Will Hard Questions for Harris Ever Start?

(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an  endorsement of any political party or candidate on the part of Newsmax.)

“She’s terrible, but she’s getting a free ride,” said former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald J. Trump of his new opponent Kamala Harris in an X interview with Elon Musk last week.

While regime media have lavished nonstop adulation on the incumbent vice president since President Biden withdrew from his reelection bid and nominated her to run in his place on July 21, it is curiously Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has born the brunt of conservative criticism.

Chosen over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a popular politician of some national visibility who might have been of greater help by delivering his swing state to Harris — but who appears to have been too uncomfortably close to Israel for radical Democrats — Walz’s image as a benign Midwestern leader faltered within hours of his selection.

In the intervening two weeks before the Democratic National Convention, he has been assailed by daily revelations about his state’s corruption scandals, his extremist positions on gender and sexuality, his ruinous California-like economic policies, his sophomoric attempt to brand Republicans as “weird,” his DUI arrest, his mismanagement of Minnesota’s 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, his alleged lies about his military service, his disturbing praise for a Muslim cleric who appears to have celebrated terrorism and Adolf Hitler, and other foibles that have started to put the Democratic ticket on the defensive.

All of Walz’s issues are worth exploring in detail, and time will tell whether attacks over them will succeed in discrediting the presumptive Democratic vice-presidential candidate.

But therein lies the problem.

Despite the seriousness of Walz’s scandals, he is on the bottom half of the ticket, where he represents no demographic of any electoral importance and leads a reliably blue state that has only gone Republican once since 1956.

If elected, his main jobs will be to go to the proverbial funerals that vice presidents attend when the president is too busy and be prepared to step in to replace the president in the unlikely event that becomes necessary.

Vanishingly few Americans will cast their votes in November because of Walz, even if much of electorate believes the worst of him. Partisan Democrats will — and indeed already are — excuse or minimize any alleged issue around Walz as they prepare to vote for Harris.

GOP loyalists will line up behind Trump with what polls suggest is about as much enthusiasm as before Walz was selected.

Indeed, despite being a virtual unknown in American politics just two weeks ago, and after all the attacks in the meantime, Walz now enjoys the highest favorability ratings of this year’s four presidential ticket candidates.

Republicans may yet succeed in casting Walz as a villain, but so what? Harris, the candidate for president, will continue to bask in favorable media coverage and, possibly, add to her polling gains as election day approaches.

In this the GOP appears to have forgotten that the successful 2004 “swift boat” ads were directed against Democratic candidate John Kerry, who headed the ticket, rather than against his half-forgotten running mate John Edwards, a senator whose biggest scandals exploded years after his and Kerry’s failed campaign.

It is obvious what accounts for this strange and unprecedented diversion away from the main candidate, a woman of color, and toward the vice presidential candidate, a white male who seems to have a lot of problems.

As Democrats insisted, and as establishment GOP types compliantly parroted in the first days of Harris’s campaign, serious criticism of her is almost totally off limits for fear of being considered racist or sexist.

That premise, however, is ridiculous.

Whatever her race or gender, Harris is a human being seeking election to the most powerful office in the world. Although race and gender definitely played a major role in her political rise and should be fair game for critics, she clearly has flaws and liabilities that have nothing to do with her pigmentation or chromosomes.

Responsible citizens should strongly question her on the merits of who she is, what she believes, how she has led and would lead, her public record, her policy positions and her current and former statements and actions.

As some publications even among the discredited mainstream media are already musing, she should be challenged on a rising tide of issues and asked hard and potentially embarrassing questions at a time of extreme national and international turmoil.

Without that boldness, the country could wake up with a long and potentially uncurable hangover on November 6.