Kamala Harris takes senatorial oath of office from Vice President Joe Biden. Source: Wikimedia Commons

A Vote For Biden Puts Far-Left Kamala Harris In Line To Be President — Scared Yet?

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No one should be at all surprised that the mentally fading Joe Biden selected California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. He painted himself into a political corner by his own foolish decisions, and needed to do something to revive his moribund, basement-bound campaign. Sorry, Joe, we doubt this will do it. But we do worry about your health.

Biden, trying to pander to as many Democratic constituencies as possible, promised early on to pick a woman for his vice president. Why he would automatically exclude roughly half of humanity from the selection process tells you a lot.

Picking Harris was no surprise. The Democratic hard left, which today governs the party, likes to shove people in boxes. No one’s ever a mere human being, but a race, a gender, a religion, a political category. As such, Harris checked three big boxes for the Democrats: Woman, check. African-American, check. Far-left progressive, check.

And, unlike the other presumed leading veep candidate, Susan Rice, Harris has experience in electoral politics, serving as California’s attorney general and as a U.S. senator. That’s in contrast to the abrasive, F-bomb throwing Rice, whose career was dotted with appointments to key posts, but who never ran for public office.

The problem is, in picking a running mate, the ailing Biden is very likely also picking the president who will follow him without the need for an election, should he win. Are Americans going to take a liking to the sometimes-hard-to-like Harris? Knowing her past, will they pull the lever for Biden knowing she might be president?

That will be a real concern for some, given that more than half of all Democrats — 59%, to be exact — in a recent Rasmussen poll said they don’t expect the 77-year-old Biden to complete a four-year term if elected. More than half.

And it’s not out of the question that the Democratic Party, worried about Biden’s failing verbal skills and growing confusion, will find a way to ease him out just before the election.

One thing bound to come up soon is Harris’ brutal, but fair, confrontation with Biden during last year’s debates. She criticized him for working in the past with segregationist senators and opposing school busing.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” she said dramatically during one of the debates. “That little girl was me!”

Now that “little girl” is running with Biden, a man in this age of acute racial sensitivity who once was chummy with the Democratic Party’s segregationist wing.

The bigger problem for Biden and the Dems will be Harris’ own substantial load of electoral baggage. To begin with, she never caught on with rank-and-file Democrats during her nearly 12 months on the campaign trail. Indeed, the more they saw of her, the less they liked her. With her ratings plummeting, she ran out of money and ended her campaign in December.

That was in her own party.

To win, she and Biden will have to gain a majority of independent voters, who now make up an estimated 38% of the electorate, Gallup data show. Independents are the de facto largest party in America, bigger than either the Democrats or Republicans. And they lean mostly conservative on fiscal and economic matters, but liberal on social issues.

What will likely future President Kamala Harris be selling to them?

She supports, among other things: the economy-killing Green New Deal, Medicare for All (ending private health insurance), open borders, late-term abortions (whether states want it or not), and the confiscation of private weapons (the death of the 2nd Amendment).

Even progressives have serious issues with Harris, in particular her record as attorney general in California where she incurred the ire of leftists by steadfastly opposing justice reform in the Golden State.

As Loyola Law School professor Lara Bazelton wrote in a scathing New York Times op-ed, Harris fought “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

That’s in stark contrast to President Donald Trump, who championed national justice reform, The First Step Act, that actually led to thousands of inmates, many of them African Americans, being released from prison.

As you can see, on the campaign trail, Harris will be bringing along a lot of political baggage and a less-than-effective style on the hustings. She often talks tough, but when pushed, backs off from taking a tough stance.

As the New York Times wrote last November in a post-mortem for her soon-to-be-defunct presidential campaign, “She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions.”

After a CNN Town Hall last year, her hometown San Francisco Chronicle opined: “She invoked versions of the phrases ‘we need to have that conversation’ or ‘we need to study that’ on questions about allowing murderers, terrorists and other felons to vote from prison, lowering the voting age to 16, providing reparations for slavery and forgiving student debt (as Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed).”

Not exactly glowing endorsements. Even so, the big media will no doubt work with their Democratic Party handlers to turn her into a paragon of political moderation and visionary consistency. Why? Their pathological hatred of Trump. They believe, and have shown repeatedly in the past, that they’ll lie if it serves to defeat or weaken Trump.

Good luck, Joe. You’ll need it. The woman you just picked to replace you, which seems increasingly possible, is way to the left of the average American on issue after issue. Anyone expecting any moderation from Harris with her well-honed far-left authoritarian instincts will be sorely disappointed. America, you’ve been forewarned.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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22 comments

    • If things get worse when Trump is re-elected it will because the Democrats make them worse in order to try to oust him again. That’s how history will repeat itself if it does.

    • It will continue to be great. More jobs, more Americanism. F the left and the broken promises to the minorities of this great country. The left no longer has a hold on the minorities, KAGA! 2020

  • Please, stop buying into the “African-American“ ruse. Her mother is Indian and her father is Jamaican. Harris’s family goes back centuries there and some were slave holders.
    A “person of color”? Sure. African American? Nice try.

  • Didn’t Democrats already reject Kamala as their presidential candidate? So the Party knows better and will foist her on the Democrat voters as Joe’s replacement? A whole party of rubes…

  • The Democrats seem to have a death wish in everything they do. What is not clear is whether they are wishing death on themselves or everyone else or maybe just everyone period–oh I forgot, wasn’t that part of the Green New Deal.

  • So if Biden steps aside during his Presidency, Harris becomes Potus. If the Dems keep the House then Nancy Pelosi becomes VEEP. I really don’t want to see that happen.

  • Agree with most everything in this editorial except for the implication that Harris is “African-American,” which, of course, she is not. Rather, part Indian, part Jamaican, I believe.

  • No, the announcement of Harris took the option of pushing Biden aside off the table for Democrats. As with anyone, he might fall so gravely ill (or worse) and not make it to the election, but for sure if an intentional swap was being considered it would have been done prior to his VP announcement. Biden won the nomination “fair and square” with all the usual political machinations, but still, he got those delegates. But a whole lot of the party is going to get seriously upset if Harris is simply anointed candidate after her lousy primary efforts.

    Just a note about “forgiving student debt”. That is a crock. Creditors would love this program because it is not telling them to eat their loans but simply that the Treasury will cover them. Nothing is being forgiven, but rather people not party to the debt contract are going to be expected to fulfill it.

  • “A Vote For Biden Puts Far-Left Kamala Harris In Line To Be President — Scared Yet?”
    That’s Issues & Insights. “How can we scare people today?”

  • I do not know why every Democrat is mischaracterized as “far-left”. Ms. Harris is more moderate/centrist even if you do not like Democratic planks. We all have our short comings but if a person can overlook the complete lack of character in trump you could easily find Harris acceptable.

  • “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” she said dramatically during one of the debates. “That little girl was me!” – except she grew up in Toronto, Canada!

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