There is an insurance crisis from Florida to Texas to California and many points in between.
And it turns out there’s one in the White House: It appears President Biden’s harshest critics were right all along about Vice President Kamala Harris.
As you read this column, another Democrat is publicly or privately abandoning his challenge to Joe Biden’s reelection bid.
AFP via Getty Images
And that’s exactly what an ambitious politician does when his reelection message is thwarted by a wily Delaware elder in the White House who has read the mood and won’t walk away gracefully.
Biden ran in 2020 as an approachable figure promising to restore historic norms and build a bridge to a new generation of Democratic dynamics, but in 2024 the aging president finds himself clinging to power in a very desperate bid.
And in doing so, she is justifying the derision of political opponents who have long argued that Harris is an “insurance policy” for the Biden administration, a hedge against her removal from office in the midterm elections.
But what they didn’t expect was that Harris would become an insurance policy for the Biden campaign, which has struggled and been in doubt in recent weeks after a comfortable primary whose outcome was as questionable as referendums in Iraq under Saddam Hussein or today’s Russia, China or North Korea.
“I thought Biden picking her was a terrible decision at first because she’s not a great person, but she’s the best insurance against impeachment and the 25th Amendment,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Fox News in 2023.
“Harris can barely read a teleprompter and no matter how much people hate her, nobody wants her, so they’d rather hang on to a floundering Biden than hand the wheels of power to someone they clearly can’t control,” DeSantis added.
DeSantis was an early supporter of this cause, and now Donald Trump is, too.
“Whatever else you say about the unscrupulous Joe Biden, you have to give him credit for making one great decision, probably the smartest decision ever, which is he picked Kamala Harris to be his vice president. No, that was great, because it was insurance. Probably the best insurance I’ve ever seen,” the former president said last week in Doral, Florida.
Unlike DeSantis’ comments about Harris, which have been repeated for years, Trump only recently adopted this position.
Trump has relentlessly provoked Harris, a prime target, with his campaign dubbing her “Giggle Kamala” after her distinctive laugh.
New report from the Daily Mail Meanwhile, the Biden team clearly has as little hope of Ms Harris succeeding President Barack Obama as Biden did in 2016. And a big driving force behind this has been first lady Jill Biden.
What is the Mail’s view?
Biden was unhappy with comments Harris made during a 2019 primary debate in which she criticized her husband for opposing busing to promote school integration in the 1970s.
As CNN pointed out in a “Fact Check” At the time, Joe Biden was seeking endorsements from segregationists in the Senate, including Democrat James Eastland of Mississippi and Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina.
“Jill tried to block Kamala from joining the Biden campaign in 2020 – she’s always hated her ever since the school busing incident – but she kept quiet after Biden painted himself into a corner by saying he would choose a black woman as his running mate,” an “insider” claimed to the Mail.
Transactional politics drove the selection of Harris.
But it was a means to an end.
The aim was to marginalize her, give her the thankless task of being “border czar” in an administration that has allowed unchecked illegal immigration for more than three years, and, as Republicans have charged, use her as an insurance policy that Americans would theoretically never cash in.
What the Biden team didn’t anticipate was his abilities fading and his actions weakening.
But with Democrats calling on the president to step aside from the campaign, the results are clear and the president’s campaign’s disdain for the vice president is clear.
Yes, Harris was insurance.
But the Biden campaign was wrong to bet that no one would benefit.
Times have changed since Biden’s choice of vice president, and since the 1970s, when the Democrat from Delaware was tied to untouchable party elders who had the power to protect him from himself.
The insurance money, which the Bidens never intended to cash, is likely going to be paid out, for better or worse.
Will Joe and Jill acknowledge that reality?
If they can’t avoid it, then they won’t.
