OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
It is possible that Vice President Kamala Harris could be on her way off of President Joe Biden’s 2024 ticket.
Political pundit and conservative commentator Mike Miller opined in a piece for Red State that he believes the unpopular vice president could be replaced, but President Biden would be met with accusations of being a misogynist and a racist even if she was replaced by another black woman.
Miller argued that her lack of any discernable skills, abhorrent speech-making, and general unpopularity could be a hindrance to the president, particularly due to his age, which would be 82 in 2024.
“Kamala Harris has been the best insurance policy against being dumped by the Democrat Party that feckless Joe Biden could have. And as his decision to seek re-election looms, Corn Pop’s pal — with a ‘little’ help from his Democrat ‘friends’ — must also decide whether Kamala Harris will be with him on the 2024 ticket if he does decide to run,” Miller said.
Miller went on to argue that he believes Harris should be replaced, but will not be, which could lead to a Republican victory unless they drop the ball.
But Miller is not the only person to doubt Harris’ ability to attract voters, with some of those naysayers coming from within her own party.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team has responded to a report that claims that she questioned the political instincts of Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Members of Congress, Democratic strategists, and other major party figures all said she had not made herself into a formidable leader,” The New York Times reported of the vice president on Monday.
The Times said that two Democrats it spoke to on the condition of anonymity said they had private conversations with Clinton, where she said that Harris lacked “the political instincts to clear a primary field.”
A spokesperson for Clinton did not deny that the former secretary of state had said those things about the vice president, but did say that the two women have “built and maintained a strong bond” about being a woman in a position of power and said that she is supportive of Harris.
The report on Clinton comes just after another report by The Washington Post that said some top Democrats are concerned about the vice president’s political prospects.
“Such concerns about Harris’s political strength were repeated often by more than a dozen Democratic leaders in key states interviewed for this story,” it said. “Harris’s tenure has been underwhelming, they said, marked by struggles as a communicator and at times near-invisibility, leaving many rank-and-file Democrats unpersuaded that she has the force, charisma, and skill to mount a winning presidential campaign.”
“People are poised to pounce on anything — any misstep, any gaffe, anything she says — and so she’s probably not getting the benefit of the doubt,” Jacquelyn Bettadapur, the leader of the Cobb County Democrats in Georgia said. She said that people “don’t know enough about what she’s doing” and “it doesn’t help that she’s not [that] adept as a communicator.”
“Every fiber in my body wants her to be president; everything I’ve ever fought for is for someone like her to be president,” a South Carolina Democratic strategist said on the condition of anonymity. “I think she’s a good person with a good heart who can lead the country. But I don’t know that the people who have to make that happen to feel that way right now. I don’t know that she has what it takes to get over the hump in our present environment.
Even Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who said she supports President Joe Biden seeking re-election, did not commit to supporting Harris as vice president on the ticket.
“I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team,” she said non Boston Public Radio last month. “I’ve known Kamala for a long time. I like Kamala. I knew her back when she was an attorney general and I was still teaching and we worked on the housing crisis together, so we go way back. But they need — they have to be a team, and my sense is they are — I don’t mean that by suggesting I think there are any problems. I think they are.”
But on Sunday she said that “I fully support the president’s and vice president’s re-election together, and never intended to imply otherwise.”
The president’s age, he would be 86 years old at the end of a possible next term in the White House, makes the selection of a vice president more important than it had been in the past.
