America's First Female President Must Not be Kamala Harris

Harris Doesn't Deserve to be Immortalized in the History Books

How much do you remember from your history classes about Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan or Chester Arthur or Millard Filmore or Zachary Taylor or Andrew Johnson? Probably not much, even if you were a history major like Joe Biden, who finished 506^th in a class of 688 with a C average at the University of Delaware and probably has no clue when those characters served or what they did in office. Only 45 men have been President, but even so, many of them are largely forgotten after they die. But if Kamala Harris wins on Tuesday, she’ll be remembered forever.

Before Hillary Clinton took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, a video was shown depicting all the men who had been President to that point and then, when Hillary appeared on screen, the video montage shattered to the sound of broken glass.  “We just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling,” Clinton said. There’s been a lot of girl power vibes swirling around the Harris campaign but the middle-class girl from Berkley by way of Canada hasn’t run a I’m With Her 2.0 campaign or anything close to it. And the media has largely taken its cue, deemphasizing the historic nature of her candidacy. Why is that?

I suspect that we aren’t being frequently reminded that Harris has a chance to make history because the media learned its lesson in 2016. I think there’s also an unspoken realization that few Americans consider her to be the kind of brilliant, high achieving woman we’d ideally like to see as our first female President. That sounds uncharitable but considering her biography and her inability to answer basic questions, it’s really a diplomatic way of saying that Kamala Harris has absolutely no business earning a coveted place in American history.

I’d love to see a female President, but I want that person to be someone who earned her place on the ticket through merit and achievement. At 29, Harris had an affair with Willie Brown, then 60 years old and the most powerful man in California politics. He bought her a BMW and gave her two lucrative sinecures where her only duty was to show up for monthly commission meetings. She was unremarkable as California’s attorney general and in the Senate, where Govtrack rated her the most liberal Democrat in 2019. Perhaps the only remarkable thing she did was rack up an incredible 91% staff turnover rate.

Harris ran like the lefty she is in her first Presidential campaign, and it was a disaster. She suspended her campaign for President on December 3, 2019, two months prior to the Iowa caucuses. A Hill/Harris X poll released a day before put her at 2% support, tied with Tom Steyer, Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang, and behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg. Her “that little girl was me” moment, where she accused Joe Biden of being a racist who opposed busing and palled around with segregationists, was all most remember about her campaign.

Biden picked Harris anyway because he was under tremendous pressure to pick a black female candidate and Harris, as a senator, outranked the other top contenders, who were mayors or congresspeople or, in the case of Susan Rice, a diplomat with no campaign experience. As VP, Harris distinguished herself for little beyond her legendary word salads and her disastrous tenure as border czar. Her approval rating was consistently below 40% prior to her billion dollar makeover following her successful coup attempt on the President. In fact, the justification behind Biden’s bonkers bid to be reelected at 82 was that Harris couldn’t possibly be trusted to take out the Orange menace.

She was handed the nomination without earning a single vote, largely because the idea of allowing a more electable white guy to vault over her was anathema in the identity politics driven Democratic party. Now, she’s facing a real election against a Republican for only the second time in her career and she’s largely ducked difficult and even basic questions. On Sunday, she was asked how she voted on Proposition 36 a measure that would reintroduce real penalties for shoplifting and increase penalties for some drug charges. “I am not going to talk about the vote on that,” Harris said. “Because honestly it’s the Sunday before the election and I don’t intend to create an endorsement one way or another around it.”

At the CNN town hall, a political science professor at uber progressive Swarthmore College who is as undecided as I’m a 7 foot-tall NBA center, asked her what one major policy goal she’d like to accomplish. She gave a rambling nearly 300-word answer but failed to answer the question. At the same event, Anderson Cooper asked her repeatedly if she supports building a wall and she wouldn’t answer the question. Do you want to build a wall or not? It is such an important and fundamental question that I can’t imagine running for President and not having an answer for it.

Harris was also asked what her biggest weakness is, and she sounded like a high school kid interviewing for an internship. Here’s the crux of her rambling 300-word answer. “I think that I -- perhaps a weakness, some would say, but I actually think it's a strength is I really do value having a team of very smart people around me who bring to my decision-making process different perspectives.” Ha! She’s so amazing that her only weakness is actually a strength. How incredibly stupid does she think we are? Answer: quite stupid. Remember, this is the woman who explained the war in Ukraine like this.

So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.

In the friendly confines of The View, she was asked if there’s anything she would have done differently than Biden—another incredibly predictable question she had no answer for. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said. After Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” a British reporter asked her, “Do you sympathize with any voters who feel offended or insulted by the garbage comments?” Here was her answer.

I’m running for President of the United States, I will be traveling to three states today to do what I’ve been doing throughout, which is talking with the American people about the fact that, first of all, I get it in terms of the concerns they have, the challenges, like the price of groceries. Second, my highest priority is to address that and to lift them up around their ambitions, their aspirations, and their dreams.

Again, she had to see that question coming and they must have rehearsed her answer.  That world salad was what she and her team came up with? I could fill many more columns with such examples, but I think the point is clear. Harris is spectacularly unqualified to be President. I know some also consider Trump to be unfit for office. He rambled his way semi-coherently through the debate and is a bs artist par excellence. I understand Harris voters who simply cannot handle four more years of Trump but I’m baffled by her ardent fans, the kind who have yard signs that say Joy and have her mug on them. Trump is nowhere near my ideal choice for President. He is unfit for office in many ways too, but the prospect of having our bumptious, DEI VP capture such an important historical designation is terrifying.

Many of us, even some who plan to vote for Harris because they hate Trump, understand that she’s a vacuous chameleon who’s achieved little and will say anything to get elected. But if she wins, even hundreds of years from now school children will be taught that she was a trailblazing heroine who broke the glass ceiling and is as important a leader as our founding fathers were. It doesn’t matter how poorly she performs in office—the media will rebrand her failures as triumps and many will believe them. Streets and schools and airports and libraries will be name after her. Her cackling mug will be in museums, on banknotes and perhaps even added to Mt. Rushmore. Democrats and the media have framed this election as a vitally important opportunity to stop a nazi and a fascist and to preserve our democracy. I see it as an opportunity to reserve a vitally important historical achievement for someone who actually deserves it.