Kamala Harris was the single most liberal voter in the Senate in 2019. She’s supported unconstitutional executive action on gun control, co-sponsored the socialist Green New Deal, and she’s all over the map on “Medicare for all.”
Yet she was the least problematic of Joe Biden’s final four contenders for his running mate.
Throughout this unusually public Veepstakes, various centrists such as Amy Klobuchar were floated as serious contenders for the job, but after the police killing of George Floyd, the commentariat assumed that political pressure from the Democratic base would all but force Biden to choose a woman of color for the job, and preferably a black one.
But he kept his options on that question open, perhaps to the detriment of the process. Instead of going with war hero and biracial Sen. Tammy Duckworth or black House impeachment manager Val Demings, Biden chose as his final four Harris, assumed runner-up Susan Rice, former fellow presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, and Gretchen Whitmer, perhaps the single worst governor in the nation, and a lily-white one at that.
That’s a dumpster fire so terrible that it renders Harris the least horrible of them.
Consider that whereas Harris has few enough principles that she could feasibly waffle on lefty issues to satisfy her more centrist boss, Warren is an ideological whip. She’s enough of a wonk to manipulate executive powers to enact unconstitutional passion projects such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in a way that Harris, just three years into a relatively thin legislative career, never could.
Even worse would be Rice, who has spent her entire life bouncing between unelected Democratic bureaucracies and the Brookings Institute. The Obama-era spy crusade against Michael Flynn and the Trump team would just be the digestif of what executive overreach would come with a Vice President Rice. Unlike Harris, Rice would immediately try to subvert the Trump administration’s successes in empowering Israel.
Whitmer may be less of an ideologue than Harris — sometimes an asset in actual governing. But when put to the ultimate test of leadership, she failed, perhaps worse than anyone in the country. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer’s tenure as governor of Michigan was already lackluster, characterized by her failure to secure her key campaign promise to fix the roads. Of course, that’s small potatoes as compared to how badly she botched the coronavirus. Despite getting its first coronavirus case more than a month after California, and despite having a quarter of the population and lacking ultra-dense cities such as San Francisco, Michigan still has more than twice as many deaths per capita of the Golden State.
In large part, that’s due to Whitmer’s nursing home policy, which she not only defends but actually wants to maintain. She just vetoed a bill from the legislature to reverse the policy. There is no other explanation for such a reckless, hateful, and consequential decision other than pure malice for her own people.
Kamala is a corrupt cop, a paper tiger who believes in nothing more than her own rise to power. And somehow, the race was so despicable that she was the least disastrous option.
