U.S. President Joe Biden listens as Vice President Kamala Harris speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, on May 13.Susan Walsh/The Associated Press
It was almost like it was planned.
Or at least, it was a decision that was made well before Sunday. The Democratic powers-that-be in Washington had time to put together a well-orchestrated operation on behalf of U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris.
For in the immediate hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would not be seeking re-election after all, and that he was endorsing the 59-year-old Ms. Harris for the job, that validation was ratified by a host of people, some of whom were considered serious contenders for the position in the event of a situation just like the one that presented itself on Sunday.
Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania were both quick to endorse Ms. Harris. Then Bill and Hillary Clinton. North Carolina quickly announced that its delegation to the Democrats’ August convention would be endorsing Ms. Harris. South Carolina soon followed suit. There would be many others.
David Axelrod, the chief political strategist behind Barack Obama’s rise to power, was impressed.
“The @VP’s political shock-and-awe campaign over the past few hours since the president’s announcement has been impressive,” he said on X.
Why is any of this important? Because it signals there is a grander plan in place to give Ms. Harris the best chance of beating former president Donald Trump in this year’s ever-so-important U.S. election. It also says there might be a chance the Democrats can recover from their disastrous run-up to the November election so far, which has given Mr. Trump a sizable head start in the presidential race.
Ms. Harris is not the perfect candidate – not by a long shot. I earlier chronicled her many imperfections as a vice-president. That said, we are where we are, and she would still be a far more prudent choice for America than the Republican alternative. It can’t be said often enough – Donald Trump is a menace who only bodes ill for the country he purports to love so much.
Whatever you think of Ms. Harris, and her vulnerabilities and weaknesses, she still gives the Democrats a better chance of victory in November than Mr. Biden. She is bad news for Mr. Trump and the Republicans. They too knew this day was likely coming and had a TV ad blitz prepared.
One ad making the rounds associates her with the Biden administration’s record on immigration, inflation and the rising costs of home ownership in the U.S. In other words, they’ve substituted Ms. Harris for Mr. Biden.
Not terribly original. There will likely be more that associates her with all the problems in the state of California from which she hails. Homelessness. Crime. Poverty. You name it.
What Ms. Harris has going for her is this: age.
She can now flip the script on the Republicans, who said Mr. Biden was far too old and frail to hold office, and say the same applies to Mr. Trump, who is 78 and would be in his 80s while holding the presidency if elected. And she can hold out, as evidence, a plethora of breathtakingly bizarre utterances and outright lies that have passed the man’s lips in the last several months alone.
This is someone who now compares himself to Al Capone, the notorious American gangster, saying (incorrectly) that he’s been indicted more frequently than “Scarface” ever was. He told one crowd that Americans aren’t allowed to watch the movie Gone with the Wind any more. “You tell me, is our country screwed up?” he asked. Except none of it is true.
He has described migrants as “animals” and said they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans. Mr. Trump has said he will be a dictator on day one of his presidency, but later clarified it would only be for the one day alone. (Who believes that?) He has said there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses in November.
Yes, Joe Biden was not fit to continue in office. His disastrous performance in his recent debate against Mr. Trump made that clear. But there has been something incredibly unfair and one-sided in the focus on Mr. Biden’s cognitive decline, while ignoring Mr. Trump’s.
His four years in office should have disqualified him from ever running for office again. His role in inciting an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, should have made him ineligible for any presidential ballot for the rest of his life. The fact that it hasn’t is beyond sad.
Should Ms. Harris indeed win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, one other thing should matter in any matchup against Mr. Trump: their time spent in a courtroom. Her presence in it has been as a star prosecutor. Mr. Trump’s has been as a many-times-over defendant and eventually a convicted criminal.
That should count for something.