As Joe Biden Turns 79, a Panic Over Kamala Harris He’s unlikely to run in 2024, and his VP is deeply unpopular.
President Biden’s 79th birthday Saturday is the key to understanding the Democratic alarms this week about Vice President Kamala Harris. Is her approval rating as terrible as the surveys say? Is she being unfairly sidelined by the White House? That fretting is really about Joe and 2024.
Democrats are slowly figuring out that Mr. Biden is unlikely to seek a second term, especially as voters conclude by watching him that he’s struggling under the burdens of the job. During the 2020 campaign, questioning his pep was treated as taboo ageism, despite the obvious change in his vigor compared with his 2012 debate against Paul Ryan.
But 58% of voters now say Mr. Biden is “too old to be President,” including 27% of Democrats, according to a recent Harvard-Harris poll. Meantime, 53% of voters “have doubts” about whether he is “mentally fit to serve,” including 16% of Democrats. On Friday Mr. Biden received an annual physical. We hope he passed with flying colors and will go on to enjoy the same longevity as Jimmy Carter, now 97.
Speaking of Mr. Carter, though, here’s what he said in 2019: “If I were just 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was President.” Mr. Biden will be 82 in 2024. Democrats were content to overlook this when their goal was evicting Donald Trump. But that’s done. Mr. Biden’s utility to Democrats will fall further if his $4 trillion spending bill passes, especially if Republicans retake Congress in 2022.
So who’s on deck? Ms. Harris isn’t proving to be a compelling answer, hence the panic. Her approval rating is on a journey to the center of the Earth, with one poll lately pegging it at 28%. A CNN report this week aired griping from Ms. Harris’s circle that she isn’t being set up to succeed. Her communications director is on the way out.
It’s true that Mr. Biden has asked Ms. Harris to take the lead on tough issues: immigration and the border, plus the voting bills in Congress, which won’t pass. Other Vice Presidents have also struggled to find their role, especially when the man in the Oval Office knows his own way around town.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that criticism of Ms. Harris is tinged with sexism and racism, particularly from “some in the right wing who have gone after her because she is the first woman, the first woman of color” to serve as Vice President. Sorry, a vast right-wing conspiracy doesn’t produce a 28% approval rating. Only Ms. Harris can do that, and her struggles to appeal are hardly new.
She dropped out of the 2020 presidential race before the first votes were cast. She was polling seventh in South Carolina, where most of the Democratic primary voters are black. The party nominated Mr. Biden as a caretaker President with the sole job of beating Mr. Trump. As a concession to identity politics, Mr. Biden pledged to pick a woman Vice President, and then he settled on Ms. Harris.
Perhaps Ms. Harris can turn things around. Meanwhile, look for Democrats to praise Amazon’s new Pete Buttigieg documentary.
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