I think it’s safe to say at this point that Vice President Kamala Harris has hindered more than helped Joe Biden’s presidency, whether we’re talking the policy failures like her gross mismanagement of the southern border crisis or the word salads and cringeworthy flubs she’s become infamous for whenever she gives interviews and speeches.
One would think that it would be hard to upstage Biden in the “embarrassing moments” department considering his lengthy record of some of the most epic gaffes and awkward statements in American political history. Yet Harris has come pretty close to doing just that over her 14 months in office, with speeches and interviews given in just the past week that prove the point.
But one wouldn’t know it if their sole source of information was Harris’ team, who have reportedly said behind closed doors that they believe the veep has “really hit a stride in interviews” over the last several months:
HARRIS ON MSNBC — On Friday, Harris did something rare: She sat down for a lengthy one-on-one TV interview. Even though MSNBC’s JOY REID is largely simpatico with the VP’s politics, members of Harris’ team were concerned about the potential for things to go poorly — and were especially worried about getting a pointed question on the administration rescinding the Trump-era Title 42 policy blocking asylum-seekers at the border, since her docket as VP includes the root causes of migration from Central American countries. (Not to worry — the topic never came up.)And despite some of Harris’ sit-down interviews causing a kerfuffle in the past (see: her chat last year with NBC’s LESTER HOLT, where her comments about visiting the border provided fodder for weeks of coverage), her team feels that over the last few months, she’s really hit a stride in interviews: get some moments that are memorable, but don’t cause days of dissection.
Let’s file this one under “You have got to be f—ing kidding me.” Seriously. I mean, what planet are these folks living on? The list of times Harris has demonstrated she’s in way over her head is so long that we can’t even come close to including them all here, but below are several examples:
If the issue wasn’t so serious, you’d feel okay laughing when you watch some of the above clips. But this is very serious – the woman is first in line to be president in the event something, God forbid, happens to Biden, and will be his heir apparent either in 2024 or in 2028.
And it’s not just the fact that she often seems like a deer in headlights when she does these events that is so concerning. I genuinely believe that at least 75% of the time she literally has no idea what she’s doing, that she’s just winging it – and it shows.
The Washington Post filed a report about Harris back in December that I think speaks to the crux of the problem in terms of what’s happening behind the scenes between her, her handlers, and her various other prep people. That report noted that people who used to work with her suggested she was a woman who leaves the important details of any assignment to staffers, while Harris herself goes before the cameras to bask in all the glory of her status and position and pretends she knows what she’s talking about.
And when it all falls apart? She blames her staffers:
Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
As I’ve said before, Harris is a considerable part of why Democrats are facing possible catastrophic election losses come fall. Though VPs don’t normally factor much into voters’ decisions about other candidates, the Biden White House has had her out front and center considerably more so than you normally see VPs because she’s a “historic first” and they want to make sure people believe they trust Harris to get the job done.
Sadly for Joe and company, trotting out Kamala Harris to score “woke” points has backfired in more ways than one, as their plummeting approval numbers make clear. The only question at this point is how much worse it will get for her – and them – as far as voters are concerned between now and November.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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