Oh Kamala, Oh Kamala

A lyric keeps running to the tune of “Camelot” a song that urges, “Oh Kam-ala, Oh Kam-ala, just NOT WITH Kam-ala.”

Yesterday, Feb. 6, 2023, the NY Times posted a story observing what you and I and everyone else knows is the greatest vulnerability in a campaign by President Biden.

The vulnerability? Not his age but that at this age you have to contemplate who would be vice president if – if he became incapacitated or died. He will be 82 if and when he is sworn in for a second term on Jan. 20, 2025.

If he is reelected and lives out the term he will be 86 when he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2029. He sure looks fine and as long as he and Jill are good and great together we think he will be.

But, as we all know, especially those of us who are Biden’s age, people die in their eighties, lots of them. You get to be 80, well it gives you a lot to think about. Just look at the obits in the Times, or anywhere else for that matter.

So what is Biden’s big vulnerability if not exactly his age? Well, as the Times reported, it is Vice President Kamala Harris.

You can parse things up and down and in and out but it kind of gets back to that moment when Barrack Obama said to Hillary Clinton, “You’re likeable enough Hillary.”

However unfortunate, Kamala Harris is not “likeable enough” and just is not liked. In fact, worse, she is generally disliked by a whole lot of the public. Whether she is as she seems, as she comes across or whether it is unfair in some ways or all ways, Harris is just not likeable – to the point of being disliked.

Even Democrats don’t like her so how can she be expected to be liked by all the voters who are not.

If Joe Biden was 62 years old or some such age, even 70, whether people liked Harris and would be okay if she stood next in line to be president would matter a lot less.

But he is 82 and would be 86 at the end of term two, so it matters a whole lot. It matters more than any other consideration in his running for a second term. Before Biden the oldest president was Ronald Reagan, who left office at age 78 already revealing to intimates signs of affliction with Alzheimers. Biden is entirely mentally spry but – but 82 will be 82 and no changing that.

In political and governmental terms Harris simply has not shown herself up to the job. She is an awful, shrill, hectoring public speaker, cannot seem to manage or use staff to any benefit, or keep them long. She is tone deaf in public and to the public with a slim record of accomplishment in the Senate and as Veep.

Then what to do? Well in a column a day later, today, Feb. 7, the Time’s Michelle Goldberg examines all the reasons Joe Biden has been the best president in 60 years.

In fact he has been better.

The last president who accomplished so much was LBJ except he got us “knee deep in the Big Muddy”, mired in the pointless, filthy war in Vietnam.

Biden got us out of the pointless, filthy war in Afghanistan. The media, espeically the boneheads on cable TV, protest it was a mess and a stain on his presidency.

What’d they expect? A going away party from the Taliban?

One, one airplane, took off with people chasing and clinging to it. Video of that got shown and is shown again and again to demonstrate that it was a mess because – because there is nothing Wolf Blitzer and his ilk love so much as good video, whether of a mess at the Kabul airport or a Russian balloon.

Neither Wolf nor any of the rest on cable TV news showed all the planes that took off subsequently evacuating 100,000 people in the final 10 days – just wasn’t good video.

If you were alive and an adult in 1975 you should recall the final scenes televised from Saigon, the last videotape from the quagmire, when we were literally forced driven out by the victorious North Vietnamese Army.

Remember the people clinging to the landing treads of helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon)? There was a Republican in the White House, Gerald Ford. Was it his fault or LBJ’s and Richard Nixon’s that getting out was an ugly, unfair mess?

Afghanistan? Et tu George W. Bush and Barrack Obama.

Leaving a lost war, fighting a losing battle is a mess. So?

So this was a lot less of a mess than Vietnam, and then remember the aftermath of the Lebanon bombs killing 200 U.S. marines, the Bay of Pigs, “Blackhawk Down” not to mention the Battle of the Bulge, the “Frozen Chosin” or First Bull Run – if you want to go back to when they didn’t have videotape.

So Ms. Goldberg, who contends Joe is great, has been a great, important presdident announces he should not run again.

First, it is really late for others to start organizing a presidential campaign. All that money to be raised, all those consultants to be recruited, all those party activists in every state, especially the early states, to be persuaded you’re the woman or the man for the job.

Ms. Goldberg observes politics. She doesn’t do politics. As was once observed, “it ain’t bean bag.” Running for president is not the same as whipping off 700 words with the answer to everything. No, it is a big, messy, expensive, ugly at times, uplifting at other times, business. And it is a business, not an adventure.

If the president did not, had not intended to run he would have signalled that starting after the 2022 election so that prospective candidates could get started on the hard business of running for president.

Thankfully, he didn’t. He is running and the main reason that is a very good thing is that, as he has demonstrated, as his staff, who we mostly don’t even know by name because they know how to do their jobs so well – the main reason is that Joe Biden knows how to be president.

He spent 50 years watching it, running too soon in 1988 when he didn’t know how to be president, then eight years as VP to a man who, like most before him, had to learn how to be president on the job.

But this president knows how to be president and no one, no one else out there in either party does. One of those who does not, although by now she should given her proximity to the Oval Office, is Harris.

Then what? Well, FDR twice dumped his Veeps, favoring Henry Wallace in 1940 over his first two-term vice president, John Nance Garner (“the vice presidency is not worth a warm bucket of spit”), and unceremoniously dumping Wallace in 1944 when Democratic Party bosses nixed Wallace.

FDR was too sick, too tired and otherwise too occupied fighting Germany and Japan to have a fight with them. They said Missouri Sen. Harry Truman would be okay and FDR said so be it.

True, FDR did not have to worry about anything but geography in balancing his ticket, no one knew he was dying so the choice was not seemingly so important – Truman certainly didn’t know , almost no one outside his close inner circle knew FDR’s perilous condition. Gender and race were not factors or even considerations in FDR’s time except as negatives.

But Biden would be removing a person credited with being the first woman and first Black and Asian vice president. He would be removing a VP who might resist, might be resisting that now as she is being pummled in the press (and might these stories indeed be signals from within?).

All of that is a problem but not as big a problem as having Harris run in the circumstances of being possible successor to an 82-year-old president.

He has to do it, find a way to do it (and don’t ask me what that is because other than appealing to her patriotism and loyalty it beats me).

And if he does, who?

The usual suspects? Warren? Too old to start anew, too narrow politically. Bernie? Preposterous and older than Biden. Buttigieg? The country is not ready and while he is facile in politics and public life, he is not yet presidential. Klobuchar? She has grown and should stay where she is and one day become the first woman majority leader of the Senate. Governors and other senators oft mentioned? None are that convincing. The most likely is Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan but hardly close to a sure thing.

Then who, who in this nation is prepared intuitively and by demonstrated ability and capability in everything she has done in public life to be president? Who has been a force in this administration? Who has state and local political and governmental experience.

Who has understood the president gets to bask in the light you make? Who again and again and again in her career has demonstrated execuitive ability and decision making prowess with tact and competence?

Gina Raimondo, former attorney general and former governor of Rhode Island and presently Secretary of Commerce in Biden’s cabinet where quietly she is deemed a star (the CHIPS bill, managing fraught trade relations with China).

There, yes the unpleasant truth – there would be hell to pay for a while from Joyce and “the Rev” on MSNBC and from some Black Dems though likely not Hakim Jeffries, a true grownup in politics. That would go on for a while but in the end the videotape will change and they will be, would be for a Biden/Raimondo ticket.

If needs be and we hope not, if Gina Raimondo becomes first in line for the presidency from Jan. 20, 2025 to Jan. 20, 2029 when perhaps she would raise her right hand in her own right to take the presidential oath of office, we – the United States of America – will all be in the best of hands.