Will voters settle for Joe Biden’s understudy?
This week’s celebration of Kamala Harris in Chicago faces an embarrassing fact: Until now, Democrats themselves thought she was less cut out to be president than Joe Biden.
If voters already had grave misgivings about Biden’s job performance before his disastrous debate in June – and polls show they did – what can they expect from his understudy?
Harris never received a vote of confidence from her own party until it wound up with a self-inflicted crisis thanks to Biden’s televised breakdown.
Democratic leaders knew all about his condition before this year’s primaries.
Yet they still let him run a second time rather than pushing to replace him with Harris when the party’s voters could still have a say.
The most charitable interpretation of that decision is that top Democrats didn’t think Harris would be much of an improvement over Biden – not enough to justify the ordeal of a contested primary or trying to get him to step down.
And indeed, the fact that Democrats are content to let Biden continue serving in the Oval Office, despite his debilities, suggests they don’t see a world of difference even now between him and a President Harris.
Their partisan calculation is that the last thing Harris needs right now is a track record.
If she became president before the election, voters would hold her to full account for the troubles of the Biden-Harris era, as well as for anything she did in her own right after taking over from Biden.
Harris’ greatest electoral advantage is a quality that sets her up for failure if she ever becomes president – she’s untested, and because she’s never so much as taken the tests other major-party nominees must pass, she can boast she’s never flunked.
Imagine trying that with the SATs!
Actually, there’s no need to imagine: In recent years, many prestigious colleges did stop asking prospective students for standardized test scores – and the result was such a drop in admissions quality that the tests had to be reinstituted.
It’s not the kind of experiment the country ought to try with the White House.
Normally, presidential primaries are the greatest test of a candidate, forcing a contender to defend his or her policies against competitors and in front of skeptical voters and journalists.
The peculiar way Democratic insiders made Harris the nominee shielded her from the examination other would-be presidents have to undergo.
And the fawning attitude much of the legacy media has toward Harris spares her from the full measure of press scrutiny a candidate typically receives.
The fact that she became the nominee so late in the season meant the media was already in a general-election mindset – not at all eager to question a Democrat’s qualifications but seeing everything as a horse race, one in which too many journalists have a clear favorite.
Harris’ resume is slender. Her highest achievement is serving as apprentice in the ill-fated Biden administration.
Outsider candidates, running to shake up the system and throw out the bums who’ve led the country into decline, often have little experience.
But outsider candidates also, by definition, have to oppose whatever the incumbent administration has been up to.
Donald Trump and Barack Obama ran as outsiders when they first won their parties’ nominations, and then the presidency.
They were issue candidates – the issue being that the country was on the wrong track, from foreign policy to the parlous state of the economy.
An incumbent administration, on the other hand, has to run based on what it’s actually accomplished – which in Biden’s case means nothing good.
Kamala Harris isn’t an outsider; she’s the junior partner in the incumbent administration, with all the drawbacks of the Biden report card, yet without Joe’s decades of testing and experience.
She isn’t a change candidate – she’s the status quo candidate.
Yet she represents the status quo minus Biden’s strengths, if also without his age-related weakness.
Voters weren’t set to reelect Biden even before his infirmity became a national scandal.
His policies and performance in office were scandal enough.
Now Harris is running on those same policies, which are her policies, and the Democratic Party’s, as well.
She’s offering America more of what the country is getting with Biden – but under a younger, more energetic leader who has never shown his degree of competence or won a single presidential primary.
That’s a recipe for catastrophe.
Harris is a more viable candidate than Biden was in his final weeks, but she isn’t prepared to be a better president – and Democrats know it.
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