeply and fundamentally corrupt political figure since Huey Long — maybe since Caligula. And his time is running short.
Since his time is running short, it’s important to look at his successor. Kamala Harris is the consummate diversity hire; she literally brings nothing to the table but a nails-on-chalkboard cackle, a penchant for word salads, and a history of fondness for guys named Willie. When in the Senate, she was a cipher. In the Vice-President’s office, she’s an embarrassment.
But then, the Federal government has a surfeit of embarrassments at the moment.
The problem facing the Democrats right now is that they have no back-bench. If they thought ahead and were willing to make some serious changes to their ticket, they’d ease Biden and Harris out the door (in the President’s case, dangling a pudding pop in front of him ought to do the trick) and find a couple of candidates who appeal to the electorate not because of their skin color or which restroom they use, but with their policy positions. But they have no candidates that fit that bill. It doesn’t help that the guy who is pretty obviously waiting in the wings is Gavin Newsom, the Man Who Broke California. It’s hard to think of who they might put forth as a moderate alternate. Kirsten Sinema? She left the party. Joe Manchin? He’s having enough trouble in his home state, where it looks like his Senate seat is history. Where are the moderate Democrats? Oh, if only Zell Miller were around.
Republicans should be happy about this. As a minarchist libertarian, I should be happy about this. Whoever the GOP runs is sure to be a better bargain than Kamala Harris. But there’s this niggling little part of me that thinks the country is better off with two strong political parties, one right-of-center and one left-of-center, instead of one that’s far-left and another that’s… somewhere else. Whatever the Democrats decide to do, Kamala Harris shouldn’t be a part of it.