Americans who watched the â60 Minutesâ interview with Vice PresidentKamala Harris that aired Sunday on CBS found themselves in the unusual position of being assured that the president of the United States is âvery much alive.â
Thatâs good to know, of course, but it wasnât even close to answering the question at hand.
And it no doubt told the country more about Kamala Harris than she wanted to say.
When the topic arose, â60 Minutesâ correspondent Bill Whitaker wasnât asking if President Joe Biden can still fog a mirror. He wasnât even asking specifically about Bidenâs health.
What he was asking Harris was why it is that Democratic donors, the money behind the political machine thatâs destroying the American political system, arenât at all sure that the Vice President is the heir apparent in the event that Biden doesnât seek re-election in 2024.
âWe were talking to some Democratic donors, and they have told us that, should something befall President Biden and he is not able to run, that there would be a free-for-all for who would run as president,â Whitaker said.
âYou are in the spot that that would be a natural for you to step up. But weâre hearing from donors that they would not naturally fall into line. Why is that?â he asked.
It was couched in the kind of kid-glove treatment â60 Minutesâ has given the Biden administration, but the thrust of the question was, âwhy doesnât anyone who matters think youâre qualified to run in Bidenâs place?â
Harris could have answered that in any number of ways without giving the impression she was waiting for the president to pitch over. The fact that she didnât seemed beyond strange.
She could have easily said something like, âI donât know who youâre talking to, but as a Vice President whoâs been a key part of this administration from the beginning, Iâm sure Democrats know where to turn to continue working for the American people.â
That would be a lie six ways from Christmas, of course. Harris has made a hash of pretty much every high-profile assignment sheâs taken on.
She was supposed to act point on the administrationâs efforts to pass national âvoting rightsâ laws that were basically election-fixing schemes to combat Republican state-level efforts to guard election integrity. They ran into a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate.
She was â famously â supposed to be in charge of getting to the âroot causesâ of illegal immigration, but she made no discernible contribution to the debate one way or the other beyond parroting standard Democratic claptrap.
Most recently, Biden has put her in charge of the newly created White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an effort aimed squarely at the Second Amendment and one destined to do little more than generate yet more Democratic talking points and potentially new regulations that will end up being overturned in court.
But it would have been something.
Instead, Harrisâ attempt at dodging was the most transparent kind in Politics â answering a different question entirely as a way of explaining why no answer would be forthcoming.
âFirst of all, Iâm not going to engage in that hypothetical because Joe Biden is very much alive and running for re-election,â the Vice President said.
When Whitaker persisted â mildly â she shut down the conversation entirely.
âI hear from a lot of different people a lot of different things,â Harris said. âBut let me just tell you, Iâm focused on the job. I truly am. Our democracy is on the line, Bill. And I, frankly, in my head do not have time for parlor games, when we have a president who is running for re-election.
âThatâs it.â
The answer was considerably different in content and tenor from when Harris answered a similar question in September by declaring she was prepared to step into the presidency if needed.
âJoe Biden is going to be fine, so that is not going to come to fruition,â she said, according to The Associated Press. âBut let us also understand that every Vice President â every Vice President â understands that when they take the oath, they must be very clear about the responsibility they may have to take over the job of being president.
âIâm no different.â
Now, a Kamala Harris presidency might be the stuff of conservative nightmares, but at least she was relatively forthright in that answer.
The question is why she didnât just repeat that sentiment to Whitaker and confidently â if dishonestly â assure him that the donors would fall in line in time.
The most likely answer is that Team Biden didnât appreciate even the insinuation of the Harris statement from September.
For all their talk of âinclusivenessâ and âdiversity,â Democrats have a police-state caliber suspicion of anything outside the partyâs talking points, and Harris acknowledging the obvious â even as a âhypotheticalâ â probably earned her a rap from whatever Ministry of Truth monitor was on duty that day.
The fact that she used the word âhypotheticalâ again in not answering Whitakerâs question is a pretty good indicator that she was nervous.
More to the point, though, is that Harrisâ statement about Bidenâs life signs is an indication that she knows exactly how much support she has in the party â and that the Biden-Harris âpartnershipâ is essentially built on mutual blackmail.
When Biden chose Harris as his running mate, it was because he was indebted to South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, a black Democrat, and under extreme pressure from his partyâs left wing to pick a black woman. Considering the ever-more-race-obsessed nature of the Democratic Party, getting rid of her now is politically impossible. (Biden picking another black woman would give the game away a little too obviously.)
Harris, meanwhile, is tied to Biden. With her unpopularity, her ineptitude and her fingernails-grating-chalkboard personality, sheâs going nowhere on her own steam â and that answer to Whitaker shows she knows it.
In short, she assured Whitaker that Biden âis very much alive and running for re-electionâ because she had to.
Without Biden, sheâs a second-rate senator from California whose biggest spot in the limelight was in 2018, trying to smear then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Even in a United States where the Democratic Party has warped the conversation to the point where skin color and gender (not to mention sexual behavior) have assumed outsized importance in political discourse, Kamala Harris knows being a black woman got her where she is.
Being a black woman wonât get her any further, and she knows that too.
And thatâs more than she wants the rest of the country to know.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
