 When she announced that she was running for president in January 2019, Kamala Harris was met with glowing profiles, grassroots excitement, and ready donors. And she is one of the top tier candidates. Yes, she was a prosecutor, yes she was a senator, but she's also someone who understands what people are going through across the country. I think there's a good chance that you are going to win the nomination. Almost immediately, her campaign was plagued by inconsistent policy positions and internal disarray. Meanwhile, Harris was haunted by her tough-on crime past as a California prosecutor. You actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so. There is no excuse for that. And the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology. This is going to sound immodest, but I'm obviously a top tier candidate. And so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight because there are a lot of people that are trying to make the stage for the next debate. For a lot of them, it's due or die. Well, yeah, and especially when people are at zero, one percent or whatever she might be at. Because of her own dismal polling numbers, Harris left the race 11 months later. But Biden picked her as his running mate anyway. And so she became the first female vice president, a black and Asian woman with a sleek image and a willingness to say things young progressives like to hear. Black lives have not been taken seriously as being fully human. We have for generations now been defunding public schools. But yet militarizing police departments. That's right. She went on to bungle interviews, flip flop repeatedly, and failed to own any issue or commit to anything. Which is to say, Harris' vice presidency has looked a lot like her shambolic presidential campaign. Now she's considered the Democratic front-runner in waiting. Yet no one can quite explain why. Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time Harris arrived somewhere where the plane and the motorcade and the secret service agents makes a few mostly bland statements, then tells whomever she's meeting with about how she's going to bring their stories back to Washington. Then she's quickly out of sight again. Wrote Edward Isaac Dover in the Atlantic in May 2021. Two months prior, Biden had put Harris in charge of leading the administration's diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as the White House put it. It was a stopping the seas from rising kind of jobs as Cato Institute immigration analyst David J. Beer, especially since Harris had no authority to actually change U.S. immigration policy. Still, a vice president could at least play a robust rhetorical role here, shifting the conversation around the issue or rallying Democrats behind an inspiring message. But rather than outline a coherent policy vision, Harris made a series of awkward decisions and comments that angered many Democrats and gave fodder to Republicans. We've been to the border. You haven't been to the border. And I haven't been to Europe. And I mean, I don't, I don't. Harris, whose mom was born in India and whose dad is from Jamaica, did eventually visit Guatemala, but then issued a disappointed statement for anyone hoping for a departure from Trump's immigration policies. I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States and Mexico border. Do not come. Do not come. If Harris runs for president, she can't point to her record as a prosecutor because it's mostly become an embarrassment. As San Francisco district attorney, she increased prosecutions and convictions for misdemeanor quality of life crimes and pushed for giving fewer people access to the city's drug court, which offers alternatives to incarceration. She opposed the prostitution decriminalization measure, helped federal officials raid immigrant businesses, head misconduct by a drug lab technician, and helped launch an anti-truancy initiative that would bring criminal charges against parents if their kids missed too much school. As California attorney general, she fought against the court ruling that the state's death penalty was unconstitutional, fought to keep people in overcrowded prisons after a court ordered them released, defended the state's corrections department's denial of surgery for transgender inmates, and refused to back a measure requiring more scrutiny and police use of force cases. She also fought to shut down the sex worker-friendly ad platform backpage while publicly ignoring sexual misconduct involving Oakland police and an underage girl. 1,974 people were sent to state prisons for possession of marijuana or hashish while Harris was California's top cop. Part of a politician's job is finding a way to work together with those in their coalition. Harris, meanwhile, has struggled to work comfortably with even her own staff, many of whom departed after brief stints on the job. A June report in Politico described Harris's office as tense and at times dour, marked by chaotic moments, low morale, and low trust. One person with direct knowledge of how Harris's office is run described it as an unhealthy and abusive environment where people are thrown under the bus from the very top. Should Biden run again? The question is dividing Democrats, read a September 2022 headline in time about the oldest president in U.S. history. But if not Biden, then who? A Los Angeles Times analysis of national opinion polls said that as of October 2022, 53% find Harris unfavorable, a drop of 14% since she took office. It's hard to avoid the sense that the Democrats have been so enamored with the package this particular candidate comes in that they're willing to overlook what lies beneath the surface. Harris's problems are her own, but in making her an avatar of its future, the party has made her problems their own too, embracing box checking at the expense of political or administrative competence. Some say third time's a charm, but a more relevant attitude may be fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Eventually Joe Biden will leave politics. When that happens, will Harris fool progressives a third time?