OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Kamala Harris has many wondering where she is as crises and scandals surround the administration of Joe Biden.
The vice president appears to be MIA as Americans remain stranded in Afghanistan and other Americans continue to recover from Hurricane Ida, Just The News reported.
The vice president has been conspicuously absent lately from coverage and appearances pertaining to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan — after having proudly claimed just four months ago to have been the “last person in the room” with Biden as he decided to fully withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
Kamala Harris’ absence is especially puzzling given the recent drop-off of confidence in the president. The generally even-keeled Mike Pence was often trotted out to take questions as head of the coronavirus task force, especially after days of the more combative commander-in-chief duking it out with the press corps. The same, however, cannot be said of this vice president.
On the Fox News show “The Five” last week the hosts speculated about where Harris may be during her apparent absence.
“If I’m Kamala Harris right now, I’m extremely offended because you have been used,” co-host Will Cain said. “They used you to pander to a voting base to get votes. They had a minority, they had a woman and now that they don’t need her, they have shelved her because her approval rating is -19.”
He said Harris is a “liability” to the administration when she is on the scene but she was not a liability during the 2020 presidential election.
“Kamala has a right to be very, very upset,” the host said. “But the Biden administration is in a very tough position. Do we admit that we used Kamala to get elected, or do we run her back out and hurt our numbers the way hers have plummeted?”
Shannon Bream noted that Harris’ own presidential campaign was a disaster.
“She was a great fit for this ticket, the host said. “But remember during the primaries she never caught on fire. She wasn’t great in the primary debates. She wasn’t polling well, she couldn’t raise money… So while she was a good fit on the ticket, whether she can be a good leader and manage things well is a totally different question.”
But host Greg Gutfeld speculated that Harris is being kept safe so that she can be used when the time comes.
“They’re just waiting for the right time to break the glass and take her out,” he said. “We really don’t know how bad she is but Democrats are going to assume it can’t be any worse than this.”
Another reason Harris may be being kept behind the scenes is her abysmal poll numbers, Los Angeles Magazine reported.
With Vice President Kamala Harris coming up short in one favorability poll after another—including an NBC survey last week which found she has the lowest ratings since Al Gore in 1993—even the people who want to see her succeed worry that it just might not be doable.
The Los Angeles Times spoke to voters in Democratic bastion Philadelphia as well as the key swing area of Bucks County—which went for Biden/Harris by a slim margin with roughly 82 percent of voters casting ballots—about the former Senator from California’s performance as Veep, and Harris’s detractors and fans said much the same things: namely, that they don’t see a lot of her; that Biden has stuck her with a miserable To Do list; and that racism and misogyny will remain formidable hurtles.
New Hope, Pennsylvania, retiree Susan Giffen, 69, told the Times that Harris would make a good President but, asked if she’d ever actually get elected to the job, said, “Absolutely not. I’d vote for her. But I don’t think she can win. And I wouldn’t vote for her in a primary.”
