Election 2024 /

WSJ: A Vote for President Kamala Harris The Vice President wants you to know she’s ready to be President. She’d better be.

  |   By Polling+ Staff

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

A Vote for President Kamala Harris

The Vice President wants you to know she’s ready to be President. She’d better be.

An endorsement for President Kamala Harris. The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes:

“Vice President Kamala Harris is reassuring everyone that she’s up to the job of succeeding her boss if the moment arrives, and the timing is no accident. The evident mental decline of the 81-year-old President Biden means that a vote for Mr. Biden this year is also really a vote for President Harris sometime in a second Biden term. 

Kamala Harris – WSJ Spotlight Coverage, Recent News

Kamala Harris is the vice president of the U.S. under President Biden and is again serving as Biden’s running ma…

“I am ready to serve. There’s no question about that,” Ms. Harris told the Wall Street Journal in an interview last week, before the release of Robert Hur’s report highlighting Mr. Biden’s failing memory. Everyone who sees her on the job, Ms. Harris said, “walks away fully aware of my capacity to lead.”

Readers no doubt have their own view of Ms. Harris’s capacity. She hasn’t demonstrated it much as Vice President, notably in her assigned task of securing the border. Her main contribution to that debate was to blame poverty and lawlessness in Central America, though those have long existed. Her main job in the last 18 months or so has been as Mr. Biden’s emissary to the Democratic left on voting rights, abortion rights, and more. 

Ms. Harris has also provided political security to Mr. Biden because so many Democrats believe she would be a disaster as their presidential nominee if Mr. Biden chose not to run. But that’s a false sense of political security.

For one thing, Democrats wouldn’t have to nominate Ms. Harris if Mr. Biden stood down and the nomination were decided at the Democratic convention in August. Other candidates would run, and their relative appeal would be tested.

Our guess is that Ms. Harris’s polling would be bad enough that Democratic pros would rally behind someone else, despite the identity-politics complications of opposing a minority woman. Democrats are bloodier-minded about power than are GOP primary voters.

Democrats also won’t be able to escape the problem of Ms. Harris even if Mr. Biden stays in the race. Republicans are sure to make Ms. Harris a central issue, and they should because chances are high that Mr. Biden wouldn’t serve out his term through age 86. That might scare more swing voters even than Mr. Biden’s mental frailty or Donald Trump’s daily diatribes. It’s another good reason for Democrats to rethink their entire ticket.”

In 1968, to the shock of political observers, the newly nominated GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon was supposedly considering runner-ups Governor Nelson Rockefeller (NY), Michigan Governor George Romney (father of Mitt) or New York’s Mayork John Lindsay, a GOP star of the day. Nixon stunned the political world by picking the decidedly right-wing and mostly unknown Governor of Maryland, Spiro T. (Ted) Agnew.

Nixon, went the word at the time, was alleged to have remarked to his staff that “Ted Agnew is my insurance policy.” Which is to say if Nixon ran into some sort of serious political trouble, Democrats would never impeach him for fear of making Agnew president. In fact, only when Agnew himself was forced out over corruption charges and the well-liked House GOP Leader Gerald Ford chosen as his successor did Nixon finally quit because of the Watergate scandal.

One gets the feeling that Harris is today’s Spiro Agnew. Which is to say, she is Joe Biden’s insurance policy.