Kamala Harris and the age of her boss Biden

It’s more than a little … perhaps shocking, perhaps ironic … that after being the victim of an absurd age-based bit of commentary on the part of the departed CNN host Don Lemon, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley feels the urge to lay on a bit of ageism herself.

But, after being called out at the ripe old age of 51 by Lemon as a woman likely “past her prime,” Haley, having taken it, somehow felt like dishing it out.

In April, Haley said: “I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.”

And how do you really feel about the president’s chances of even surviving the next five years, Ambassador Haley?

Given the aging of the electorate, and the fact that so many Americans are living very full lives at advanced years that just a few generations ago would have been considered positively geriatric, Haley expressing as “a matter of fact” her feelings that the president will soon be dead is perhaps not the best political move to make.

On the other hand, perhaps she is just giving voice to what even many allies of President Biden are whispering; what Democratic voters are known to be concerned about; what many GOP leaders are increasingly unafraid to mention: Biden, at 80 the oldest president ever to hold office, is going to have to deal with the issue of his, well, increasingly senior status if he goes ahead with his plans to seek re-election.

Sen. Ted Cruz called Biden “142 years old.”

Politics, as they say, ain’t bean-bag.

But, in a recent piece for Politico, longtime television political analyst and five-time Emmy winner Jeff Greenfield went straight to the heart of the succession matter regarding Biden’s age: “Particularly if the GOP sees Vice President Kamala Harris as a weaker figure than President Joe Biden, the attacks on her as a potential president will only increase.”

If Biden is historically unpopular with Americans when they are polled about him, with many Democrats who voted for him in 2020 longing for someone else to be their party’s standard-bearer in 2024, Harris’s poll numbers are even worse.

This editorial board has been among the most critical voices about Kamala Harris’s failing ever-upward on her political path for many years now. Ever since an editorial board meeting with us as she ran for United States Senate in which she touted a truancy plan she created as San Francisco district attorney and yet admitted that she had no idea — none — about how successful it had been in actually reducing truancy, it has been hard to view her as anything but all self-serving talk, no action.

She moves on from job to job — DA to attorney general to senator to presidential candidate to vice president — without much to show for it, with little gravitas, with no stick-to-it-iveness, riding hard on the certainly interesting and very California circumstances of her life story as the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrant parents.

Historically, Greenfield points out, vice presidential candidates and actual vice presidents have been problematic for their bosses but in the end not very consequential to a ticket’s success. Dan Quayle was no genius, and, as Sen. Lloyd Bentsen quipped in a debate, “no Jack Kennedy,” but his ticket with George H.W. Bush on top still won by 8 percentage points. Sarah Palin was seen as a weight on candidate John McCain’s presidential bid, but a later study from UC Irvine showed that she had no effect on the election.

Should Biden dump the unpopular Harris from his ticket? There certainly are better candidates out there. But to do so would perhaps invite as much criticism as it would praise, and would likely lose some voters as well as winning some.

And, just to speculate, wouldn’t it be something to see a vice-presidential debate between a Kamala Harris and let’s say a Nikki Haley, two American women with roots in India and very different politics indeed? The advanced ages of the men who are likely to be atop those tickets would recede as an issue for the moment and two women very much in their prime could have at it.