Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth, there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than they were before she arrived.

At CNN this week, Donna Brazile suggested that the White House should keep “the vice president on the road almost constantly” — which sounded like an eminently pragmatic way of ensuring that Harris remains safely out of the way until I realized that Brazile was envisioning Harris using those trips to talk to American voters. Harris, Brazile added, “is a wonderful messenger.” But is she? Really? Think back over Harris’s entire career. Can you find a single utterance of hers that has so much as approached being compelling or worthwhile? I doubt it. Harris is not interesting, she’s not substantive, she’s not provocative, or innovative, or wry. She’s not funny. She’s not amiable. She’s not accomplished or persuasive or adroit. She’s a heedless, cowardly, cackling cipher — an insipid, itinerant woolgatherer, whose first instinct in any situation is to resort to farcical platitudes or to suggest wanly that we should all have a “conversation about that.” Were she to be cast in a kids’ movie, it would not be as the hero, but as the ghastly mid-level bureaucrat who sends the hero’s dog to the pound halfway through the second act. All in all, there is no reason for anyone to be shocked by Harris’s failure, because there was no reason to anticipate that she’d end up as anything else. Presidential campaigns start off as vanity exercises in which overpaid marketing teams present their candidate as their candidate wishes ideally to be seen. When Harris was such a candidate, she gained 3 percent support in the polls. What, exactly, did her team think was going to happen when she was forced into the real world?