It’s a risk, a mighty, mighty risk, for President Joe Biden to go out on the campaign trail as if he didn’t mind making a clown of himself, thereby causing opponents to chuckle at the boost they receive. Look, with videos as proof positive, he will sometimes forget where he is, forget names, get lost in the speech he’s reading and apologize incomprehensibly. So, Vice President Kamala Harris may take his place.

That’s what is already happening and could persist throughout the campaign with the chance of her scarily becoming president in a year or two if Biden is reelected and his physical and mental readiness continue to decline. We might then see replays of her gotcha oomph that was demonstrated in a 2019 TV debate when she and Biden were facing Democratic primary elections for president. At that time a U.S senator, she said he was not a racist and then in a raucous exchange as much as said he was.

She blasted Biden for opposing busing to integrate schools when he himself was a senator. Harris said he could have wrecked even her beneficial experiences of being bused to an integrated school as a child. The fact is that busing mostly inconvenienced and confused teachers, students, families and schools. With outspoken opposition from Black as well as white Americans, the practice was ended as a federal mandate.

Harris got a bit of a popular boost that night, but it didn’t last long and she soon was saying she didn’t believe in a federal mandate either. Her campaign tumbled downhill with even her staff saying she wasn’t fit to be president. Minus donations enough to further her cause, she dropped out of the campaign before voting began.

As vice president, she was eager to prove herself and Biden gave her a chance, naming her czar of the country’s southern border, a subject she seemed little interested in and did next to nothing about even as the number of illegal entries multiplied incredibly under Biden.

His own negligence and hers thereby wrecked cities and their economies, increased crime, made some schools unmanageable, forced girls abandoned by their parents into becoming prostitutes as a means of survival, helped facilitate the killing of tens of thousands of Americans with smuggled drugs and the list goes on. Harris said she would fix this major mess in the nation by addressing the root cause of terrible lives in the countries being fled. Sadly, significant improvement of conditions is only accomplished with massive changes in politics, economies and culture, something terribly hard to achieve.

It hardly follows that Biden himself will rise to speak out on such issues as racial discrimination and abortion rights in 18 states, as she did in the past six months. Biden has mostly hidden out in the White House or vacationed in his home in Delaware, and the split in duties just may continue until the election, some of Washington’s journalistic detectives report. May some truth about this team nevertheless become known.

Tribune News Service