For the most part, the first 24 months of Kamala Harris’ term as vice president have been tumultuous with a high turnover rate in her office among senior staffers, one awkward word salad after another, multiple assignment failures, and infighting routinely taking place between her team and President Joe Biden’s team among the many issues plaguing Kamala World.
There have also reportedly been tensions between Harris and Biden directly, with a newly released book alleging that, according to top sources, Joe Biden realized his mistake in picking her to be his running mate very early on.
In the summer of 2022 going into the fall, however, media outlets were suggesting that there was a renewed sense of purpose for Harris after Roe v. Wade was overturned, with some in the media claiming that she’d at long last “found her footing” on the public relations and policy front.
But well into February 2023, we’ve learned that the uncomfortable second-guessing among Democrat leaders including those in “key states” about Harris has cranked up again.
The Washington Post ran a story a couple of weeks ago which detailed how, at “a pivotal point in Biden’s term, many party activists are not sure the vice president has shown she is up to winning the top job.”
“In 2016, she won her Senate seat against weak opposition, they say,” the paper also noted. “In 2019, her presidential run ended before a single ballot was cast, doomed by an uneven performance on the campaign trail, weak support, faltering resources and turmoil among her advisers.”
Almost a week later, the New York Times ran with its own type of “is Kamala up to the task?” (paraphrasing) story, reporting on how even Harris’ allies are said to be “tired of waiting” for her “to carve out a lane for herself” ahead of a potential 2024 run in the event Joe Biden decides to be a one term president.
The also Times wrote about how — now that it appears Biden will indeed run for a second term after all — the growing concern is that Harris will be a “liability” for him down the home stretch.
And behind the scenes, twice-failed Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton has allegedly expressed her disappointment with what she believed was Harris’ inability to “clear a primary field.”
To top it all off, there are other prominent Democrats who are waiting in the wings in the hope that Joe Biden decides he’d rather have someone else run alongside him.
Case in point, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) eye-opening comments during a recent interview where she expressed support for a Joe Biden 2024 run but refused to commit to supporting Harris as his running mate. This was in stark contrast to how she jumped on board the Biden-Harris train not long after Biden named Harris as his VP choice in 2020, with Warren making sure to alert anyone who would listen that she and Harris were supposedly old pals.
Though Biden is unlikely to choose someone else considering the obligations he undoubtedly feels towards the same prominent backers who pushed him to pick a woman of color in the first place, it was still wryly amusing for those of us on the outside looking in to see Warren and some of Harris’ behind-the-scenes critics on the left confirm in their own swampy way that there are really no true friends in electoral politics — just people, like Harris, who can be tossed to the side once they’ve outlived their usefulness.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
