The big problem with Joe Biden’s VP pick Kamala Harris
Joe Biden has just picked ambitious former prosecutor Kamala Harris as his running mate in an attempt to get the law and order vote, but she may be more hindrance than help to his campaign.
Opinion
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And so, in the end, Joe Biden decided to go with the cop.
Faced with losing the suburban vote to Donald Trump with crime, looting, and civil unrest in America’s mostly Democrat-run cities spiralling out of control Biden – or rather, his handlers – decided to pick former California attorney general Kamala Harris as his running mate.
Given Biden’s advanced age and, more importantly, concerns about his apparently declining mental acuity, it’s an important choice.
Should Biden win in November – and polls at the moment are on his side – there is every likelihood that his vice-president would be called to step in and take power.
The only problem is that in choosing a supposedly law and order candidate (while also fulfilling Biden’s earlier commitment to pick a black woman running mate), the Biden camp has set themselves up for a huge amount of heartache down the road.
While Americans are sick of seeing their downtowns trashed by looters, rioters, and Antifa goons, they still haven’t lost their sense of fair play.
In 2019 the Washington Post reported that when Harris was top prosecutor in San Francisco, and running to become California’s attorney-general, she was embroiled in a scandal that saw her fail to share exculpatory evidence with defence attorneys, leading to thousands of cases being thrown out.
I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 11, 2020
Voters are also good at sniffing out opportunists, which is part of the reason as a rival for the Democratic nomination last year, she was roundly rejected by voters.
Part of this uneasiness stemmed from Harris’s run first on a law and order line and then change tack when she realised that this would not play well with cop-hating progressives who, long before George Floyd became a household name, saw the entire criminal justice system as an edifice of evil.
So, what did she do?
Harris decided to up her street cred by claiming that she smoked pot at university while listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur.
Seriously.
The whole comic episode was only enhanced when someone pointed out that Harris graduated university in 1986, but that Snoop and Tupac didn’t hit the music scene until the 1990s.
Oh, and if the Biden camp thinks Harris will be as easily managed as Uncle Joe, they’ve got another thing coming.
Harris is nothing if not ambitious – which is not in and of itself a bad thing – but that ambition saw her, during the primaries, do everything to take every cheap shot she could at Biden.
This included exaggerating her own personal history to smear Joe Biden’s opposition to school bussing many decades ago, as well as saying she thought Tara Reade’s accusations of sexual harassment and assault against Biden were credible.
At least that makes her the last woman on the American left to still “believe all women”.
Biden’s camp may have thought they were being very clever in picking Harris to neutralise the law and order issue in the suburbs, but it won’t do them any favours with the hard left wing of the party which increasingly seems to be in control.
More than that, they’ve now got a dangerous opportunist with a proven history of lying on the ticket - someone who may, to coin a phrase, try to throw Joe Biden under the bus while they’re both still riding in it..