Kamala’s coming betrayal

Vice President Kamala Harris is on a collision course with the very man she owes both her office and her candidacy to: the 46th president of the United States, one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

There’s really no way around it, though to her credit, she’s been actively looking for any other way. The public polls are bad, and all D.C. knows the Democrats’ better and more expensive internal polling is even worse.

Personality aside, what is she selling? She keeps promising to 'turn the page,' but from where to what?

Two weeks ago today, those numbers forced the campaign to ditch its bunker strategy, but even the safe ground campaign operatives chose to host their debutante debut failed to help. Social media clips of her gaffes reached far beyond original audiences and undermined Harris with the very voters she’d been trying to reach. When her numbers continued to decline after the blitz, the campaign tried the next thing: Fox News, which CNN and MSNBC like to sneer at but which earns far more politically independent viewers than they do. Harris has CNN on her side — she needs those independents.

Her staff members did everything they could to keep Bret Baier’s interview under their control. They showed up late and then waved their arms like crazy people to cut it short. When it was over, Democratic partisans awarded their candidate a participation trophy, claiming she did well by showing up at all. Republicans cheered Harris’ televised demolishing. Corporate media called it a Rorschach test, with each side claiming it won.

But notice: Democrats couldn’t point to a single place where she actually did well. Republicans, on the other hand, filled the airwaves with clip after clip of her frantic implosion under Baier’s pointed and persistent questioning. By Thursday afternoon, one Team Trump TikTok had already been watched 10.5 million times. It was the one where Baier asked her how she could represent "a new way forward” when she’s been in power three and a half years now.

"Come on,” she laughed, leaning in and smiling. “You and I both know what I'm talking about. You and I both know what I'm talking about."

“I actually don't,” he replied coolly. “What are you talking about?"

Viral gold. But more, the question highlights her failure to branch out. Who cares about Republicans, Democrats, and Rorschach’s ink blots? Wednesday night was about winning over disaffected partisans and undecideds. In this, she failed completely.

And really, how could she have succeeded? Personality aside, what is she selling? She keeps promising to “turn the page” (“A new way forward” is literally written on the side of her campaign bus), but from where to what?

As Baier pointed out, 79% of the country thinks it’s going in the wrong direction, and painting words on the side of the bus isn’t enough when you’ve had an office in the West Wing for four years now. Democrats must face that the elephant in the room isn’t the Grand Old Party but that they themselves might be the direction Americans are rejecting.

So why can’t she say it? Why can’t she say she’s thankful for ol’ Joe but that she’s going to chart a different path on the economy and that the administration made mistakes on the border too? Is the final betrayal too much for Biden to bear? Was a deal made when the crown was passed?

There’s no doubt he could lash out more publicly than how he’s been acting up these past few weeks. If Biden ever had deeply held, core beliefs, he betrayed them long ago in service to personal ambition and the demands of the Democratic Party. Then in 2016, the party he lived in service to betrayed him and shunted him aside for her. He came back and succeeded where she’d failed, and then they did it again, shunting him aside for the second time in eight years. He’s angry enough to gripe about it in private and at funerals. What happens if his own vice president betrays him in public? Does he go gently into that good night, or does he burn and rave at close of day?

But the Harris-Walz campaign is out of options. That’s why Harris talked to Baier in the first place. She's taking risks because she has to. Why else would the campaign float an hours-long conversation with Joe Rogan, where Kamala is as weak as it gets, if not out of desperation? Sooner or later, aides will conclude that she has to twist the knife in the boss if she’s ever going get her chance to start a new life. It won’t be pretty, but it will be necessary.

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Hear more on the subject from the "Blaze News Tonight" team in the video below:

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