XPost: mn.politics, alt.politics.democrats, talk.politics.guns   
   XPost: sac.politics, or.politics   
   From: contact@tiffanyhenyard.com   
      
   This week’s celebration of Kamala Harris in Chicago faces an embarrassing   
   fact: Until now, Democrats themselves thought she was less cut out to be   
   president than Joe Biden. If voters already had grave misgivings about   
   Biden’s job performance before    
   his disastrous debate in June—and polls show they did—what can they expect   
   from his understudy?   
      
   Harris never received a vote of confidence from her own party until it wound   
   up with a self-inflicted crisis thanks to Biden’s televised breakdown.   
   Democratic leaders knew all about his condition before this year’s   
   primaries. Yet they still let him    
   run a second time rather than pushing to replace him with Harris when the   
   party’s voters could still have a say.   
      
   The most charitable interpretation of that decision is that top Democrats   
   didn’t think Harris would be much of an improvement over Biden—not enough   
   to justify the ordeal of a contested primary or trying to get him to step   
   down. And indeed, the fact    
   that Democrats are content to let Biden continue serving in the Oval Office,   
   despite his debilities, suggests they don’t see a world of difference even   
   now between him and a President Harris.   
      
   Their partisan calculation is that the last thing Harris needs right now is a   
   track record. If she became president before the election, voters would hold   
   her to full account for the troubles of the Biden-Harris era, as well as for   
   anything she did in    
   her own right after taking over from Biden.   
      
   Harris’ greatest electoral advantage is a quality that sets her up for   
   failure if she ever becomes president—she’s untested, and because she’s   
   never so much as taken the tests other major-party nominees must pass, she can   
   boast she’s never    
   flunked. Imagine trying that with the SATs!   
      
   Actually, there’s no need to imagine: In recent years, many prestigious   
   colleges did stop asking prospective students for standardized test   
   scores—and the result was such a drop in admissions quality that the tests   
   had to be reinstituted. It’s not    
   the kind of experiment the country ought to try with the White House.   
      
   Normally, presidential primaries are the greatest test of a candidate, forcing   
   a contender to defend his or her policies against competitors and in front of   
   skeptical voters and journalists. The peculiar way Democratic insiders made   
   Harris the nominee    
   shielded her from the examination other would-be presidents have to undergo.   
   And the fawning attitude much of the legacy media has toward Harris spares her   
   from the full measure of press scrutiny a candidate typically receives.   
      
   The fact that she became the nominee so late in the season meant the media was   
   already in a general-election mindset—not at all eager to question a   
   Democrat’s qualifications but seeing everything as a horse race, one in   
   which too many journalists    
   have a clear favorite.   
      
   Harris’ resume is slender. Her highest achievement is serving as apprentice   
   in the ill-fated Biden administration. Outsider candidates, running to shake   
   up the system and throw out the bums who’ve led the country into decline,   
   often have little    
   experience.   
      
   But outsider candidates also, by definition, have to oppose whatever the   
   incumbent administration has been up to. Donald Trump and Barack Obama ran as   
   outsiders when they first won their parties’ nominations, and then the   
   presidency.   
      
   They were issue candidates—the issue being that the country was on the wrong   
   track, from foreign policy to the parlous state of the economy. An incumbent   
   administration, on the other hand, has to run based on what it’s actually   
   accomplished—which    
   in Biden’s case means nothing good.   
      
   Kamala Harris isn’t an outsider; she’s the junior partner in the incumbent   
   administration, with all the drawbacks of the Biden report card, yet without   
   Joe’s decades of testing and experience. She isn’t a change    
   andidate—she’s the status quo    
   candidate.   
      
   Yet she represents the status quo minus Biden’s strengths, if also without   
   his age-related weakness. Voters weren’t set to reelect Biden even before   
   his infirmity became a national scandal.   
      
   His policies and performance in office were scandal enough. Now Harris is   
   running on those same policies, which are her policies, and the Democratic   
   Party’s, as well.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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