Kamala Needs a Lame VP Candidate
Competence and accomplishment would contrast negatively with the DEI veep
The news is coming fast and furious as Democrats plan officially to coronate Vice President Kamala Harris their nominee by August 7, which is 12 days before their convention will begin. By this scenario, she will also have to select her running mate by that time. The conventional wisdom is that she needs and will choose an accomplished and boring Democrat governor—perhaps with some claim to centrism. This is terrible advice: it would mean her veep candidate is more appealing and qualified than she is to be president.
Harris needs someone less accomplished and more phony, which isn’t easy to do.
The early vote before the convention was originally justified because of an Ohio law that required nominees be chosen by August 7 in order to be included on the general election ballot. However, Ohio has since enacted a fix, delaying the deadline to September 1. (Incidentally, Trump will win Ohio.) Regardless, Democrats are using the matter to justify an early vote.
The move indicates that behind the brave face and induced enthusiasm of the switcheroo from dotard President Joe Biden to Harris, the party is in a state of deep anxiety over the candidate who has only a 39 percent approval rating. The early vote is an attempt to forestall any challenge to Harris that might emerge between now and when the convention begins on August 19. As the launch of Kamala’s candidacy begins to falter, party bosses and cadres nonetheless do not want a convention with the potential for more chaos than already exists. Supporters of Palestinians already plan a freakout.
The move is bold and authoritarian—like Hernan Cortes burning his ships upon arrival in the New World to motivate his men. Or the Bolsheviks murdering the Tsar despite previously eliminating his power. There will be no going back. The Democrats’ fate is now tied to Kama-lama-ding-dong and that is that. Given the coronations of Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, this means that the last time Democrat rank-and-file had a true debate and choice about the direction of their party was in 2008.
The move is one Democrats are likely to regret. Whereas the contest between former President Donald Trump and Biden had come to focus on Biden’s health, one between Trump and Harris will be fought over policy and general competency. This doesn’t help the Democrats much if at all.
Trump’s policies on taxes, tariffs, controlling inflation, economic growth, border control, deportation, and a Jacksonian national defense all have majority support across the country.
Harris, in contrast, has favored leniency for Antifa-BLM terrorists, eliminating U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confiscating guns, taxpayer-funded late-term abortion, free healthcare for illegals, banning natural gas production and transportation, sex changes for kids without parental consent, hiking taxes, government-run healthcare, and DEI hiring of the kind that landed her the vice presidency. Polls indicate each of these policies is unpopular with the public, especially when DEI is correctly defined as discrimination and political indoctrination.
Then there is the border, which is out of control, along with the rest of immigration policy. Kamala Harris is the border czar. That makes Harris culpable in what polls indicate is a crucial issue to voters in the 2024 presidential election. Trump has already seized on the matter, telling reporters:
Harris was appointed ‘border czar’ in March of 2021, and since that time, millions and millions of illegal aliens have invaded our country and countless Americans have been killed by migrant crime because of her willful demolition of American borders and laws.
Presumably upon orders from the Harris campaign, there is an amusing effort underway by its media lapdogs to deny that Harris was in charge. So far, leftwing outlets including Axios, Newsweak, New York Times/Pravda, New York Daily Snooze, Time, and USA Today (McPaper) have run very similar stories claiming Harris wasn’t the border czar at all. The energy behind this effort shows that the Democrats realize just how vulnerable Harris is on this issue.
Harris’s only real card to play comes down to identity politics. She would be the first woman president and the first president of South Asian descent (her mother is from India). She certainly played this card in her pathetic and short-lived 2020 run for president, accusing Biden in a debate of being a segregationist because of his concerns in the 1970s about forced bussing of children to other school districts—a concern shared by voters of all races. By the unwritten rules of Democrat politics, Biden, a white man, just had to sit there and take the hit.
Most Republicans would also be susceptible to this form of attack, nervous as they are about race even after the BLM-inspired trashing of American cities in 2020 and DEI fetish that has displaced traditional American meritocracy. Most Republicans that is except Trump and his vice-presidential nominee, J.D. Vance. Neither man should or would put up with Harris’s contrived aggrieved-black-woman act, which the public has conceptually opposed ever since it sided with Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas against lying fantasist Anita Hill in 1991—including most women and blacks who wanted Thomas confirmed.
Harris is off to an unimpressive start. Desperate to show a bump in the polls that one would expect from the emergence of any alternative to Biden, Reuters/Ipsos declared earlier this week that Harris had a two-point edge over Trump, 48-46. But the pollsters declined to provide details of the poll, indicating only that it was based on a “KnowledgePanel.” In other words, it was make-believe. As listed by RealClearPolitics, three other polls conducted entirely since Biden withdrew on July 21 have Trump in the lead. Recent polls also have Trump ahead in most battleground states. In other words, the Kalmala switcheroo is not exciting the public, even in the short term.
That brings us back to Harris’s choice for vice presidential nominee, which is “she/her” biggest chance to make a news splash before the Democrat convention. The media has thrown around the names of the governors of Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, among many others. All would come across as less offensive than Harris. What she really needs is someone like Pete Buttigieg, who was a gay mayor somewhere in Indiana before becoming a gay secretary of transportation—a job no one knew could be done poorly before he held the position.
Time will tell what Harris and the Democrat elite decide and then dictate to the party. Early omens do not foretell success.