It’s déjà vu all over again.
The sitting Democrat president is in deep trouble. The economy is in bad shape. The world is in chaos because of the president’s foreign policies. Crime and violence are rampant on America’s streets. The Democrat Party is bitterly divided, with the left wing of the party strongly protesting the incumbent president. A prominent third-party candidate is running, making a stand in the ideological middle of the two major party candidates. The Republicans are running a tough and experienced national candidate.
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And then the sitting, unpopular Democrat President steps down from his re-election campaign.
Is it 2024? Or is it 1968?
As I said before, when comparing the 2024 Presidential election to those of 1968 and 1980, the Democrats would be better off if they jettisoned their unpopular president and replaced him with another candidate. I came to this conclusion by simply comparing what happened in 1980, when incumbent President Jimmy Carter got crushed by Ronald Reagan, to what occurred in 1968, when incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey barely lost to Richard Nixon (in the popular vote) after incumbent President Johnson chose not run for re-election.
The Democrats have just followed my advice. Partly. (I counseled them to choose someone else, like Governor Gavin Newsom (CA), who is even more dissociated from the Biden administration.)
READ MORE COUNTERPOINT: Democrats Should Say, ‘Help Me, Gavin Newsom, You’re My Only Hope’
President Joe Biden, who exposed his advanced senility by spectacularly “falling in the orchestra pit” on June 27, is gone – he has literally disappeared after posting his resignation letter on Twitter – and his vice president, Kamala Harris, is the almost certain replacement for him.
So, this means we will have to restart our presidential analysis for the coming election.
There were originally five big problems facing President Joe Biden. However, as I said before:
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The senility and corruption problems would completely drop off the board with a new candidate, and the other three big issues – the economy/inflation, the border situation, and the Gaza Democrat rioting – would all be more attenuated with another Democrat candidate replacing the man who created all of these problems.
But with Vice President Harris being that Democrat candidate, another problem has been added to this list (see below).
So, at the beginning of Presidential Election 2024, Version 2.0, there are four major problems facing Vice President Harris. These are:
First, Harris Is Seen as a Diversity Pick, and She Hasn’t Rectified That Problem
This may sound harsh, but Kamala Harris, while not senile, is:
More unpopular than Biden, presumably because Biden’s announcement that he chose her because she was diverse marks her as an affirmative action-like hire and because she has done nothing to impress her detractors since then as vice president. Indeed, there are reports that she is a toxic boss who refuses to put in the hard work to become a good candidate; she is unable to manage her staff; and she frequently embarrasses herself with word salads and inappropriate laughter.
If Harris had buckled down after Biden giving her a gift by selecting her as vice president, she would not be facing this problem. In 1988, George H. W. Bush chose Senator Dan Quayle as his vice president, but Quayle was almost immediately embarrassed as a lightweight when he entered the race. But, starting in 1989, Quayle did put a lot of work into improving his reputation, and he eventually developed a good rapport with conservative and establishment Republicans. In the end, however, it was not enough for Quayle to get elected on his own right, but that was because he chose to run for president in 2000, where he was the underdog to Governor George W. Bush, who was the more natural heir to George H. W. Bush.
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Second, It’s Still the Economy, Stupid
Contrary to the mouthings of the mainstream media, the economy, over the past four years, is not doing well for average working families. Inflation is high because of excessive federal spending. The decent job growth is largely because the federal government is irresponsibly doing the hiring. And now the latest news is we may be heading towards a recession.
And it gets worse for the Democrats. As I reported before:
More registered voters believe former President Donald Trump would do a better job than President Joe Biden tackling two of the top issues of the 2024 campaign — the economy and immigration — according to an exclusive poll by USA TODAY/Suffolk University… Perhaps most troubling for Biden: 51 percent of respondents said they now approve of Trump’s job performance when he was president from 2017 to 2021, compared to 41 percent who said they approve of Biden’s current job performance.
Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s vice president. She will claim some distance from Biden’s economic decisions, but she still is his top lieutenant, and as such, she will be held responsible for his bad economy.
Third, the Border Is Still Wide Open, Causing Much Violence
For the past four years, often every other week, there seemingly is another example of an American being harmed or killed by an illegal alien who snuck in through the porous Southern border. There was Laken Riley. There was Rachel Morin. There was Sonia Argentina Guzman (and others). There was Jocelyn Nungaray. And there was Tiger Gutierrez.
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There are also terrorists and foreign agents coming through the border. And foreign organized criminals. And, no doubt, lunatics from insane asylums (this is often hard to show, but the large amount of solitary young men is inevitably going to include an outsized mentally ill population among them).
Vice President Harris is not just part of the Biden administration – she was also the designated “border czar”! As such, there is no way she can avoid blame for this problem.
Fourth, the Pro-Hamas Democrats Are Still Rioting, and the World Is Still in Chaos
Joe Biden, like his Democrat predecessor Barack Obama, believes in appeasing foreign enemies. His vice president, Kamala Harris, also believes in this. For example, please see their support for the Iran deal, which was nothing more than a glorified bribe to the Iranian regime in return for a “pinkie swear” that Iran wouldn’t work to produce nuclear weapons. This appeasement has, inevitably, led to U.S. weakness throughout the world and a resulting chaos and violence in all areas of the globe.
Including chaos and violence in the U.S. In another column, I wrote:
Today, on our streets and colleges, there are American socialists running amok who want to kill or harm American Jews, and in some cases, they are doing so. These people are, by definition, Nazis. And, without a doubt, (almost all of) these people are registered Democrats. And what are Biden and Democrat local officials doing to stop these actual Nazis from continuing their violence and antisemitism? Nothing, legally, despite the vast number of both federal and state charges that could be asserted against these criminals. And politically speaking, Biden and the Democrats are, in fact, appealing to these Nazis for their votes, either by refusing to enforce the laws against their criminal actions and/or by acting in the foreign policy realm to punish the Jewish state of Israel in its defensive war against the terror state of Hamas.
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Vice President Harris is to the left of President Biden on Israel and has defended the campus rioters. There is no way that she is going to avoid any responsibility for the antisemitic rioting problem, which will continue — at the DNC and elsewhere — until the election.
In 1968, (the then-sitting) vice president, Hubert Humphrey, ran a close presidential race despite the headwinds he faced from the many problems caused by the Johnson administration. However, while the Democrats are better off running Vice President Kamala Harris than President Joe Biden, there is no guarantee that Harris will keep this race as close as it was in 1968.
That is primarily because Hubert Humphrey was a much better candidate then than Harris is now. He had been a national figure since he was elected Mayor of Minneapolis in the late 1940s. He had also been elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first Democrat to do so in (then) recent times in Minnesota, and he did so by ousting an incumbent and then winning two reelections. He was also a leading figure in the national fight to keep the communists out of the Democrat Party. In the Senate, he was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a premiere issue of the times. Members of the Senate, including Republicans, and all other major political and governmental players, respected him immensely. And then he served his four-year term as vice president, where he was a valued advisor and participant in the administration. Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has spent much less time in elected office, and her elected offices have been much less important. And her role has never been praised, by anyone, except for her sycophants.
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Humphrey also always came across as dignified, well-spoken, and very intelligent when he appeared in public. Harris, as I said above, does not.
Further, Humphrey had much more time to campaign for his election – Johnson dropped out on March 31, versus Biden on July 21 – and his accession was not in any way unusual for the times (primaries were not required then, unlike today).
To sum up, choosing Kamala Harris as their nominee for president is yet another bold strategy by the Democrats. We are going to have to see if it pays off for ‘em.