Where's Kamala? She's Everywhere! (with Candidly Tiff)

The 2024 election will be about the VP. That's a good thing.

The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be a rematch between Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Donald John Trump. It should not be close. Since Election Day of 2020, the latter has attempted to overthrow the government, been impeached a second time, been indicted twice (with more indictments looming), and had a jury side with one of his (many) sexual assault victims. The former, meanwhile, has been the best president of my lifetime.

Despite all the time and effort spent these last three years trawling Hunter Biden’s laptop for dirt on POTUS, the Republicans have come up empty. Joe Biden is a hard guy to muddy up. In 2024, then, the GOP will home in on another target. Whatever names appear at the top of the ticket, the election will be about Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden is old, they will say. This is true. He will turn 81 in November, would be 82 if and when he begins his second term and, if I’m doing the math right, 86 when that term ends. Actuarial tables aren’t alternative facts. (Trump, who turned 77 the day after his second indictment, is no spring chicken either, and is in conspicuously worse shape both physically and cognitively than POTUS. But the media never brings up his age or his health, perhaps because he behaves like the class bully who’s repeating fifth grade.) So the Republican talking point is simple: “A vote for President Biden is a vote for President Harris.”

“Nikki Haley has already started this attack,” Candidly Tiff, the political commentator and KHive charter member, tells me on today’s PREVAIL podcast. Haley “has become the attack dog on Kamala Harris. Maybe because she’s a woman, they’ve said, ‘You know, hey, you go take that.’ She’s also a woman of color, even though sometimes she thinks that she’s not, but she still is. So the fact that she has brought this argument multiple times—I mean, she did it on Friday again. She keeps saying it: ‘A vote for Biden is a vote for VP.’”

So what’s the counter?

Tiff grins. “I think the way that we combat this is say, ‘Good!’”

The media is in no hurry to tell us about her accomplishments—despite what the chuds on the Supreme Court might opine about race, misogynoir is real—but Harris has been an active, engaged vice president—no less important to Biden’s administration than Dick Cheney was to Dubya’s. “If you actually wanted to know what the VP was doing,” Tiff says, “you could [easily] find out, because it’s all over social media. But people don’t want to look for it.”

To some extent, this comes with the territory. In office, the vice president is always something of an afterthought. Consider Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt’s third and final VP, who inherited a country still at war and yet was barely read in. The current trend of second bananas taking an active role in government is a recent phenomenon. (Cut to Cheney in his bunker at an undisclosed location, doing the “this guy” move with his thumbs.) But, as Tiff points out, at no point in the history of the United States was there a concerted media effort to track down the vice president. No one in the press was running around in 1991 asking “Where is Dan Quayle?”

But on the campaign trail, the dynamics shift. VPs come out swinging. They are, traditionally, the attack dogs of the operation. This is something sorely needed in today’s Democratic Party. As Micah L. Sifrey writes in The Connector:

The Biden Administration is embarking on a big push to convince Americans that its major legislative accomplishments are changing their lives for the better. But while their “Investing in America” three-week barnstorm will have lots of ribbon-cutting-style events, it’s questionable how much of an impact this will have on public opinion. As Deepak Bhargava, Sharzhad Shams and Harry Hanbury write in Democracy Journal in “The Death of ‘Deliverism’,” it’s time we took seriously the possibility that working-class Americans of all colors are so profoundly disillusioned they can’t believe it when government does something good for them. They cite the widespread public apathy about the demise of the child tax credit, which had temporarily lifted more than 2 million children out of poverty and reduce the rate of child poverty by 46%. They write, “during the same time span in which monthly deposits landed in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, the percentage of Black voters—a group that especially benefited from the policy—who said their lives had improved under the Biden Administration actually declined.”

“It has long been an article of faith among liberals and leftists,” they write, “that if you ‘deliver’ for people—specifically, if you deliver economic improvements in people’s lives through policy—these changes will solidify or shift people’s political allegiances….However, progressive economic policies do not necessarily lead to the political outcomes that deliverism predicts they should, and deliverism is proving ineffectual as a response to authoritarianism. People are fully capable of supporting or ignoring progressive economic policies while voting for authoritarians.”

This is doubly true when those same authoritarians simply steal credit for achievements they voted against, which Republicans do all the fucking time. Just this week, seditious idiot Tommy Tuberville, the football coach turned senator from Alabama, tried to do a touchdown celebration on account of the $1.4 billion heading to his state via the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program—a key Biden/Harris initiative. “Great to see Alabama receive crucial funding to boost ongoing broadband efforts,” the coup-friendly senator tweeted, as if he hadn’t opposed and voted against the bill. How many of his constituents—who, remember, were gullible enough to vote for this fascist prick in the first place—will realize that Tuberville is full of shit?

Sifrey continues:

What should progressives do? Start by abandoning the assumption that technocratic solutions will be enough, and take identity, emotion and story-telling that names clear villains a lot more seriously. “Stories without villains make no sense to anyone,” the authors write. “The mainstream Democratic Party’s tendency to avoid naming corporations as bad actors, whether pharmaceutical companies or big banks, is politically disastrous.”

There are plenty of villains on the political right, lord knows: Trump, the lifelong criminal and violator of the Espionage Act, who wants to bang his daughter; the flagrantly corrupt Supreme Court Justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, who took rights away from women in between fishing trips with rightwing billionaires; Ron DeSantis, the Florida Bolsanaro; (alleged) rapist Rudy Giuliani, whose fingerprints are all over January 6; and my personal bugbear, the dastardly Leonard Leo.

Joe Biden will not go after these people. Dark Brandon, the Mr. Hyde side of his personality that occasionally makes an appearance, will take a swipe from time to time—as he did this week in smacking down Tuberville. But POTUS likes to stay positive. And that’s where the VP comes in. Kamala Harris will joyfully lay waste to these assholes. Remember those clips of her pwning Bill Barr and Brett Kavanaugh and Jeff Sessions? We’re going to see that Kamala on the campaign trail—the Dark Brandon version of MVP. And the American people, starved for a fearless champion of human rights and defender of democracy, will love it.

Some media pundits have suggested that Biden switch running mates in 2024. This is a terrible idea for a million different reasons. Why would you replace Kamala Harris? Did you also want to kick Beyoncé out of Destiny’s Child? And if you were going to make such a dunderheaded move, why would you do it during campaign season, when MVP really shines?

Tiff puts it best: “Who would be better?”

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LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

S5 E17: KHive & The Reelection Rundown (with Candidly Tiff)

Greg Olear and Candidly Tiff, the political commentator and KHive charter member, discuss the Trump indictment, the GOP presidential candidates, Joe Biden’s successes, Kamala Harris’s impressive vice presidency, and what to expect in the election of 2024 and beyond. Plus: a new vacation destination.

Follow Tiff:
https://twitter.com/tify330

Follow her TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@candidly_tiff

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Photo credit: Lisa Ferdinando, Dept. of Defense. Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks to Department of Defense personnel, with President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 2021.