President Kamala Harris?

OPINION:

“Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus, right? Can you raise your hand if you love a yellow school bus?” Vice President Kamala Harris gushed in October 2022 in Seattle while praising a federal grant awarded to school districts to replace older buses with electric vehicles.

The speech was largely mocked for its inanity.

Early in her tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Ms. Harris was given the distinction of being President Biden’s “border czar,” tasked with “stemming the migration to our southern border.”

Since taking the appointment in 2021, the Biden administration has set record highs for migrant encounters on the southern border for the last three years in a row, with about 10 million illegals crossing into the country.

On Ms. Harris’ watch, 380 people on the terror watchlist have entered the country — more than the 14 during former President Donald Trump’s tenure in office. Meanwhile, 30.3 tons of fentanyl has crossed our borders during the Biden-Harris administration, enough to kill roughly 13.8 billion people.

Moreover, more than 85,000 migrant children have been lost to the sex trade and sweatshops.

Ms. Harris has largely avoided the southern border. It was only after her disastrous 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that she considered it. When Mr. Holt asked her why she had yet to visit the border, she responded glibly: “And I’ve never been to Europe. I don’t understand the point you’re making.”

Within a month, she visited El Paso, Texas, for a short photo-op, more than 1,000 miles upriver from the Rio Grande Valley sector, which was experiencing a genuine crisis. At that time in Mr. Biden’s presidency, the administration’s stance was that the southern border was a “challenge” that it was “managing.” The White House empathetically denied the region was in crisis.

Would Ms. Harris take control of the southern border if she were upgraded to president? Don’t count on it. In 2018, while running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Ms. Harris told MSNBC the role of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement needed to be “reexamined” and “we need to probably think about starting from scratch.”

Ms. Harris flamed out of her primary campaign in 2019, the first top-tier candidate to drop out of the contest. According to The New York Times, she proved “an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions.”

Kelly Mehlenbacher, Ms. Harris’ state operations director, wrote in a resignation letter at the time, which was obtained by the Times, that “this is my third presidential campaign, and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.”

Ms. Harris’ staffing problems followed her into the White House. In her first year in office, she experienced an end-of-year staff exodus. Why?

According to The Washington Post, Ms. Harris’ critics “scattered over two decades point to an inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions.”

Multiple articles cited Ms. Harris’ unwillingness to study briefing materials prepared by her staff before a high-profile interview or appearance and then her berating them when she looked or sounded incompetent.

“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer told the Post. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”

Throughout her political career, Ms. Harris has had to deny that her affair with then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown had anything to do with her meteoric rise. In 2019, Mr. Brown penned an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle with the headline “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?”

When they met around 1993, Mr. Brown was a noted civil rights leader and the speaker of the California Assembly, commonly referred to as one of California’s most influential legislators. Mr. Brown was 60, and Ms. Harris was 29.

In the piece, Mr. Brown acknowledged he helped Ms. Harris win her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. During the relationship, Ms. Harris received a BMW and a patronage job as the attorney to the California Medical Assistance Commission.

As Ms. Harris rose in the ranks of California politics to the state’s attorney general, she fought to keep nonviolent prisoners locked up — subverting a 2011 Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to reduce its prison population.

“Working in tandem with Gov. Jerry Brown, Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population,” the American Prospect wrote.

Lawyers from her office went so far as to claim that nonviolent offenders needed to stay incarcerated, lest they lose bodies for firefighting programs in the wildfire-plagued state, the Daily Beast reported.

Ms. Harris also advocated a 2011 law that allowed prosecutors to charge parents with a misdemeanor if their children missed 10% of the school year, disproportionally affecting poorer people of color.

Ms. Harris’ approval numbers as vice president are on par with Mr. Biden’s (38.6%, according to FiveThirtyEight’s latest polling average), with more than half of the country opposing her (50.4%). Some polls show her performing better than Mr. Biden in a hypothetical matchup against Mr. Trump, yet others show her equal with Mr. Biden or polling behind him.

Now, however, is her time. Mr. Biden exited the presidential race Sunday and endorsed Ms. Harris as his successor. It’s time for her to prove she’s better than her past performances.

In her own words, she can now run under her mantra, “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.