As Biden-Harris Tensions Go Public, Is Kamala Being Shoved Aside?

The plan seemed clear at the highest levels of the Democratic Party. Put Joe Biden forward in the pandemic-plagued 2020 election as a harmless replacement for Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and have the demographically ideal Kamala Harris waiting in the wings to take the reins in 2024, when progressives would be in full flower.

It seemed, as they say, a good idea at the time. But it’s all gone terribly wrong, with approval of both the president and vice-president collapsing like the house of cards it has been all along. The ticket was built on a foundation of quicksand designed strictly to cash in on unique historical circumstances that made possible the takedown of a reviled president. But payment has come due in their deal with the devil. The chariot of election 2020 has turned back into a pumpkin. All that is left now is Biden’s naked decline for all the world to see, and Harris’ repeated embarrassments, failures, and singularly unappealing character.

Nevertheless, it seems the bulk of informed observers persist in the belief that, if only by default, Kamala is the choice to carry the Dems’ banner forward in 2024. Among them is Liberty Nation’s own Joe Schaeffer, who points to the heavy support for Harris among the Dems’ most moneyed backers, headed by far-left George Soros. This reality, together with a remarkable dearth of viable Democratic candidates ready for prime time, might admittedly lead one to the conclusion that Harris is on track to be the heir apparent in 2024.

But what if she was never supposed to actually be that? What if she was selected as nothing more than a cynical bow to progressives obsessed with race and gender? What if she was just a vehicle to help push Biden across the finish line, only to be discarded once her usefulness ran out?

There is certainly evidence in plain sight that Harris may never have been the anointed one. If you wanted to transmit the message that the VP was truly next in line for the Oval Office, you would try especially hard to prop her up and talk her up, given that the current president will be 82 when the next election comes around and is growing more unpopular with each passing month. You would try to ramp up her approval by assigning her tasks that are high-profile but relatively easy to achieve.

What you would not do if you are grooming her to be the 47th president is send her headlong into a self-inflicted border crisis, knowing she would be forced to defend indefensible policies that have turned the border into a sieve. You would not prevent her from visiting the border to avoid the heat she’s received for her non-visit. And you would not drop the highest-ranking woman of color in American history into the middle of the hottest of hot-button, racially supercharged issues: voting rights. In sum, you would protect her. You would not dump your worst problems on her. But that’s exactly what this administration has done.

Now, a new issue in the relationship, centered around race, has reared its head. After the White House went out of its way recently to defend Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for taking paternity leave as the supply chain crisis worsened, a former aide to Harris told CNN about an unmistakable contrast: “It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves.”

At the same time, it is rather extraordinary for any White House to deem it necessary to explain that the Vice President of the United States remains relevant. And that is especially true when the current second in command was touted as arguably the most significant vice president in history, as the first woman and first woman of color ever to hold that high position. Thus, it was deeply revealing how White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded this week to the growing chorus of naysayers and Democrats undoubtedly shaken by Kamala’s lower-than-low approval numbers, tweeting: “For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country—from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband.”

As Shakespeare once put it, the lady doth protest too much, methinks. The compulsion for Psaki to drive home talking points that should be self-evident – if they were true – betrays an insecurity about Harris within the administration as deep as the vice president’s personal insecurity, most plainly revealed in her laughter at all the wrong times and places. Doubling down on what has become an LOL phrase about the VP, “root causes,” only accentuates the problem of perception, if not competence, swirling around the woman long assumed to be the anointed successor to Joe Biden.

But what is even more noteworthy than having the chief administration spokesperson over-explain the importance of the vice president is for left-wing elite media to admit things have gone as far south as they have for their chosen team. Indeed, it’s gotten so bad that even CNN has now been forced to report on the perilous state of play for the president whom they all but begged viewers to elect, and the deteriorating relationship between the president and Vice President Kamala Harris, which they term an “exhausted stalemate.”

There is little doubt that Democrats and their sycophants in the media are reeling as they think ahead to both the midterm and presidential elections to come. But for all the speculation past and present placing her atop her party’s ticket in 2024, given her record low approval together with her virtual face-plant in the 2020 presidential primary, the question of Kamala Harris’s future may have already been answered. The fearsome specter of another run by Donald Trump appears more and more likely, so even with heavy support from Soros and an extraordinary absence of viable alternatives, will Democrats really roll the dice on someone who has not only flopped as vice president, but failed so badly in her previous run for the top spot that she dropped out before the first votes were even cast?

~ Read more from Tim Donner.