Still, that Harris is unpopular should come as no great surprise, given that she somehow manages to combine into a single package a transparent insincerity, an unvarnished authoritarianism, and a tendency toward precisely the sort of self-satisfied progressivism that helped the Republicans to limit their losses at the last general election. If her apologists wish to, they can pretend that the reaction Harris yields is “gendered” or “systemic” or “inequitable” or whatever other bastardized academic term is fashionable this week, and they should feel free to knock themselves out doing so. Deep down, though, they must know that America isn’t the problem here. The problem is that Harris is a phony. It remains the case that, throughout her entire public career, almost nobody has looked at Kamala Harris and thought, “Yes, she’s the person we need to lead us.” Sure, she’s won a couple of elections. But even in deep blue California, she has struggled. Her 2010 victory in the attorney general’s race was decided by just 74,000 votes out of more than 9.6 million cast, and ended up being so close that it took three weeks before the result was finally clear. There is a reason that, having been picked as Biden’s running mate, Harris was quickly shoved offstage... The vice presidency may, indeed, be “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” but it seems indisputable that the Democratic Party has a real interest in Harris being more popular than she is. Joe Biden is 78 years old — older than any president has ever been at any point in American history. There is no guarantee that Biden will finish his first term, and there is even less of a guarantee that he will run again in 2024. In either case, when Biden leaves the White House, Kamala Harris will be his presumptive heir, and, in both cases, the Democratic Party — which explicitly put Harris there because she is a female minority — will struggle mightily to extricate itself from the dead weight she brings along. “Look at this historic vice president who, of course, shouldn’t be the actual president” is not exactly a winning message, is it?