Nobody likes Kamala Harris lmao

[Хahar 🤔]

Kamala Harris is interesting because she's a machine politician. There aren't a lot of those left because there aren't a lot of real machines left in America, but San Francisco has one and she's part of it. The political skills that have gotten her to this position aren't really electoral but instead involve forming connections, which she has in spades in San Francisco and in Sacramento.

The last time there was a vice president like this, he was only in that position for a matter of months before Franklin D. Roosevelt died and he became president. We're in sort of uncharted territory with a vice president like her, and right now she's in a job with no clear responsibilities, cut off from her source of strength in California and mostly cut off even from Congress.

The media framing of her in the last two years suggests two things, both of which can be true:

• Kamala Harris has not endeared herself to people she has needed to make strong connections with and she has consequently struggled to have any sort of role in the current administration.
• People in positions to talk to reporters see Kamala Harris as a potential rival and so they're informing against her to the press.

That Gavin Newsom is very openly looking to run for president suggests that Harris really has missed an opportunity, because they can't realistically both run serious campaigns and Newsom wouldn't be so bold if he thought that she had a real shot. If she does just go back to California when her time as vice president is through, that would be very normal for vice presidents.

[Хahar 🤔]

To add on to my previous post, the extreme hostility we see toward Kamala Harris (on this forum, but also elsewhere online) is interesting to me. It's unclear how specifically she's "unqualified" or how she's demonstrated "incompetence" when she has a job with no power and no responsibilities and (as mentioned previously) her background is similar to that of other vice presidents. The obvious difference here is the idea that she got her job just based on the identity boxes she checks off.

The people who feel this way have obvious justification in that they can point to what the Biden campaign actually said. I don't recall these sorts of criticisms of Kamala Harris being leveled in the same way when she ran for president, because then she was running against a bunch of candidates who weren't black women whom she would have to defeat. It may have been strategically useful for the Biden campaign to say that it was going to choose a black woman as its running mate, but doing so preemptively destroyed the credibility of anyone who might be chosen.

Sometimes you see the suggestion that Biden should have chosen a different black woman instead of Kamala Harris and that would have been better. I find that hard to believe. My recollection is that the other candidates who were regularly mentioned were Val Demings, Stacey Abrams, and Susan Rice. None of those three have ever won a statewide election and only Demings has ever been elected to a higher position than state legislator. Does anyone really believe that any of them would be seen as less of a token selection?

Suppose that the Biden campaign had chosen Kamala Harris without announcing that it would select a black woman and after suggesting that a variety of Democrats of different backgrounds would be considered. This wouldn't change the issues that Kamala Harris has had as vice president in terms of being disconnected from her base and lacking strong allies in Washington, but I think that there would be less hostility toward her in general because she wouldn't be seen in the same way as having been advanced without merit.