Debut.
I was going to make the headline “Dems introduce America’s next president, plus Joe Biden” but thought better of it. Too dark. Although if you think that’s dark, check out the Babylon Bee. YouGov published a snap poll this morning finding that 51 percent of voters approve of Harris’s selection as VP nominee versus 37 percent who disapprove. Biden will happily take that, but this is the number he really cares about: That’s all he wanted from the pick, ultimately, and it’s why everyone else was disqualified. He didn’t want voters to get nervous in the booth about electing a 77-year-old because they’ve decided the VP nominee is too green to be trusted with power. Virtually everyone else on his shortlist would have provoked a “Who?” reaction from much of the public except for Elizabeth Warren, and Warren was a nonstarter. Choosing a white woman over half a dozen black women candidates would have felt like a snub and her brand of leftist politics would have been cannon fodder for the Trump campaign. He went with America’s only black woman senator because it checks the right demographic boxes and the right experience box. Harris is also useful as a running mate because she’s slippery, which ironically was a liability for her in the primary. She tried to brand herself as progressive by embracing Medicare for All and the Green New Deal but it was stupid trying to out-socialist Bernie and Warren. Harris gambled that she could win the nomination first by consolidating the black vote as the most prominent black candidate in the field (sorry, Cory Booker) and then by building support on the left as someone who, while not as authentically progressive as Sanders and Warren, might be more electable and should be supported for that reason. In the end, though, black voters preferred Joe and the DSA crowd preferred their real-deal options to a poseur who was being cynical in her calculations. Harris was neither fish nor fowl, not left enough to win over the left but too eager to pander to the left to attract centrists. But someone like that is fine for VP, especially for a candidate like Biden who’s run a play-it-safe campaign from the start. Harris’s left-wing pandering hasn’t impressed any real leftists, but the fact that she made the effort will leave most of them with no strong reason to oppose her nomination. The fact that her pretend leftism never seemed very convincing leaves centrists without a strong reason to oppose her as well, especially since she has Centrist Joe’s seal of approval and a determined effort by our media to rebrand her as a moderate. She’s too weaselly to get people to support her enthusiastically for president but weaselly enough to make everyone in the party find her selection as number two basically unobjectionable.
