Kamala Harris is painfully out of her depth The ineffectual VP isn't worthy of higher office

Following Joe Biden’s belated withdrawal from the presidential race, the onslaught of felching flattery about his heroically sacrificial character and his administration’s astonishing, unprecedented, better-than-FDR-scale accomplishments began within minutes. From the Democratic party’s grand poohbahs and their lickspittles in the media, this fawning admiration is intended to compensate for having done nothing but insult, undermine, and leak against the President for three weeks. Now his detractors are suddenly Biden’s greatest fans. But don’t expect smarmy, unctuous if subtly guilt-ridden bootlicking from this columnist.

Pining over what might-have-been is more the stuff of poetry than of politics. Yet this is an apt juncture at which to reflect on the obvious alternative to today’s shambolic state of the Democratic party, which now, three and a half months before the election and under a month before its August convention, doesn’t actually have a candidate for president. I last wrote here about my fondness for parallel universes, so check this one out.

After forcing himself to watch the same YouTube videos that the public has been hooting over for years — of his own halting, rambling, often incoherent and ungrammatical performances from earlier in his term — a truly heroic elderly president honours his implicit 2020 promise to his colleagues and constituency. Thus, in January 2023, he announces that he has no intention of running for another term. This long lead time allows a range of candidates to throw hats into the ring — you know, all those names numbingly repeated ever since Biden’s train-wreck debate as demonstration of his party’s “deep bench”. Fingers crossed that in our parallel universe at least one of these candidates in a highly competitive primary season is not a lunatic dicks-in-women’s-sports progressive who therefore has a great chance of beating Trump.

In this fantasy, too, the Dems don’t put Biden’s idiotic diversity hire VP through a hasty rinse cycle, but instead acknowledge that even a large proportion of Democratic voters detest the woman. Oh, Kamala runs, all right, but she doesn’t do that much better than when she ran for president the first time, then proving so unpopular even in her own state of California that she bowed out before testing herself in a single primary. Never underestimate the far-Left-led party’s capacity to utterly misread the electorate and nominate some Witless Woke Weirdo — but at least this scenario allows for the possibility that a sensible centrist freakishly squeaks through. In which case, Trump is toast.

But back to reality! There’s been much talk about an “open” Democratic convention, in which a crowd of presidential aspirants duke it out — nicely, of course, never emitting a discouraging word about their lovely but perhaps ever so slightly misguided opponents — hence garnering excited media attention and rousing a disgruntled, resentful electorate out of their torpor of resignation to become riveted by the suspense over who will emerge as their saviour in November.

Yet given that the superior pols at the top of the “Democratic” party don’t really believe in democracy but more in noblesse oblige — a.k.a., “Yo, voters, don’t worry your pretty heads about who runs the country” — this “open” proposition is a longshot. It’s unlikely that folks so convinced that they always know best will leave the nomination to chance. I’m hardly sticking my neck out here, much less distinguishing myself as some sort of analytical genius, by regarding the nomination of Kamala Harris as almost inevitable — although I would love to be wrong.

Like the majority of American voters, I am a “double hater”, and it’s telling about this election that the tag months ago became a set expression. As I’ve been engaged for over a year in an exhausting internal battle over which presumptive major-party presidential candidate I revile the more, maybe you’d expect that the withdrawal of at least one of these bêtes noirs would make me happy. It doesn’t.

If Kamala Harris takes Biden’s place at the top of the ticket, I’m still a double hater, and I’m still agonised over which presidential candidate I revile the more. She’s an intellectual lightweight — and I’m being polite. She cannot think on her feet. I’ve never heard her say anything original or observant; at her best, she simply recites the party line. At her worst, she’s too lazy to memorise the party line, for she has a history of not bothering to do her homework before official appearances. Much like Jill Biden, she often resorts to the persona of a kindergarten teacher. She comes across as a fake, and most voters — most people, even children — are keenly attuned to artifice. (Trump is an asshole, but at least he’s genuinely an asshole.) She has a reputation as personally unpleasant, helping to explain why she’s run through staff like disposable cutlery.

Kamala is an atrocious orator. Should she secure the nomination, her vapid, meaningless, repetitious, and asinine rhetoric during her vice presidency has gifted the Trump campaign with a series of upcoming TV adverts that will be not only devastating but winningly hilarious. Brace yourself for whole 30-second spots that do nothing but splice episodes of Kamala’s signature nervous cackle back-to-back.

Kamala’s approach to her primary remit in the administration, the chaos at the southern border, hasn’t been merely ineffectual, but non-existent. There has been no approach. Memorably, when pressed a while back why she’d never even visited that border, she let loose her typically inappropriate cackle and said, “Well, I haven’t been to Europe, either!”, seeming to regard the riposte as sparkling repartee. She’s repeatedly assured the nation that “the border is secure”, in yet another instance of Democratic “gas-lighting” so commonplace that we’ve got sick to death of the word.

Kamala pushes the whole progressive DEI schtick. You can hardly blame her, since it’s an obsession with “identity”, competence be damned, that got her where she is today. The sole reason Biden picked the woman for VP to begin with — who had, remember, all but called him a racist during the 2020 debates — was her status as a triple token: female, check, black, check, and as a cherry-on-the-sundae sweetener, South Asian, check. As a president, she’d be so painfully out of her depth that the progressive hard leftists who’ve clearly manipulated Biden’s policies are probably salivating, because controlling Kamala’s agenda could be even easier.

Much as any self-possessed, moderate, not-Trump Republican could have wiped the floor with Biden in November, a self-possessed, moderate Democrat could still wipe the floor with Trump. Kamala Harris is not self-possessed and not moderate. She is a prime example of the way affirmative action puts the Peter Principle on steroids, elevating a worse-than-mediocrity to high office, and now to such a giddy position that she’s in contest for the highest office in the world. A Harris v Trump election in November would likely be tight. A political middle-of-the-roader such as the now-independent Senator Joe Manchin (thanks for the suggestion, Ross Douthat), who almost single-handedly kept a lid on some of Biden’s fiscally ruinous legislative excesses, would surely beat Trump by a landslide — though Manchin is regarded as a traitor in Democratic circles and is doubtless not a realistic option.

All the post-debate drama, the confusion, the what-now? as of Sunday afternoon, and the rushed, cynical makeover of Kamala Harris from millstone around the ticket to the second coming: it’s all Joe Biden’s fault, because he shouldn’t have run for another term from the start. It’s also the fault of innumerable enablers in the administration, in Congress, and in the media, who were all smug in their collusive certainty that they could run a potted plant for president and none of the sad little people who cast their ballots would ever notice it wilts when in need of watering.

I’m sure the high-stakes theatre has been fun to follow from a distance. But the one thing you’d think I’d get out of all this tumult is relief from the draining tug of war between two unacceptable choices in my head. Instead, after a second assassination attempt on a presidential candidate this month — a metaphorical one that finally succeeded — I’m left still disgruntled, still resentful that no one is likely to be on the ballot for whom I can vote without holding my nose, and still dismayed that we Americans are apt to be choosing between two prospective leaders, neither of whom is by any stretch of the imagination qualified for the job.