BY RICK MORAN | P J Media
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Democrats have been flogging the image of Kamala Harris for more than six months, trying to show Americans why she should be popular, and the public isn’t buying it.
The efforts and the expectations of success by Democrats
say a lot about the party and their myopic view of the voters, which has cost
them dearly during the last three national elections. A party that tells most
voters they’re “racist” and says those same ordinary people must be cleansed of
their “systemic racism” and delusions of “white supremacy” shouldn’t have to
wonder why people don’t like them very much.
But the Democrats keep doubling down — as they did with
Harris. The vice president is among the most unpopular vice presidents in
modern history and, true to form, Democrats can’t figure out why on earth that
might be true.
A recent YouGov
poll revealed that Harris’s net approval rating is ten points
underwater among all voters and 25 points underwater among independents, 44
percent of whom say they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of the vice
president.
Charles W. Cooke in NRO:
Still,
that Harris is unpopular should come as no great surprise, given that she
somehow manages to combine into a single package a transparent insincerity, an
unvarnished authoritarianism, and a tendency toward precisely the sort of
self-satisfied progressivism that helped the Republicans to limit their losses
at the last general election. If her apologists wish to, they can pretend that
the reaction Harris yields is “gendered” or “systemic” or “inequitable” or
whatever other bastardized academic term is fashionable this week, and they
should feel free to knock themselves out doing so. Deep down, though, they must
know that America isn’t the problem here. The problem is that Harris is a
phony. It remains the case that, throughout her entire public career, almost nobody has looked at Kamala
Harris and thought, “Yes, she’s the
person we need to lead us.” Sure, she’s won a couple of elections. But even in
deep blue California, she has struggled.
Harris won her state attorney general race by 74,000
votes out of 9.6 million cast. Her two terms as California AG were marked by a
“tough on crime” reputation she cultivated to win a narrow election to the
Senate.
For some politicians, it’s all about rising and Harris
tried to use the slightly more visible platform as a senator to run for
president in 2020. She was a complete failure, getting only about 3 percent
support nationwide and only 7 percent in her home state of California. This,
despite her abandonment of a common-sense approach to justice in service of a
far more radical agenda in order to appeal to the far left of the Democratic
Party.
The radical left loves Harris because she checks so many
boxes: female, black-Asian (a twofer), and progressive. The mystery is why
she’s so deeply unpopular.
The
vice presidency may, indeed, be “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” but it seems
indisputable that the Democratic Party has a real interest in Harris being more
popular than she is. Joe Biden is 78 years old — older than any president has
ever been at any point in American history. There is no guarantee that Biden
will finish his first term, and there is even less of a guarantee that he will
run again in 2024. In either case, when Biden leaves the White House, Kamala
Harris will be his presumptive heir, and, in both cases, the Democratic Party —
which explicitly put Harris there because she is a female minority — will
struggle mightily to extricate itself from the dead weight she brings along.
“Look at this historic vice president who, of course, shouldn’t be the actual president” is not exactly
a winning message, is it?
If you live by identity politics, you will die by
identity politics. In urban and suburban America, identity politics will get
you elected, or at least, not prevent you from winning. But in the rest of the
nation, it’s a different story. Most Americans in Middle America hate identity
politics and what it’s doing to the United States. And they don’t trust
politicians who promote identity above all.
Until Democrats learn that lesson, they will continue to
be “surprised” by election results.
_______________
Rick Moran has been writing for PJ Media
for 13 years. His work has appeared in dozens of media outlets including
the Washington Times and
ABC News. He was an editor at American Thinker for 14 years. His own blog
is Right Wing Nut House.
