The Bottomless Pit of the Democratic Party: Insiders' Quest to Install Kamala Harris as Interim President

Democratic Party insiders are desperate to make Kamala Harris happen, by any means necessary. It's unbecoming.

It may seem like forever ago when Democratic elites, pundits, and political influencers simultaneously applied full pressure on the Biden administration, in a strategic and calculated move, to urge the incumbent President to step down from running for reelection so that a more formidable nominee could step up and have a chance at defeating Trump. But as this piece reveals, that was only four short months ago.

Now, a couple of weeks out since that “formidable nominee”—Kamala Harris—was handed a defeat of historic proportions, some Democratic pundits and political activists are seriously floating the idea of Biden formally stepping down from office to allow Harris to hold office in the interim, before finally handing over the reins to the newly elected president Donald Trump.

For what reason Democratic insiders are proposing this as an option is anyone’s guess, but it could be a combination of two reasons: Democrats are incapable of handling defeat and would do anything to make a case for why they had it right all along, and the voters got it wrong; and Democrats have spent the larger part of the past seven years game-planning and laying the path for an inevitable Kamala Harris presidency, in a way, to complete the arc of Obama’s legacy. They can’t possibly just watch it slip away now without doing something.

Since 2016, immediately following Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Trump, the road to presidency for Harris was already being paved. According to a November 14, 2016 report in Politico, billionaire “George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton [gathered] in Washington for a three-day, closed door meeting to retool the big-money left to fight back against Donald Trump.” In attendance, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. In July 15, 2017, a Page Six reporting revealed that Sen. Kamala Harris met with Hillary Clinton’s biggest donors, and members of her inner circle, in the Hamptons. The week after, another report in the Free Beacon revealed that Sen. Kamala Harris would be spending the following weekend at the Hamptons to meet with even more Democratic donors and bigwigs, among them the infamous Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, former UN Ambassador Susan E. Rice, Citigroup's Ray McGuire, and many more.

All of these actions, according to insiders familiar with the tradition of private Hampton meetings with big time donors, signaled that the Democratic elites were quickly coalescing around the newly elected (Jan 2017) California Senator, to begin grooming her for the 2020 elections. If none of that was convincing enough, a July 21, 2017 Free Beacon exposé revealed that Harris “brought a number of former Hillary Clinton campaign veterans on board to work in her Washington, D.C., congressional office.” Among them Sergio Gonzales, former regional director for Hillary for America, Lily Adams, former DNC deputy communications director and Iowa communication's director for the Clinton campaign, Tyrone Gayle, former regional communications director for Hillary for America, and Kate Waters, who worked in a press secretary role for Clinton's campaign.

Equipped with a network of the top Democratic elites and some of the most experienced campaign personnel in politics, Sen. Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party seemed to have strategically laid the path for a formidable challenge to whomever the 2020 primary candidates would be. Nevertheless, their goal was simple: become the Democratic nominee and defeat Trump.

But when the election season came around, the years spent conducting backroom deals and hosting private meetings, luncheons, and fundraisers amounted to nothing worth phoning home about. Sen. Kamala Harris entered into the 2020 presidential race with nothing resounding that the electorate could connect with. Her campaign rang hollow. Her ads lacked any sense of compelling narrative, urgency, passion, policy, personality, insight into who she was, and an awareness about who her message was actually for.

In her introductory campaign ad Kamala Harris: For The People, launched in January 2019 following the announcement of her candidacy for president in the 2020 elections, the ad did not seem all too concerned with speaking to the people. In the ad, Harris’ voiceover rattles off a number of empty words and platitudes—Truth. Justice. Decency. Equality. Freedom. Democracy.—without highlighting any foundational policies anchoring her campaign. The comments in direct response to the ad (see images below) were revealing, as they depicted the chasm of disconnect that was present in her messaging from the onset.

Although she struggled to connect with voters initially, Sen. Kamala Harris did seem to generate some excitement as her campaign went on, showing some flashes of success on the debate stage against candidates like then former vice president Joe Biden. But that excitement was short-lived as her campaign slowly came to a halt in December 2019, as a result of a series of campaign hiccups on and off the debate stage, insufficient funds, and the lack of clarity in strategy and policy.

Sen. Kamala Harris’ tailor-made road to the presidency had been prematurely thwarted during the primaries, but, apparently it wouldn’t be the only option available to prop her up and get her that much closer to the position. According to the earlier 2016 Politico reporting, “the Democracy Alliance, its donors and beneficiary groups over the last decade have had a major hand in shaping the institutions of the left, including by orienting some of its key organizations around Clinton, and by basing their strategy around the idea that minorities and women constituted a so-called ‘rising American electorate’ that could tip elections to Democrats.”

The push for Sen. Kamala Harris, at every level has always been a well orchestrated identity-based strategy to pull at the heartstrings of the American electorate, all too consumed by identity politics, and tip the elections to Democrats. In 2020, as vice president Joe Biden emerged as the primary Democratic frontrunner, Sen. Harris threw her support behind Biden, formally endorsing him for president. As a return of favor, or perhaps as a means of attempting to fulfill his commitment to “pick a woman to be Vice President,” and to fulfill the vision of organizations like the Democratic Alliance, Biden announced Harris as his running mate. And upon Biden’s election, Harris had somehow ascended to the second most powerful position—Vice President—in the country, after having folded a botched campaign just months prior. Truly unprecedented.

Now, within the span of an election year, the incumbent president has not only succumbed to pressure by the Democratic elites and insiders to opt out of his reelection campaign, he is now being asked once again to abandon his post. And this time for good, for the sake of Harris taking the reins of the White House for the remaining two months of Biden’s term. Why? Perhaps Democrats are sore losers? Perhaps the full picture of Harris’ political significance is not yet apparent? Perhaps the Democratic party machine just needs to break that seal once and for all, ushering in a female president in a manner similar to what the former President Gerald Ford predicted may be the course of action? Who’s to say?

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