Still Can’t Find Kamala

The New York Times is out with a long feature yesterday entitled “In Search of Kamala Harris.” You’d think after two and a half years in office the sleuths at the Times news desk would have been able to find her by now, but apparently she is so stealthy that they have failed to do so.

The most telling sentence in the long piece is this: “White House senior advisers have exhorted Democrats to stop criticizing Harris to the press, on the record or off, telling them that it’s harmful to the overall ticket.” Has a White House ever had to tell its own party members to lay off a vice president? Dan Quayle and Spiro Agnew both got tons of bad press and low poll numbers, but I do not recall they ever received intra-party criticism as Harris has.

The story bends over backwards to be positive about Harris and avoid the plain truth, which is that she’s a lightweight in way over her head, and was a terrible choice as a running mate. But even the skilled ventriloquist journalists at the Times can’t disguise this fundamental fact.

It seems that not only is the media still searching for Harris; Harris is searching for herself!

In 2017, when Harris arrived in Washington as a senator from California, these contrasts were supposed to make her the Next Face of the Party, the rising star with an inside track to be the next Democratic presidential nominee. But after a disappointing 2020 campaign, and the reputational sting that has lasted ever since, Harris has often been a politician in search of a moment, rather than a leader defining this one. . . in terms of her own political profile, she has remained a vacuum of negative space, a vessel for supporters and detractors to fill as they choose, not least because she refuses to do so herself.

Part of Harris’s problem is clearly this:

Harris craved the approval of the party’s left wing, particularly the class of liberal, college-educated women who had grown more interested in [Elizabeth] Warren’s unabashed progressivism.

On the other hand, when the Times reporter tried to pin her down on her ideological disposition, she gave the usual dodge:

[Reporter:] “But one of the quotes I most remember from your presidential run was you saying, when asked what you believe in, that you weren’t trying to restructure society. How do you solve those kind of deep systemic inequalities?”

[Harris:] “I think you have to be more specific,” she parried, “because I’m not really into labels.”

“Not into labels” means you don’t want to admit the label that actually fits you but is currently unpopular.

The article reminds us of the circumstantial evidence that Harris is incapable:

By June of her first year in office, Politico had already declared that Harris’s office was “rife with dissent” and quoted an anonymous source claiming it was “an abusive environment.” A slew of staff departures fed a stream of headlines that only seemed to confirm the waywardness that had defined her presidential campaign. Her initial communications director, Ashley Etienne, left in less than a year. Simmons, her successor, stayed only a year and is now a commentator for CNN. The New York Post published a tally of Harris’s staff departures — 13 within 13 months. They included members of the advance team, her longtime policy adviser, her first chief of staff and her high-profile press secretary, Symone Sanders-Townsend, who now hosts a show on MSNBC. (Harris has yet to appear.)

And that she’s just plain weird:

Many of her rhetorical quirks extend beyond policy — the unbridled laugh (Harris has become the face of a new internet term, IJBOL, for “I just burst out laughing”); her passion for Venn diagrams (she mentions them so much that the G.O.P. has made a one-minute compilation video); and even her dance moves have become punchlines, shrinking Kamala Harris the vice president to Kamala Harris the meme.

So is this story part of a behind the scenes campaign to get Harris off the ticket? This part of the story is interesting:

Even off the record, Biden’s senior advisers say that there’s no desire to oust her and that the idea was never floated. One person in Biden’s inner circle suggested that the president would be personally offended by the suggestion: Obama’s campaign conducted polling on replacing Biden ahead of the 2012 election, and the subject stings the former vice president to this day.

I’m not sure whether that tidbit about Obama in 2012 has been previously reported, but it says a lot that Obama’s team recognized that Biden is a nitwit. As the entire world is now seeing.