Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., was a good soldier for his party – and co-chairman of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign – expressing something almost no American believes.
For that matter, most Americans don’t likely think Coons believes that Vice President Kamala Harris is ready to be president either.
Kamala Harris Has Struggled as Veep
For some progressives, a Kamala Harris presidency might seem like an intersectional nirvana. Americans familiar with Harris flailing to complete a sentence before breaking out into hysterical laughter, believe this constitutes a national emergency.
Still, events over the span of a week are enough to raise serious alarm among Americans.
“The vice president, like many vice presidents, has struggled to get positive press coverage and to get the credit she deserves for the hard work that she’s been doing,” Coons said in an interview with ABC News. He went on to say, “The vice president is ready to run and ready to be president should that ever happen. I know our president has great confidence in her, and so do I.”
Lack of Transparency from White House
This perhaps wouldn’t be such a big deal had the Biden White House days earlier been clearer about whether a re-elected Biden would serve out his second term.
Asked a fairly simple question, “Does the president plan to serve all eight years?” the best White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre could offer was: “I’m just not going to get ahead of the president on that. I’m just not going to get ahead of it. That’s something for him to decide. I’m just not going to get ahead of it. There is a 2024 campaign. Anything related to that, I would refer you to that.”
She later tried to clean the response up on Twitter, blaming the Hatch Act for an unclear answer.
“As you know, we take following the law seriously,” the press secretary said in a tweet. “So, I wanted to be sure that I didn’t go into 2024 more than is appropriate under the law. But I can confirm that if re-elected, @POTUS would serve all 8 years.”
Kamala Harris Continues to Falter
This comes the same week that Harris made another of what her critics gleefully call a “word salad” when speaking – or doing something akin to speaking – at a pro-choice rally in Washington.
“So, I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future,” Harris said, or tried to say.
This has been the continuous touchstone of her time as vice president.
The Biden White House and a chief campaign spokesman for the Biden re-election campaign are now raising the prospect that Harris could step into the presidency.
Of course, any vice president could become president. That’s sort of what they’re there for – the unforeseen. In this case, we aren’t talking about a matter of life or death. The prospect here is that our nation’s octogenarian president might be the first commander-in-chief to—not to resign—but retire before his second term is up.
In fact, it might be the point.
At least one of the key reasons Biden is running for re-election at his age is that he has already beaten Donald Trump and polls show he could potentially beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Harris would clearly lose to both, probably badly. But a Biden reelection victory, followed by retirement, is the most likely path for a Harris presidency.
A Kamala Harris Administration
This is an unsettling notion that warrants discussion for the 2024 campaign.
What can we expect from President Kamala Harris’s State of the Union addresses?
Sure, those speeches are usually carefully written. But she doesn’t exactly seem to follow the script.
The problem doesn’t really seem to be that she’s not smart enough to follow the teleprompter. Rather, she seems to think she’s too smart for the teleprompter.
Whenever she engages in muddled gibberish, it comes across as if she’s trying really hard to sound profound. She wants to be an Aaron Sorkin character and she just isn’t. Most politicians aren’t.
More times than not, keeping it simple would serve her well. Both Biden and Trump have had success with keeping it simple.
Barack Obama mastered the soaring oratory, making simple points sound profound to an unassuming audience. But he also knew how to communicate. While other gifted communicators in the White House – Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton – were mostly folksy communicators who saved the profound for a profound circumstance.
Perhaps she would vastly improve if Harris could simply read the script or talk from the heart and stop imagining herself into West Wing reruns. She doesn’t have to live up to a caricature. She’s the real vice president and possible future president.
Any reasonable person with eyes and ears would question her capacity to be president. She ascended to the vice presidency during her first Senate term – like Obama. Unlike Obama – who was only an Illinois state legislator four years before running for president – Harris is a former California attorney general, which means she had a better political resume than Obama and more executive experience than Biden.
Yet, such qualifications do not seem evident. Perhaps she’s a bright person void of communication skills. She might well be better suited as a shrewd political player behind the scenes but was improperly cast into a role that requires public speaking.
But we are where we are, and prospects of how she would run the nation’s foreign affairs and the economy are troubling.
Either way, one Biden political legacy seems to clearly be making George H.W. Bush and John McCain look wise at choosing a running mate.
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Barbara Joanna Lucas is a writer and researcher in Northern Virginia. She has been a healthcare professional, political blogger, is a proud dog mom, and news junkie. Follow her on Twitter @BasiaJL.
