To use the words of a small boy speaking to his idol, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

Yep, it’s so.  Joe Biden and the Democrats failed (on purpose?) to groom Kamala Harris to lead the party into the future.  Joe and they viewed her only as a DIE hire who could get votes, as a throw-away.  Biden passed the torch to Harris, but before that, he showed less interest in grooming her as a successor than in crude racial patronage.  Democrats know that Harris isn’t the best person to represent the party.  Yet convention delegates must support her because of Biden’s endorsement and because they’re shackled by their party’s radical embrace of identity politics.  Can they support Kamala Harris without making it seem like the convention was “rigged”?

Joe Biden’s mental acuity was questionable when he ran for president.  He and the Democrats should have spent the past three-plus years grooming his potential successor.  Instead, he (or Jill) thought he was immortal, so they sidelined his vice president, didn’t do anything to showcase Harris as a governing partner to the oldest president in history.  Kamala Harris is not very competent and not a particularly compelling leader.  However, Biden knew that skipping over her had the potential to anger and alienate core Democrat constituencies like black and female voters.  But she had already introduced herself to the American public, and no voters, core Democrat constituencies or otherwise, have rallied behind her.

Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, admitted that the White House should have worked harder to groom Kamala Harris for the future.  Said Klain (who is known to be an advocate of Harris), “Promoting one’s vice president is ‘always hard.’  Obviously, I wish, you know — you could always do more, and you should do more.”  As a consequence, many Americans, after three years of Biden’s and the Democrats’ poor stewardship of Harris, are now looking at her as if for the first time.

Lack of grooming has made Harris poor at diplomacy.  When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress, Harris failed to preside over the Senate chamber for Netanyahu’s speech.  She chose instead to address a sorority event in Indianapolis.  This is not the first time Harris has failed at foreign policy.  She attempted to convince Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to refrain from striking Russian oil refineries and putting upward pressure on global energy prices.  And she was characterized as “invisible” by Isabel Schnabel, an executive board member of the European Central Bank. 

Biden and Democrats insist that Harris’s vice presidency has been minimized by design.  She has been relegated to warm-up speaker and Biden stand-in, delivered remarks at White House events while Biden attended summits, or visited foreign leaders when Biden was on a vacation, or, after the debate, brought in to do clean-up.  Despite Biden saying that he wanted his second-in-command to be a governing  “partner” during the 2020 campaign, she got the “border czar” assignment, at which she failed miserably.  Longtime Harris supporters don’t see what she’s done or has tried to do as vice president.  Harris has, in an effort to deflect criticism, said the V.P. job comes with outsized scrutiny and no forgiveness for even small errors.

Harris hasn’t been a particularly exciting vice president.  However, as Biden’s partner for the last three and a half years, she has had no choice but to support and defend the agenda, policies, and actions of a president who is very unpopular.

Now that her turn at the top of the ticket has unavoidably come, it’s quite clear that she is woefully inadequate for the job of president.  And the tight election timeline will magnify any missteps she will make.  Harris has managed to become known for only three things: word salads, cackling at the wrong time, and abortion.  

As for word salads, she served up another one at the Essence Festival of Culture music festival in New Orleans, giving a repetitive definition of the word “culture.”  “Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right?  And in present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment.”

As for cackling at the wrong time, she cackled during a joint press conference with Polish president Andrzej Duda in Warsaw.  The cackle led Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s former press secretary to say it would be a “tragedy” if she ever became president.

Harris managed to combine abortion with word salad when delivering an address at Howard University: “So I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time — and certainly this one — to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future.”

Biden did groom her on one characteristic: his ability to outright lie, and to lie by taking Trump’s remarks out of context.  Harris’s propensity to lie reached new heights after she told a crowd that Donald Trump would terminate the Constitution.  Her remark came from a comment Trump posted on Truth Social in 2022 regarding his belief that the 2020 election had been stolen.  She conveniently omitted all the context from her lie.  She misrepresented Trump’s stance on abortion by claiming he would ban abortion nationwide when he expressly has said that he opposes a nationwide ban.

What Harris doesn’t realize is that these misrepresentations of the truth weaken her anti-Trump arguments by impairing her credibility. 

With only a few months to wage a campaign against Trump, Harris can’t afford to repeat the mistakes that sank her previous presidential bid.  There will be little time to recover.  She will need to be virtually error-free as she sprints to Election Day.  However, that prospect will, at best, be slim, since she wasn’t groomed to be at the top of any campaign.

No matter how diligently the Democrats and the MSM groom her, it’s too late.  After Biden’s withdrawal, they have worked to transform Harris’s image from a dud to a dynamic presidential candidate who can take on Donald Trump and win over battleground states voters with a moderate and modern message.  A repackaged Kamala Harris has hit the campaign trail as Democrats work to bury her reputation as Biden’s ineffective second-in-command and burnish her image for the top of the ticket.

Warren Beatty has created a web page that facilitates quick responses and/or comments to anything you consider outrageous: quick-rant.atwebpages.com.

Image via Picryl.