Kamala Harris doesn’t actually do anything in her job, and maybe that’s more than just her laziness. Actually, with her miserable performance, and her poll numbers bottoming even Joe Biden’s, she seems to be in the throes of a power struggle with the White House to hold on to her job.
That’s the argument of the American Spectator, which has an interesting piece on signs of a White House bid to dump Harris:
The White House has been undercutting the vice president since Inauguration Day. She was assigned a portfolio of controversial and virtually impossible-to-achieve issues: stemming the flow across our southern border and passing legislation to federalize elections to overturn state laws that make it harder to commit voter fraud. More recently, Harris was dispatched to Paris for the thankless task of trying to mend our relationship with France in the aftermath of keeping President Emmanuel Macron in the dark as the Biden administration canceled the French contract to build submarines for Australia.
They are intentionally giving her tough assignments to torpedo her, and the consequent negative press she has generated has eroded her support to the extent that only 28 percent of voters approve of her job performance. Another poll found that 47 percent did not think she was qualified to be president.
A string of negative stories began appearing starting in May with headlines like “Kamala Harris Bombs at the Naval Academy.” Negative stories attributed to “anonymous White House sources” have appeared at an ever-increasing rate: “White House ‘Perplexed’ By Kamala Harris Performance on First Foreign Policy Trip: CNN,” “Biden’s milestone VP pick is looking more like a millstone,” and “The Long Knives Come out for Kamala Harris as Her Vice Presidency Continues to Collapse.”
The drumbeat picked up with a June 30 Politico story headlined “Not a healthy environment: Kamala Harris’ office rife with dissent.” It quoted anonymous White House “sources” who said that Harris’s office was dysfunctional: “It’s become an all-too-familiar pattern for a politician who has churned through several iterations of staff on her rise.” Similar stories denigrating Harris continued all summer. Then, on election night, November 2, the world collapsed on the Dems with dismal showings in state and local elections across the country. It was time to reassess their plans for the elections in 2022. …
A little more than a week after the Dems’ disastrous showing in state and local elections, the press unloaded withering broadsides at Kamala. On November 10, the Hill published a scathing critique of Harris: “At 28 percent, say goodbye to Kamala Harris being Plan B for an aging Biden.”
Bad assignments, bad stories. Even Peggy Noonan has noticed. And the White House knew that Kamala was too stupid to convert the bad assignments into good ones by restoring President Trump’s border wall and asylum policies. Had she done that, she would have ended the border surge, confounded Joe, and made him look stupid. She didn’t. She’s not that sharp a power player. Harris was a prisoner of her own left-wingery, and they knew it. So it was easy for the Bidenites to pull her by her own puppet strings and get her ensnared. Instead of beating Joe, she got the president of Guatemala making international headlines about her opacity on illegal migration, and in recent days noting that she just blew in and blew out of his country on her first official trip, and he hasn’t heard from her since. She went shopping for cookware in Paris instead.
The Spectator believes that Jill Biden is the one who’s behind this bid to oust Harris, and Harris is going to fight it.
Now that bad assignments and bad stories are out, Kamala remains a problem. The likely recourse now is for Jill and Joe to boot Harris the way President Nixon booted his vice president, Spiro Agnew, through some kind of “finding” of some illegal act with an impending indictment, which should be interesting stuff, given that she’s provided plenty of material already, some visible in the Hunter Biden laptop, as well as in her role of apparently anticipating and promoting the Jussie Smollett stunt.
The Spectator thinks Jill is positioning herself to become the replacement vice president, and after that, the president should something happen to Old Joe. One wonders how ambitious she might be to make that happen.
The Ambitious Jill theory seems far-fetched, but this isn’t a normal political age, so who knows?
Others, such as the Conservative Treehouse, have pointed out that the sudden recrudescence of Hillary Clinton, reading her 2016 presidential acceptance speech to the public, suggests that she too is in the market to replace the floundering Harris.
Harris is brimming with resentments, as she’s indicated in her office’s leaked complaints about White House racial and sexist favoritism toward Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, the only man known whose public approval ratings are below Kamala’s. Both of them would end up grease spots on the desert floor were they to take on Donald Trump in a head-to-head race. Mutual resentment was also obvious among Joe, Jill, and Kamala at the Bob Dole funeral — see AT deputy editor Andrea Widburg’s must-read piece here.
The most interesting detail here is that Kamala Harris would fight Joe in the great Democrat juggernaut to get her out of there. Will the Dems have some legal woes to pin on her? Will Harris fight those? What kind of furniture would she throw at Joe were that to happen? We all know she’ll whip out the racism card, and that will turn Jill green like the Incredible Hulk. We also know that it wouldn’t be hard to find something illegal that Harris has done — her whole career has been about corruption. If she were savvy, she’d throw the Hunter laptop contents at Joe even though she’d go down herself, too.
All of this should mean some interesting months in the long three years ahead of us as Joe’s stolen election term winds out.
American Thinker is a daily internet publication devoted to the thoughtful exploration of issues of importance to Americans. Contributors are accomplished in fields beyond journalism and animated to write for the general public out of concern for the complex and morally significant questions on the national agenda.
