In 2008, the media pushed the narrative that John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was a liability. Despite being a popular governor, Palin was deemed too inexperienced for the job. The Obama-Biden campaign and the media kept insinuating that McCain was so old and frail and could potentially die in office and pointed out that Palin would be “a heartbeat away from the presidency.”
It’s a bizarre irony that today, the country literally is in the precarious situation of an inexperienced and frankly incompetent vice president being “heartbeat away from the presidency” — Kamala Harris.
With polls showing Biden basically running even with Trump in a general election matchup, it doesn’t take a seasoned political strategist to understand that, on top of everything else working against Biden (his age, cognitive decline, the economy, etc.), Harris is an added drag because few people think Biden is currently able to be president and even less likely expect him to serve out an entire second term.
The White House clearly understands that Harris is a liability. Her approval ratings are at the bottom of the barrel for vice presidents, and all you really need to do is watch her try to speak a coherent sentence.
This is why the Biden administration has trying hard to prop her up and convince the public that she’s ready to take over the role of president if necessary, which will be about as difficult as convincing people that the economy is strong. Just as people can see for themselves that gas, groceries, and utilities are still way, way up, they can also see that Harris couldn’t talk her way out of a paper bag. Kamala Harris is literally every bad thing the left said about Sarah Palin nearly 16 years ago but worse because Palin successfully governed a state while Harris is an ill-advised affirmative action hire.
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Things are just as bad behind the scenes as they are in public. Her staffers clearly know that they are on a sinking ship, and for some time now, her office has experienced unprecedented turnover — a trend that started in the administration’s early months.
In the first year and a half, the Biden-Harris White House experienced an exodus of 30 senior staffers, mostly from Harris’s office, including Michael Collins, her director of public engagement, Meghan Groob, Harris’s director of speechwriting, and domestic policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu, all within weeks of each other.
In fairness, the Trump administration was also plagued by a revolving door. I’ve pointed out that this doesn’t bode well for him to assemble a cohesive team in a second term, but that’s because Trump in particular has a tendency to personally attack people who leave his administration.
The revolving door in Harris’s office tells us that, as bad as things appear from the outside, there’s a significant amount of dysfunction that we’re not seeing behind the curtain. At the root of the problem is Kamala Harris, who is in way over her head, and everyone can see it except for her.
