Yesterday, former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens (who's making more money apologizing for his past political sins than he made as a Republican sinner) tweeted the retail-politics praises of Vice President Kamala Harris back in 2010. If one chose to be cynical — heaven forfend, not I — one would say he had to go that far back to find something politically praiseworthy in her career.
It was then, in California's attorney general contest, that she defeated Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley, whom Stevens said was the "strongest Republican not named Schwarzenegger in twenty years." Stevens further remarked that it was a "Very tight race." His overall implication was that Harris would be a formidable presidential candidate in 2028, and a force to be reckoned with until then, should "something happen" (surely the world's worst euphemism) to reelected President Biden.
Stevens's tweet caused Nate Silver to make a point of chuckling.
In other responses to Stevens, Silver noted that, in California, "For a D to 'almost' lose [to] the R candidate [means] the D candidate has to be quite poor," and "Harris also performed very poorly in the 2016 Democratic primary. And she consistently polls notably worse than Biden does against Trump. All of the evidence points in the same direction here," which is that Trump would crush her.
My collateral argument so far could in fairness be attacked as the logical fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam — an appeal to authority, the authority being Nate Silver. Just because he says she'd be crushed by Trump does not make it so. But Silver has sound empirical evidence going for him, whereas Stevens's evidence — empirical though it be — is as shaky as the driveling propaganda he once spouted for Republican candidates.
Still, this is all speculation. So let's pile on some more.
The odds are reasonably good — to use a forced, unwanted word — that a reelected President Biden would leave the 2028 presidential race to an unelected President Harris. In other words, Ms. Harris could well be the public face of the Democratic Party in '28, though she was never directly supported by Democrats nor the electorate at large for that highest of offices. If her empirical unpopularity sustained itself, Democrats would thus be, in 2028, in a really poor political position.
What particularly frightens about that prospect is that prodigious Democratic unpopularity in 2028 would be just soon enough for Trumpism to still have a hold on the electorate — and to make a comeback. America must be free of the evil not only for another four years, but for at least another two-term Democratic presidency after that. Which means for the sake of the nation's welfare, Democrats must rather swiftly find, fashion or fabricate another inspiring Barack Obama.
Only one thing is absolutely clear in today's politics: Kamala Harris is not he.