As press turns against Kamala Harris, even her surrogates have ‘lost hope’ in her

OPINION:

Well, now it’s just getting weird.

Vice President Kamala Harris has become a political piñata. And who’s hitting her with a stick the hardest: the liberal media.

Before we go on, let’s take a quick look back at Vice President Al Gore. The mainstream media loved President Bill Clinton (he could play the sax and wore briefs, which he was more than happy to talk about). But they did NOT like Mr. Gore.

In 1999, many were not happy with the prospect of the slow-speaking Tennessean becoming president, so they were brutal (“Saturday Night Live” mocked him for his earth-tone wardrobe and his “lock-box” fixation). He didn’t win.

Flash ahead to 2023. Ms. Harris is NOT beloved. There’s something about her that annoys YOU, sure, but it also annoys liberals and Democrats and the MSM. Maybe it’s her pretentious speech, her condescending tone or her chalkboard-grating laugh, but they just don’t like her.

Over the last few months, Democrats have openly mused about her future, with some liberal news sites and party leaders saying she shouldn’t run in 2024. If President Biden runs again, he should dump Ms. Harris, some stories say. Others say that if he doesn’t run, the party should bail on her and pick someone else.

Yeah, no one is looking forward to a Harris administration.

With all the horrible stories about how no one wants her, The New York Times assigned three — three! — reporters to try to salvage her career.

It did not go well.

The news outlet penned a piece this week headlined “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting.”

The piece rambled on and on — more than 2,200 words — and of course, concluded that Ms. Harris is pretty darn good, with the last line quoting a supporter as saying, “It’s better to let Kamala be Kamala.”

But there was one passage that was just so perfect.

“[T]he painful reality for Ms. Harris,” the piece said, “is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

Here’s the killer: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”

So, as Ms. Harris and her team are trying to spin some good news, they suggested the reporters check in with some top supporters, confident that they’d deliver some gushing quotes. Instead, they did the opposite, saying they’d “lost hope in her.”

Wow. 

The very next paragraph was also incredibly frank for the highly liberal New York Times. “Through much of the fall, a quiet panic set in among key Democrats about what would happen if President Biden opted not to run for a second term. Most Democrats interviewed, who insisted on anonymity to avoid alienating the White House, said flatly that they did not think Ms. Harris could win the presidency in 2024. Some said the party’s biggest challenge would be finding a way to sideline her without inflaming key Democratic constituencies that would take offense.”

The Times report followed another from the equally liberal Washington Post published last week. “Some Democrats are worried about Harris’s political prospects,” the headline said.

The Post, for some reason, went to Jacquelyn Bettadapur, a “longtime leader of the Cobb County Democrats.”

“People are poised to pounce on anything — any misstep, any gaffe, anything she says — and so she’s probably not getting the benefit of the doubt,” she said. Many Democrats “don’t know enough about what she’s doing,” she said, adding, “it doesn’t help that she’s not [that] adept as a communicator.”

Ms. Harris is in the dumper. A recent survey from Morning Consult found that just 28% of Democratic voters would vote for Ms. Harris in a Democratic presidential primary without Mr. Biden on the ballot, down from 33% in a poll last year. You don’t win the White House with those numbers.

The liberal site Slate laid a vicious slap on Ms. Harris shortly after Election Day 2022.

“As Joe Biden weighs a run for re-election even as he becomes the first octogenarian U.S. president in history, he should think back on what it was like to watch the Harris campaign flame out,” Christina Cauterucci wrote. “Harris, a proven dud of a presidential candidate who has done little to distinguish herself since, is not a good choice for the Democrats’ top billing. For his second term, should he seek one (he shouldn’t!), Biden should tap someone else.”

Ms. Harris is going the way of Mr. Gore. Almost nobody likes her. And even though the next election is more than 600 days away, even her friends are turning away. When your friends have lost hope, you’re pretty much done.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.