Harris Is Only Running Because Of Biden’s Cognitive Decline

In her appearance on “The View” this week, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked if she would have done anything differently than President Joe Biden over the past four years. She answered, incredibly, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Commentators were quick to note how disastrous an answer it was given Harris’ previous efforts to distinguish herself from Biden, whose tenure in office is widely seen as a failure. The problem for Harris of course is that she’s the current vice president, which means she’s not the challenger but the de facto incumbent. Distinguishing herself from Biden was always going to be difficult. What’s more, the Biden White House has gone out of its way to emphasize how integral Harris has been to the administration. Biden himself said last week, she has been “a major player in everything we’ve done.”

Previous attempts by Harris to distance herself from Biden, like choosing “A New Way Forward” as her campaign slogan, or talking about what she’ll do on “day one in office,” have come off as fake and half-hearted. They have also lacked credibility. As former President Donald Trump noted in the debate last month, she’s been in office nearly four years. Why hasn’t she done any of the things she says she’ll do if she wins the presidency?

But Harris’ answer on “The View” also did something else, which might be even worse for her electoral prospects than endorsing all of Biden’s decisions. She inadvertently exposed the uncomfortable truth at the heart of her campaign, which Harris and the corporate media desperately don’t want to talk about.

And the truth is this: she’s only running for president because it became impossible to hide Biden’s cognitive decline.

Harris isn’t running because she has a vision for the country. She’s not running because she thinks it’s time to “change direction” or because she has a “new way forward.” She doesn’t even have any major policies initiatives.

She’s running because she’s not Joe Biden. That’s it. The entire theory of her campaign comes down to this: Biden was unfit to run so someone else had to, and there was no practical way to pass over the vice president, so she gets to be the nominee.

That fact has been hanging over the Harris campaign like a sword of Damocles since Biden dropped his re-election bid in July. Any direct question about the differences between Harris and Biden, if it wasn’t handled deftly, had the potential to open up the larger question about Biden’s decline and Harris’ complicity in hiding it. 

Recall that in the runup to the Trump-Biden debate, the corporate media treated any questions about Biden’s mental acuity or fitness for office as a deranged conspiracy theory. So did Harris. In the aftermath of the February report by special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and wrote that the president’s memory was “hazy” and had “significant limitations,” Harris aggressively defended the president. She called the Hur report “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”

Even after the June debate, which displayed Biden’s cognitive decline to the entire world, Harris maintained this position. The very night of the debate Harris went on CNN to defend Biden, praising his handling of the presidency despite a “slow start” in the debate and then claiming, absurdly, that Biden is so sharp that world leaders seek out his advice at major international summits.

She did the same thing this past weekend. Asked by Axios if Biden has the stamina and clarity of mind to handle the domestic and international crises in front of him, and whether Harris could “fully assure” voters that there’s no reason to be concerned about the president, the Harris campaign responded, “Of course.”

But of course there’s plenty of reason to be concerned, otherwise Harris wouldn’t be running for president at all. She was only picked to replace Biden when it became impossible to hide Biden’s cognitive decline.

This of course raises questions about who is really running the Biden White House. Because it isn’t Biden. For years now it’s been obvious that Biden isn’t up to the job and in fact isn’t really doing the job. Maybe the reason “not a thing comes to mind” when Harris is asked if she would do anything different than Biden is because Biden is an empty figurehead who isn’t the one running things.

If that’s the case, who is running things? Harris? Probably not, given her lack of ability to think clearly and articulate much of anything.

Harris’ answer on “The View” unintentionally highlighted the corrupt nature of both the Biden presidency and the Harris campaign. Biden wasn’t really governing, and Harris isn’t really running on anything. The one thing she does have to run on is the one thing she can’t say: The president is cognitively compromised, and she’s not. Or at least, not as much as Biden is.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.