Panicked Democrats are deep into the blame game as rising inflation and plummeting polls have the White House — and its media enablers — shooting off in every direction.
CNN brought out the heavy artillery on Sunday, firing a barrage directly into the lap of alleged Vice President Kamala Harris, in the form of a nearly 5,000-word hit piece.
Harris has been on a roll lately, like a snowball gaining size and speed right into the political abyss.
The CNN report says that “key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands” at Harris and her inept staff because they’re “worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus.”
For their part, Harris’ people claim that “she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined,” and that the White House makes her feel “constrained in what she’s able to do politically.”
If true, for once I’m going to have to take the side of Presidentish Joe Biden.
Sort of.
After Biden trashed relations with France last summer by scuttling a multibillion-dollar submarine deal with Australia, the White House decided that the best way to repair the damage was to send Harris on a goodwill trip to Paris.
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What were they thinking?
This unprepared and nervous lightweight is one heartbeat away from the presidency.
Nevertheless, longtime Harris friend (and California lieutenant governor) Eleni Kounalakis told CNN that “those of us who know her know how much more helpful she can be than she is currently being asked to be.”
I’d argue that the only thing worse for this White House than letting Biden out in public is sending Harris out instead.
The CNN piece hit such a nerve that White House press secretary Jen Psaki took to Twitter almost immediately to defend the drowning Veep.
For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country—from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband.
— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) November 15, 2021
But as my colleague Chris Queen wrote earlier on Monday: “These platitudes are all well and good as our border crisis — which the administration put Harris in charge of handling — continues to rage out of control.”
Panicked Democrats got a double-whammy on Sunday.
Mere hours after CNN came out swinging against Harris, the Washington Post busted out with guns blazing on the Biden White house.
The intro of Tyler Pager’s smackdown was so brutal that it reads like something you’d expect to find right here at VodkaPundit, slamming Biden for getting it wrong on inflation, COVID, and Afghanistan.
Pager then writes that “a growing number of Democrats worry that the White House has repeatedly underestimated the scale of the challenges facing the country.” Worse — because it involves losing power — panicked Democrats believe that Biden’s weak performance is “exacerbating the party’s political problems and making its already perilous path to holding Congress in 2022 even more difficult.”
Pennsylvania Congresscritter Conor Lamb, another one of those panicked Democrats, is already distancing himself from the Biden White House, in preparation for a Senate run next year.
It’s one thing to have a gaffe-prone veep with approval ratings lower than Genghis Khan’s in Baghdad of 1258. It’s quite another to have a president so lame that he could take down the whole party. “To the extent I’m challenging our party, I am saying we have to break these issues down into simpler, more immediate terms: What are you going to do about the price of the gifts I’m about to buy my kids for Christmas?” he told the Post.
Other Democrats quoted in the story have similar complaints about “mixed messaging” from the White House, but the real story is that Biden’s problems go much deeper than poor public relations.
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The Biden plan for dealing with the logistical knots causing so many headaches is to send alleged Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg out — after cutting short his months-long maternity leave — to tell people that transportation is racist. The Biden plan for fighting inflation is to print up more money (inflationary!) while vastly expanding the regulatory state (ditto). The Biden plan for COVID is a mandate it doesn’t have the power to enforce. The Biden plan for the border fiasco is to tear down the wall. The Biden plan for getting more of our people out of Afghanistan is to hope everybody forgets they’re still there.
The White House would love it if Harris would take the fall, but they can’t leave her dangling, either. Congress can’t afford to pass Build Back Better, but they can’t afford to torpedo Biden’s signature legislation. Democrats need to be seen as centrists, but the party’s most vocal members and supporters are all-in on CRT, BLM, Green New Deal, and every other trendy bit of postmodern Marxism.
Thus the circular firing squad.
After a big election loss, like Republicans suffered in 2006 and ’08, or Democrats did in 2016, it’s both expected and necessary for the losing party to endure serious internal bloodletting.
But panicked Democrats are going after one another’s throats over an election that’s still a year away.
Fun, isn’t it?
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