We are stuck with the French phrase coup d’état because nothing else describes so well the sudden removal of an old ruler by secret manoeuvrings — and their replacement with a chosen successor who happens to be endowed with every possible virtue. Of course, Kamala Harris is not a dictator because she must still face a nationwide election. But secret manoeuvrings did make her the presidential candidate of her Democratic Party, a position that is also intended to be filled by primary elections up and down the country before delegates agree on the victor at the Party Convention.
Nor was her vice-presidency enough to secure her candidacy. Far from it, given the unpromising electoral record of that most peculiar office, not inaccurately described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” by John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. In fact, in all of American history, only seven vice presidents were elected to the presidency (eight replaced a dead president). This reflects the habitual role of vice presidents: emphatically not presidents-in-waiting but rather politicos serving as symbolic figures who are selected to attract voters that the president cannot attract with his policies.
In Garner’s case, those voters were the good ol’ boys of Texas and the South who might not otherwise vote for a New York patrician who was also a liberal. In Biden’s case, those voters were women: so much so that he felt it necessary to announce the sex of his vice president without first selecting a plausible candidate. Indeed, Senator Elizabeth Warren initially thought she had secured the position, but Biden’s most important backer during his painful primary season — after losing badly in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, America’s most senior black politician, Rep. James Clyburn, came to the rescue — demanded that the woman should be black. For Biden, Harris was the obvious choice because she was still new in the Senate and had little power of her own.
Having chosen Harris, he then proceeded to ignore her, just as each president before him had ignored his own vice president, so that it was only very recently that Harris was given a definite task: to stop the embarrassing and politically disastrous immigrant flood at the border with Mexico, which had started when Trump’s rather effective control measures were revoked during the very first days of the Biden Presidency.
What ensued was also embarrassing: having been appointed the “Border Tsar”, Harris did not stay in Washington to re-activate the controls that had worked so well under Trump, but instead travelled to Guatemala to earnestly tell would-be immigrants: “Do not come! Do not come!” Yet nothing changed at the border, which continued to be swamped — until Biden reactivated Trump’s measures as the election was approaching, when the numbers duly fell.
This is why, only a short time ago, the very same outlets that are now filled with joyful enthusiasm for Harris featured the grave warnings of anxious Democratic gurus, whose editorials urged her swift replacement by Biden. Unsurprisingly, Biden ignored those suggestions. As his own physical strength waned, Harris gained a very important new role in the White House: the best possible reason to keep Biden in the White House.
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