It’s a risk, a mighty risk, for President Joe Biden to go out on the campaign trail as if he didn’t mind making a clown of himself. Look, with videos as proof positive, he will sometimes forget where he is, forget names, get lost in the speech he’s reading and apologize incomprehensibly. So, Vice President Kamala Harris may take his place.
That’s what is already happening and could persist throughout the campaign with the chance of her scarily becoming president in a year or two if Biden is re-elected and his physical and mental readiness continue to decline. We might then see replays of her gotcha oomph that was demonstrated in a 2019 TV debate when she and Biden were facing Democratic primary elections for president. At that time a U.S senator, she said he was not a racist and then in a raucous exchange as much as said he was.
She blasted Biden for opposing busing to integrate schools when he was a senator. Harris said he could have wrecked even her beneficial experiences of being bused to an integrated school as a child. The fact is that busing mostly inconvenienced and confused teachers, students, families and schools. With outspoken opposition from Black as well as white Americans, the practice was ended as a federal mandate.
Harris got a bit of a popular boost that night, but it didn’t last long, and she soon was saying she didn’t believe in a federal mandate either. Her campaign tumbled downhill with even her staff saying she wasn’t fit to be president. Minus donations enough to further her cause, she dropped out of the campaign before voting began but did not abandon her identity as a Black woman. Here was where Biden’s affirmative action tendencies took hold. Just as he later would want a Black woman on the Supreme Court, he wanted a Black woman as a running mate.
Her father, after all, was a Jamaican of Black and Irish descent, a brilliant man with a doctorate, and her mother, also armed with a doctorate, was from India. That reality gave Harris a second identity as an Asian-American, a member of the best educated and richest group in the country. She was eager to prove herself as vice president, and Biden gave her a chance, naming her czar of the country’s Southern border, a subject she seemed little interested in and did next to nothing about even as the number of illegal entries multiplied incredibly.
His own negligence and hers thereby wrecked cities and their economies, increased crime, made some schools unmanageable, forced girls abandoned by their parents into becoming prostitutes as a means of survival, helped facilitate the killing of tens of thousands of Americans with smuggled drugs and the list goes on. Harris said she would fix this major mess in the nation by addressing the root cause of terrible lives in the countries being fled. Sadly, significant improvement of conditions is only accomplished with massive changes in politics, economies and culture, something terribly hard to achieve.
As a senator, she earned attention with her fierce opposition to two Supreme Court nominees. In previous undertakings as California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney, she was revealed as something less than a bright and shining star. As a law professor named Lara Bazelon pointed out in a New York Times op-ed piece, she was guilty of “official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors” in order to uphold wrongful convictions.
Biden has mostly hidden out in the White House or vacationed in his home in Delaware, and the split in duties just may continue until the election, some of Washington’s journalistic detectives report. May some truth about this team nevertheless become known.