BY MOSHE HILL OPINION COLUMNS JULY 24 2024
It took 24 days from showing the world how mentally incapable he was for Joe Biden to announce that he is no longer running for President. In doing so, Biden cemented his legacy and threw a wrench in the Republican campaign against him. What is that legacy, however, and what will the campaign for the next President look like now?
Democrats are desperately trying to frame this move as a courageous one by a selfless man who has accomplished great things his term in office. This is pure spin, as the reality of the Biden presidency is one of death and destruction. Biden is best known – by at least half of the country anyway – as the President who allowed at least 10 million illegals to come through the southern border, 40-year-high inflation, massive wars in Europe and the Middle East, and the biggest medical coverup since FDR was in a wheelchair.
Kamala Harris was there the whole time this all happened. She was named border czar, but never went to the border. She stumped for Biden’s economic plans and foreign policy. She covered up his mental decline. Every time she is on camera her poll numbers go down because of her sheer unlikability as a person. Yet she is the chosen successor for Joe Biden because she played the political game as well as anyone has since Barack Obama.
Harris began her political career as a deputy prosecutor in California after passing the bar exam on her second attempt. When she was 29, she started dating Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown, who was 60 and married at the time. Through his influence, she received high paying government patronage jobs. She spent the next decade parlaying personal relationships into political power, rising to become the Attorney General of California and eventually Senator.
When Harris ran for President in 2020, polling immediately was in her favor. On paper, she’s a very attractive Democrat candidate. She is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants (although she falsely has claimed to be African-American), she spouts far left progressive ideology but also can claim that she’s tough on crime because she was a prosecutor. When people actually heard her speak, however, she plummeted so far so quickly that she was forced to drop her campaign before the Iowa caucuses.
Joe Biden brought Harris back from the political scrapyard for one reason and one reason only: She was a woman of color. In March 2020, he vowed to pick a woman as his Vice President. In August 2020, he was pressured by prominent black celebrities and political leaders to make that pick a black woman, which he promised to do. The list was short, and Kamala was the most prominent name on the list, so she got the call.
This was politically convenient for Harris, obviously, and she had no problem flip-flopping on her previous criticisms of Biden instantly. On the debate stage and in the campaign trail, Harris accused Biden of siding with segregationists to keep people who looked like her out of school and said that she believed the women that accused Biden of harassment and assault. She was never asked about this flip flopping, and she never offered an explanation.
Harris is not without her controversy. She helped bail out rioters from the summer 2020 BLM riots. She advocated for defunding the police. She locked up minor marijuana offenders while then railing against those who do so. She unilaterally subverted the voters of California when she refused to defend Prop 8 (a ballot measure that defined marriage as between a man and a woman that passed) in court. She lied about going to the border. She was complicit in covering up Biden’s dementia.
None of this means she cannot win. The race has changed significantly. Kamala polls nationally better than Biden did against Trump, but the race is not a national one. The polling data from the battleground states are not in yet. Then there’s who Harris picks as her VP. If she chooses moderate Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who is a religiously conservative Jew, will the anti-Semites in the Democratic Party in Michigan and Minnesota stay home? If she picks a woman, will suburban women have record turnout? There’s too much in the air right now to make any educated predictions.
What we know for certain, however, is that the Biden campaign in 2020 ran on the idea that there would be a “return to normalcy.” Has anything in the last three weeks (or three years) felt “normal”? This has been the most turbulent time in recent American history, but not because of a pandemic, and not because of a foreign adversary to the United States, or any other kind of external force or natural disaster. This has been a turbulent time solely because the President of the United States and his party have decided to put their own lust for power ahead of the interests of the American people. And Kamala Harris has been an integral part of that.
