While Americans may argue over exactly how to solve the burgeoning border crisis, one thing isn’t up for debate: Vice President Kamala Harris’s media tour to Guatemala is on-the-record as a crisis of its own.
Even left-wing MSNBC hosts critiqued her performance, and CNN reported that Democrats are “quietly perplexed” about it.
It’s clear that the White House is not providing Harris with neither the tools, the policy solutions, nor the (media) air support she needs to succeed with her primary task of solving the border crisis.
There may be something larger going on here.
After all, the Biden administration didn’t take the hit for the bad press junket – Harris personally did.
To understand what is at play here, one has to understand the gamesmanship of Washington, D.C.
James B. Stewart wrote the book on it, literally, in Blood Sport.
President Harry Truman famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
The late Vince Foster wrote that in Washington “ruining people is considered sport.”
With this logic, what really may be the cause of Harris’s current troubles are the prior tussles between her boss and his boss, former President Barack Obama.
First, there was her attack on then-candidate Joe Biden on the debate stage of the first Democratic Primary Presidential debate.
Harris clobbered Biden over his record on school segregation and his stance against school busing of African american children into white schools. It was a moment of embarrassment for Biden, and it nearly ended his candidacy.
Then, Harris doubled down on the challenge in the second Democratic Primary debate stating that on school integration, Biden “has still failed to acknowledge that it was wrong to take the position he took at that time.”
She also claimed that he was “in the United States Senate working with segregationists to oppose busing, which was the vehicle by which we would integrate America’s public schools.”
The challenges were not appreciated, nor soon forgotten, by First Lady Jill Biden. Politico reported that Dr. Biden said to a group of supporters about Harris, “Go f—k yourself!”
But wait, there’s more.
Prior to the 2020 debate kerfuffle Harris bucked not only Biden but also his boss, then-President Barack Obama, when she fought his efforts to secure the border. She ordered California’s law enforcement agencies across 58 counties to ignore Obama’s “2012 Secure Communities Act” directive that would have allowed local law enforcement to turn over illegal immigrants to federal authorities, even during routing traffic stops. With Harris’s snub and her refusal to allow the most populous state in the union (and the most populous border state) to participate, she effectively killed Obama’s program.
Bad blood? Yes
Bad blood over the border? Most definitely yes.
So, with all of that bad blood, why did Biden tap Harris for the Vice Presidency?
He appears to have borrowed a page from the brilliant President Ronald Reagan, who at the time knew that an up-and-coming politico named George H.W. Bush had been critical of his policies and could serve as a detractor who might nip at Reagan’s heels for four years.
Rather than take the chance of that distraction, Reagan invited Bush onto the ticket as his vice president.
As for the modern-day vice president, it is plausible that the Biden administration is allowing Harris to fail because they don’t actually want the border crisis to be fully resolved. After all, a flood of illegal immigrants immediately becoming dependent upon government sounds like a dream voting base for the Democrat Party.
Yes, it is possible that Biden’s advisers are just fine with millions of migrants crossing the border — however, with the climate in Washington and the bad blood between the two camps, the more likely explanation is that they’re simply looking to cross her.
Jennifer Kerns is host of the new nationally-syndicated show, ''All-American Radio with Jennifer Kerns.'' Read Jennifer Kerns' Reports Here.