With the 2024 presidential campaign season kicking into high gear this summer has come renewed scrutiny over Kamala Harris‘ role as vice president and what she’s done and hasn’t done. Has she been an effective leader, and would she be considered by a majority of voters to be a viable alternative to Joe Biden should he bow out?
These are all questions rank-and-file political observers, especially Democrat operatives, are asking themselves as Harris hits the stump on behalf of her boss to make the case for their reelection.
So far, the surveys say no, voters do not approve of Biden’s second in command, which is something that Harris herself has laughably tried to spin as a positive in recent weeks.
Perhaps the most pathetic (and yet predictable) spin of all, however, came Sunday during CNN’s “State of the Union” program, where former Biden-Harris 2020 campaign senior staffer and transition team member Ashley Allison inadvertently revealed the big problem with (and for) Harris going into 2024.
It all started when Republican strategist Alice Stewart pointed out that, while some of Harris’ defenders were trying to portray Harris as a victim of baseless attacks, Harris has actually earned the criticism:
“I think we need to be honest about the origin of this. Look, yes, the president is old, and Kamala Harris is the heir apparent, potentially, if he were to step aside. But look where this began. The vice president was given a very impressive portfolio to deal with the border crisis, as well as election reform. She failed on both counts. She has not done her job as vice president.”
This did not sit well with Allison, who hit back with right out of the gate with the fact that Harris is a woman and is black:
“Well, I will just say, I think that this is happening for a couple of reasons. Most people don’t know what vice presidents do. And now she is a historymaker. She is a woman. She is a black woman. And it’s the easy thing to do to say, she’s the attack dog, go after her. She was not put in charge of the border. She was put in charge of the root causes and going down to Central and South America to discuss what is happening.”
After trotting out the sexism/racism cards and leaving out that Harris was a failure at the so-called “root causes” as well, Allison then predicted that once Harris hit the ground running on the campaign trail that she would impress and win over many converts:
“But my final point will be, she is taking it outside of Washington, D.C. She is done with us, the pundits, and she’s going to the people who will actually elect her. She’s talking about the issues that women care about, abortion. She’s talking about: I’m not going to debate Ron DeSantis on slavery. There is no debate there. And I appreciate it. And I think you will see her numbers start to increase and people will be accepting her of the job.”
Watch:
WATCH: CNN contributor Ashley Allison with the shameless smear of Republicans on State of the Union this morning. Allison suggests Republicans are being racist and sexist when criticizing Kamala Harris.
“I’ll just say, I think that this is happening for a couple of reasons: Most… pic.twitter.com/loLShGw1Zi
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 6, 2023
Ms. Allison is of course entitled to her own opinion but she is not entitled to her own facts.
The fact of the matter is that, as I explained previously, Harris is under the microscope not so much because she’s a black woman but because she could be 80-year-old Joe Biden’s successor should he bow out, as Stewart also observed. No matter who Biden had picked, there would be a laser focus on that person because that person was next in line to be president.
As it relates to her race and gender, the argument that they factor into her low approval ratings ignores how Harris was rejected during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary season by women voters and black voters alike, with her campaign spiraling out of control a month after she sprung a staged, race-based attack on Joe Biden during the first debate.
I guess we’re supposed to blame that on racism and sexism, too?
Harris, as we’ve noted before, has been her own worst enemy her entire career, with an entitlement mentality that should be offensive to women of all backgrounds who have worked hard to get where they are and who have not benefited from having an affair with a powerful married man who admittedly gave them one opportunity after another to rise to the top in the political world.
That heavy reliance from Team Kamala on her race and gender, feeling like she should be shielded from criticism on that basis is going to be a big problem for her as she goes out and gives speeches to voters. Because even though most people will acknowledge that racism and sexism do still exist in varying degrees in this country, voters have now elected a black president (Barack Obama) and several years later they elected another presidential ticket that included a black woman as VP. In other words, that glass ceiling has been shattered wide open.
Falling back on those tiresome identity cards as a substitute for substantive debate isn’t going to be the sure win it once was for Kamala Harris and Democrats in general. In fact, if anyone is obsessed about color and gender it is Democrats, which Allison proved with the excuses she made and which Joe Biden also confirmed when he picked Harris precisely because she was a woman of color (and because he was pressured to do so) in the first place.
Related: Kamala Harris Rolls Into Jacksonville for Anti-DeSantis Speech, Audience Didn’t Seem Too Impressed
