Biden’s enemies were right: Kamala Harris was the ‘insurance policy’ all along
From Florida to Texas to California and many points in between, there is an insurance crisis.
And it turns out there’s one in the White House too, with President Biden’s fiercest critics apparently right all along about Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the time it takes you to read this column, yet another Democratic legislator is renouncing, on record or off, Joe Biden’s re-election bid.
And that’s exactly what an ambitious politician might do when his or her re-election messaging ends up waylaid by the Delaware dodderer in the White House who’s unwilling to read the room and leave with grace.
Biden ran in 2020 as an avuncular figure who promised a restoration to historic norms and a bridge to a new generation of Democratic dynamos — but in 2024, the aging president is holding onto power with a veritable death grip.
And in doing so, he is validating the taunts of his political enemies, who claimed for years that Harris was an “insurance policy” for the Biden administration, a hedge against removal midterm.
The one thing they couldn’t anticipate, though, was that Harris would be insurance for the Biden campaign, embattled and questioned in recent weeks after a cakewalk primary season whose results were as in doubt as plebiscites in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and today’s Russia, China and North Korea.
“I thought Biden picking her at first was the worst decision ever because she’s not great. But she’s the best impeachment insurance and 25th Amendment insurance anyone could have,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Fox News in 2023.
“Even though he can barely read the teleprompter and as much as people disapprove of him, nobody wants Harris, and so they’d much rather stick with Biden floundering around than actually turn the wheels of power over to somebody that clearly is in over her head,” DeSantis added.
DeSantis was an early adopter of that argument, now embraced by Donald Trump.
“Whatever else can be said about crooked Joe Biden, you have to give him credit for one brilliant decision, probably the smartest decision he ever made. He picked Kamala Harris as his vice president. No, it was brilliant. Because it was an insurance policy. Maybe the best insurance policy I’ve ever seen,” the former president said last week in Doral, Fla.
Unlike in the case of DeSantis’ comments on Harris, repeated over the course of years, Trump only recently adopted this position.
Trump taunts Harris — an easy target — relentlessly, with his campaign dubbing her “Cackling Kamala” in reference to her distinctive laugh.
New reporting from the Daily Mail makes it clear, meanwhile, the Biden camp had as little expectation that Harris would succeed him as Barack Obama did of Biden himself being next up in 2016 — and first lady Jill Biden is a big driver of that.
The Mail’s take?
Dr. Biden was unhappy with Harris’ comments during a primary debate in 2019 that accused her husband of opposing busing to facilitate school integration in the 1970s.
As CNN noted in a “fact check” at the time, Joe Biden courted support from Senate segregationists, including Mississippi Democrat James Eastland and North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms.
“Jill was trying to stop Kamala joining the Biden ticket in 2020. She has hated her ever since the school bus thing. But she bit her tongue because Biden boxed himself into a corner by saying he would pick a black woman for his running mate,” claimed an “insider” to the Mail.
Transactional politics drove the Harris pick.
But it was a means to an end.
The idea was to marginalize her, giving her thankless duties like being a “border czar” for an administration that allowed unchecked illegal immigration for more than three years and using her — as Republicans charged — as an insurance policy that Americans would theoretically never let be cashed.
What the Biden camp didn’t count on was his act wearing thin, as his faculties fade.
But the consequences are clear now, as Democrats call on the president to step away from the campaign, and his camp’s contempt for the VP is clear.
Yes, Harris was the insurance policy.
But Team Biden placed a bad bet when it wagered that no one would be seeking to cash it in.
Times have changed since Biden picked a VP — and so have they changed from the 1970s, when the Delaware Democrat was yoked to untouchable party elders who had the power to protect him from himself.
The insurance policy the Bidens never intended to cash is set to be paid, for better or for worse.
Will Joe and Jill acknowledge that reality?
Not if they can help it.
