It’s a reliable law of public communications that when an institution feels the need to deny there is anything amiss going on, you can bet there is something amiss going on.
When a bank issues a statement insisting it has plenty of liquidity, it’s often an invitation for a run. A public declaration from a celebrity couple that their marriage is secure has top divorce lawyers salivating in readiness.
And when a government goes out of its way to tell you that relations between its two most prominent individuals are absolutely fine, you know from experience that something is very wrong in paradise.
This is the spectacle Americans have been treated to all this week, as stories and speculation mount that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are falling out.
Last weekend CNN, a media organisation that has become Pravda-like in its devotion to and faithful recitation of the Democratic Party’s line, dropped an unusually detailed story about unrest in the vice-president’s camp.
Falling out
The story reported how Harris feels misused by the president and his staff. The vice-president’s role has always been a constitutionally vague one. Other than standing around waiting to step up if the president should die or resign, the job largely consists of whatever the boss feels like delegating. Most suck it up silently and await their turn, knowing they have the inside track when it comes to running for their party’s presidential nomination.
But Harris, whose vice-presidency has so far been marked mainly by a series of gaffes, may be worried that she is losing the confidence of her boss and the powerful team around him.
Her grievances, as reported by CNN, are manifold and seemingly contradictory. She isn’t being given proper jobs to do. She’s being given jobs to do that are impossibly hard, such as managing the escalating migrant crisis at the southern border.
Doubly triggered
Most telling, there was pique and a hint of what may become a significant problem for the Democrats. It’s standard procedure on the left that whenever something goes wrong for a woman or a person of colour, criticism is immediately ascribed to racism and sexism. The vice-president is both and therefore doubly triggered. The story quoted affiliates of Harris noting the difference between the support she had received from the president’s staff and that accorded to a prominent white man. Over the summer Pete Buttigeig, the transportation secretary, who like Harris ran for the Democratic nomination at the last election, was beaten by Biden and is a likely candidate next time around, was criticised by some in the media for taking extended paternity leave in the middle of the supply-chain crisis that has gripped the country. Harris’s people claim the White House quickly defended him but has been slow to defend her from repeated critiques of her performance.
Kamala’s denial
Late on Sunday night, when half the nation was in bed, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, took the unusual step of tweeting out a denial. White House officials later rushed to microphones to heap praise on the vice-president. On Thursday Harris herself appeared on television to deny she felt “misused or underused”.
You don’t need to be a cynic or a Kremlinologist to figure out what’s going on. The Biden presidency is in the mire. With inflation surging, Covid lingering, a crisis at the border, the humiliating exit from Afghanistan fresh in the memory and a Democratic Party that has embraced every extreme progressive nostrum ever dreamt up in a sociology department, his approval ratings are plumbing depths.
The president turns 79 this weekend. While he has insisted he plans to run again in 2024, his evident cognitive deterioration, combined with his disastrous political performance, are leading many to think he may well bow out. If he does, or even if he runs again, wins (at 82) and then is forced to retire, Harris is the favourite to succeed him. In the last half-century no vice-president who has sought to succeed a president has failed to get their party’s nomination.
But it is more evident by the day that Harris is, to put it charitably, ill-equipped. In her forays into the public eye she has seemed confused, faltering and slightly odd. When asked why, as the person in charge of the immigration crisis, she hadn’t been to the Mexico border, she told a befuddled interviewer that she hadn’t been to Europe either – so what?
Her repeated photo-ops have been cringe-worthy, such as a recent video she filmed with a bunch of children musing vacantly about the wonders of space exploration. It turned out the children were all actors.
Just this week on a trip to France she was asked by a reporter what message the US had for Russia as it menaces Ukraine. “I can’t comment on classified information,” she replied. She’s starting to make Dan Quayle look like Abraham Lincoln.
None of this should be a surprise. Harris ran a disastrous, brief campaign for the Democratic nomination two years ago and bowed out before the first contest. She got the nod as veep because Biden had explicitly committed himself to picking a woman and then, following the Black Lives Matter eruption last summer, felt further compelled in his choice to pick a minority. She thus emerged victorious from a field of approximately one candidate.
Now, having put her there, it may be difficult for the Democratic Party to deny her the opportunity to succeed Biden. The leaks out of her office this week suggest she is already arming herself with the defence that any criticism of her is motivated by sexism and racism. That is a powerful message for today’s hyper-progressive, identity-obsessed left.
To be sure, Biden’s problems are all of his own making. But his choice of successor is deepening the Democrats’ woes.
The Times
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