Kamala harris

Americans are not fans of Vice President Kamala Harris, but Democratic strategists are convinced it’s just a messaging problem. If they could only explain to those silly voters why they should like Harris, then her dreams of winning the presidency in 2024 would be realized. That was the elitist arrogance behind a ‘crisis dinner’ for the Vice President last month featuring a legion of female Democratic strategists. Axios’s Jonathan Swan, who broke the story, astutely noted ‘it's telling that so early in the Biden-Harris administration, such powerful operatives felt compelled to try to right the Vice President's ship.

Off to Washington DC on Monday they flew, maskless with Miller Lites in hand — three-score Democratic members of the Texas legislature, breaking the quorum required for any vote, abandoning their duties at a called special session. Washington DC, where the real power-brokers live and the Vice President of the United States. On from there to a PR opportunity with the President himself. What a telling commentary on the state of American politics, where the story gets around that there’s only one side — the progressive side — worthy of attention on account of its self-trumpeted devotion to the people’s rights. Kamala Harris called the stunt ‘as American as apple pie’ — and sadly she’s not altogether wrong.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s office harbors a 'chaotic' atmosphere where staffers are treated 'like shit', according to a Politico report published Wednesday. The Beltway gossip rag cited nearly two dozen 'current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden’. Many sources blame Harris and Tina Flournoy, her chief of staff and longtime consigliere, for the toxicity and dysfunction. For example, Harris's recent trip to the US-Mexico border reportedly blindsided staffers responsible for handling travel arrangements, forcing them to complete everything at the last minute. 'People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it's an abusive environment,' said the one unnamed source.

We did it, Joe! After weeks of pressure, Vice President Kamala Harris is finally going to visit the US-Mexico border. The administration's border czar will travel to El Paso, Texas, on Friday. 'Earlier this year, the President asked the Vice President to oversee our diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,' VP spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. 'As a part of this ongoing work, the Vice President traveled to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month and will travel to El Paso on Friday.' Harris long resisted taking the trip down south, but her position became increasingly untenable with each disastrous interview and skyrocketing numbers of illegal border crossers.

The Biden administration has repeatedly refused to take its self-created border crisis seriously. Last week, they sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Guatemala and Mexico to address the 'root causes' of the recent surge in migration, one of which she identified as 'climate change’. Harris promised to throw more money at the problem and laughed at the idea that she should go to the border and see the crisis firsthand. Today, the White House sent out a press release insisting that they are taking serious action on what they call the 'border challenge’. The email starts out with a couple of factual whoppers. It claims that 'the trend of border apprehensions in May is a reduction of individuals (unique encounters) and families below the peak in 2019’.

Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on her first foreign trip since taking office this week — and quickly proved herself to be as empty as the faces on the royally-iced cookies she handed out to reporters on Air Force Two. President Biden's 'border czar' traveled to Guatemala and Mexico in a futile attempt to solve an autogenic crisis and insulted the intelligence of each country's leaders and the American people along the way. It seems even Harris's plane knew the disaster that would unfold if she made it to Central America, developing a 'technical issue' to keep the Vice President grounded. Unfortunately for all of us, she was undeterred, switching planes to continue on her journey.

Who is the head of state? As president, Joe Biden has the sole and unlimited authority to determine US foreign policy. He's flexed this power in pulling troops from Afghanistan and negotiating behind-the-scenes for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Interestingly, though, Vice President Kamala Harris has taken an outsized role in handling much of the administration's diplomacy. Take Friday morning, for example. Harris was the first administration official to greet South Korean president Moon Jae-in on his official working visit to the White House. The pair sat down for a bilateral meeting. The South Korean entourage included the foreign minister and director of national security — but the US side featured no similarly ranked diplomats.

Vice President Kamala Harris is not historically very popular. Her approval rating rarely topped 40 percent during her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary. Her poll numbers sagged in her home state of California. It wasn't until Biden chose her as his running mate that Harris enjoyed consistently higher approval ratings, but even as of April of this year, her unfavorability ratings were just about as high. Despite being pretty unlikable (and as that nervous laugh suggests, awfully inauthentic), Harris has managed to maneuver herself into arguably the most powerful position in the country. If she does eventually run for president, who would be her base? Who actually likes Kamala Harris?

So far in the 2020s, American citizens have been hectored endlessly about wearing masks, staying safe indoors and standing apart out. Yet the people who smash up neighborhoods are encouraged to keep expressing their pain. The concept of law and order is therefore becoming a twisted joke. Yes, Minneapolis is rioting again — another police violence video circulated on the internet, another round of anarchy, another bonfire of American values. This time it’s Daunte Wright, a young man shot dead as he tried to escape the police in Brooklyn Center, a northern suburb of the Twin Cities. The officer responsible, a woman called Kim Potter, seems to have believed she was using a Taser to stop Wright. But she got him with a gun instead.

Although the electors for the presidential election of 2020 do not cast their votes until December 14, and their votes are not certified — and hence the election is not officially ratified — until December 23, it is eminently possible that by the time you read this the world will know whether the election was won by Donald Trump or Joe Biden. That is emphatically not the case now, in mid-November. The media narrative would have you believe otherwise. According to the received script, Biden won on November 3, or at least in the wee hours of November 4, when mail-in ballots, tens of thousands of them, began appearing like manna from heaven.

It’s of course premature to even speculate as to how the new administration will fashion a foreign policy. But enough declarations have been made to give an outline, so let us imagine the policies that might emerge.The Founders never really envisioned foreign relations being a major preoccupation of America when they drew up the US Constitution. ‘Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none,’ Thomas Jefferson famously admonished. In a document that brilliantly balances the government’s power and reach between executive, legislative and judicial branches, the executive is left with virtual control over making foreign policy, for little of that was expected.

Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States. Decision Desk HQ, a non-partisan election results site, declared that Biden had won the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and therefore the presidency, at 8:50 a.m. ET on Friday morning. AP, CNN, ABC, NBC, Reuters, CBS and the New York Times called Pennsylvania for Biden at 11:30 a.m. ET Saturday morning. A win in Pennsylvania takes Biden to 273 Electoral College votes, past the threshold of 270 needed to secure the White House. The Democratic candidate then won Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, putting him at 306 electoral votes. The Associated Press and Fox News both called Arizona for Biden earlier in the week. Fox's decision is said to have incensed Trump senior advisers.

If Joe Biden loses the presidential election tomorrow, he will not have any shortage of people to blame. The first culprit will be himself. Why did he do it? Why did he run? There are some vigorous 78-year-olds. Joe Biden is not among them. Physically, he’s ready for a nice cup of Ovaltine, not the Oval Office. In the matter of stamina, it is unfair to measure most people against Donald Trump. The man is a machine. As Ann Althouse pointed out, the President visited five states yesterday, covering about 3,000 miles. Joe traveled to two quiet events in one state some 30 miles from his home. William Blake was on to something when he observed that 'Energy is eternal delight.’ Joe Biden is a faltering battery, a flaccid string. Donald Trump is a dynamo.

The most under-appreciated fact of the 2020 presidential campaign is that Kamala Harris, the woman likely to soon replace the geriatric Biden should the Democratic ticket win, is a creature of San Francisco political machine. Harris was born 56 years ago today in Berkeley, the daughter of two graduate students, and spent her formative years in the East Bay. She attended Howard University where she learned nothing about rap, returning to the Bay Area afterwards. Her political career took off after an affair with then California State Assembly Speaker, and the future mayor of San Francisco, and the City’s powerbroker, Willie Brown. Brown was twice her age at the time, and his wife was battling cancer.

Long before her Senate confirmation hearings, we knew Judge Amy Coney Barrett was smart. A Supreme Court clerkship and prolific career in the legal academy added up to someone uncommonly capable of hard work. That she is Catholic with seven kids — the ‘dogma lives loudly in her’, to borrow Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s immortal slur — is well known. What we didn’t expect was the hearing’s greatest surprise: Judge Barrett is normal.That is no minor relief in an America that increasingly seems a little unhinged. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse came to the Senate floor bearing an incomprehensible series of partially hand-scrawled charts, like a conspiracy theorist storming a town hall.

8:15 p.m. ET — Matt McDonald: Hello and welcome to The Spectator’s live blog for the vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City, Utah, between Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris. Along with six of my Spectator comrades, I’ll be offering commentary, analysis and jokes (much more my pace), on whatever unfolds on the University of Utah campus tonight. While the pair may offer a more sober affair than Trump and Biden did last week, Cockburn has knocked up a drinking game so you don’t have to join them. I have a six-pack of Carib, let’s get started. 8:16 p.m. ET — Freddy Gray: Vice presidential debates are not that interesting, as a rule. But 2020 is very weird and different and tonight does feel as if it should produce something unusual.

The United States has always been the world’s leading religious marketplace. Even before independence, the American colonies were more fervently Protestant than any country in Europe. The Pilgrim Fathers turned Massachusetts into a witch-hunting Calvinist theocracy, and no sooner had Puritan power begun to wane than New England was seized by a ‘Great Awakening’ in which vast crowds declared their faith in Jesus with hysterical enthusiasm. But it was the Founding Fathers’ decision to deregulate religion completely that really set America apart from the Old World. In successive ‘awakenings’ lasting well into the 20th century, thousands of sects sprang up, some barely Christian but all of them 100 percent American.