For those of you who arenāt sports fans, thereās an old football maxim that the most popular player in town is the backup quarterback.
If your team isnāt playing so hot, thereās always the idea that the guy on the bench is the answer. Just put the starter on the sidelines, callers to sports radio will declare, and poof ā problem solved! Thatās rarely the case, of course, and pretty soon the most popular player in town is that guyās backup.
What does it say about Vice President Kamala Harris, then ā the backup quarterback in this parallel ā that even as the starter gets pounded from every direction, she remains even less popular than he is?
Perhaps itās because of the fact that, unlike the backup quarterback for your local pro team, we can see Harris practicing for the job every day. Sheās not very good at it ā and weāve documented many of the reasons sheās so unlikeable here at The Western Journal. Weāll continue doing so, no matter how much the media might try to buoy her reputation. You can help us by subscribing.
The latest hiccup came Monday as Harris spoke at an event meant to prop up the administrationās environmental agenda. The short speech quickly birthed another viral clip of the veep making virtually no sense.
A bit of context: The clip came during a portion of the speech where Harris looked toward a future where investments in Infrastructure (well, heavily air-quoted āInfrastructure,ā at the very least) produced massive returns in green technology.
āImagine a future: The freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves and the buses that take children to school and parents to work; imagine all the heavy-duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and allow our economy to grow ā imagine that they produced zero emissions,ā Harris said.
Yes, sing it with me ā imagine all the people, living for tod~ay~ay~ay. You may say Kamalaās a dreamer, but sheās not the only one. Last April, President Biden used a similarly Lennonesque construction when talking about how his massive spending package could create a plane that would ātravel 21,000 miles an hour,ā roughly Mach 27.
Thatās farcical on its face, of course. But try to take the next two sentences out of the veepās mouth with a straight face:
āWell, you all imagined it,ā she told the assemblage. āThatās why weāre here today ā because we have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen.ā
I feel like weāve gone from John Lennon to an intoxicated Willy Wonka: āCome with me / and youāll see / a shot of pure imagination / unburdened by what has been / then to make the possible actually happen.ā
Sure, the words hang together, strictly speaking, but theyāre so vague they effectively mean nothing. And they prove, once again, why Americans canāt trust anything Kamala Harris says.
The problem is not just that theyāre more of the same blather that Democrats always fall back on when they pretend new-agey aphorisms are a substitute for explaining an actual program of action.
The bigger problem for Democrats is that once those new-agey aphorisms are dispensed with and we get to their actual program of action, we end up with what we have now: raging inflation, an illegal immigration invasion thatās out of control, a president who gives a tacit green light to foreign aggression, and gas prices that are eating Americansā salaries with every trip to the pump.
So when Democrats āmake the possible actually happen,ā we get the Biden administration.
But, if you want the wisdom of the brilliant veep on your wall, hereās a printable version:
Of course, this word salad wouldnāt be such a big deal if it happened in a vacuum. If you havenāt been paying attention to the backupās speechifying of late, she hasnāt been throwing too many complete passes verbally.
And those incompletions neednāt be needlessly complicated. Here she is last month on radio show āThe Morning Hustleā explaining to host Headkrack ā known on his driverās license as Lester Ruffin ā what the Ukraine conflict was about āin laymanās terms.ā
I donāt usually refer to infants as ālaymen,ā which is why Harrisā explanation didnāt quite sit well with me (or many others):
āSo, Ukraine is a country in Europe,ā she said. āIt exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country.ā
And Ukraineās flag is blue and yellow. Russiaās flag is white, blue and red. Ukraine flag good. Put Ukraine flag on your social media profile. Burn Russian flag. Put Russian flag on social media profile is bad. Brainy done hurt-hurt now.
At least Headkrack was being nice and setting her up to knock one out of the park. (I know, mixed metaphor ā but at least Iām making sense, which is more than we can say for Kamala.) When things get adversarial, Harris tends to fall apart. Consider these two doozies of answers ā one from January, the other from last year:
To be fair, sheās been to Europe since the last clip. A visit to the actual border has yet to happen. (As the New York Post noted when she made her āborder tripā in June of 2021, the closest she got to the border was a Border Patrol station nine miles away from it ā and in an area where the crisis wasnāt being felt most acutely.)
Perhaps this was always the plan for Joe Biden. After all, when your days in the league are numbered, you want your team drafting a Ryan Leaf, not a Peyton Manning. The one great thing about Kamala Harris from the presidentās perspective is that sheāll always make him look good.
However, assuming this wasnāt some brilliant 3D underwater chess next-level thinking by the president ā and this is a safe assumption, given Bidenās verbal skills are hardly any better than his veepās and he tends to refer to Harris as the president almost every other time they appear together in public, it seems ā Kamala is a cataclysmically bad pick.
Remember, she wasnāt picked to be Bidenās No. 2, but No. 1A. She was an insurance policy for a man who was the oldest president in the Oval Office on the day he took office. She wasnāt just the backup QB, she was supposed to be the starter in the not-too-distant future.
Itās little surprise, then, that as she stumbles around on the practice field, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is warming up on the sidelines.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
