Seriously, Where's Kamala?

What nobody's much noticed is that, with daily news items that call Biden's fitness into question, Kamala Harris's profile has gotten lower and lower.

Kamala Harris may have crashed and burned as a 2020 presidential candidate, dropping out well before the first votes were cast in Iowa. But Biden chose her as his running mate anyway. It’s not clear exactly what Harris brought to the ticket outside of checking off a few demographic boxes.

Now,

Harris has been taken off the field almost completely. Last week Harris was sent to Vietnam and Singapore amid the chaos in Afghanistan. When that trip was over, she stopped off in Hawaii to visit Pearl Harbor. Any Americans who wanted to hear why Harris supported the decision to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan last spring would have to wait, because the press was blocked from the event.

. . . Last year, then-Vice President Mike Pence held dozens of press conferences as the head of the White House coronavirus task force, taking tough questions on an almost daily basis from the onset of the pandemic.

Since Harris took office, she has yet to hold even one formal solo press conference. Not one.

This story covers Harris's standing among swing-district voters in the Philadelphia area. In one interview,

[A 69-year-old retiree] worries Harris’ political growth has been stymied by a series of no-win assignments from President Biden and that Harris cannot overcome the country’s sexism.

. . . Two men told a reporter outright that a woman should never be president; a third said she “cackles” too much; a fourth called her “a joke,” who was put in her job as “a trophy.”

. . . “I can’t think anything of her because she hasn’t done anything,” said Adam Osborn, a 45-year-old Trump supporter who works in the advertising sign industry. “She’s not in the news in a way that portrays her positively, and she’s not in the news period. She’s in the shadows of the administration.”

But based on what we're beginning to understand about Biden himself, I don't think Harris's current position is any sort of tactical move to forestall efforts to remove him. Serious political observers rule out even an impeachment vote with Democrats controlling the House, but even after a putative Republican congressional victory in 2022, the odds of finding 67 senators who'd vote for removal are also slim. Biden understands this. Whatever her qualifications, which are nevertheless minimal, fear of a Harris presidency isn't the chief reason Biden will likely remain. It's just baked into the situation.

I'm thinkng more and more that he simply chose her from the start as the figure least likely to outshine him. It was probably an instinctive decision based on his decades of experience surviving as a mediocrity. That she should not yet hold a solo press conference looks to me like a policy decision from Biden's handlers, implicitly endorsed by the big guy himaelf, irrespective of any developments like the Afghanistan fiasco.

Nor would she ever have the gravitas within the administration to rally the consensus needed to invoke the 25th Amendment, again likely a factor considered in the 2020 selection process. The big guy's been way ahead of us!

Fate could intervene in other ways, of course, and the lizard people might yet devise a set of moves a la Spiro Agnew's resignation and replacement by Gerald Ford that could make Biden's removal more palatable. But to have a complete non-entity as vice president was almost certainly the intent of Biden and his handlers from the start, and let's face it, it's working so far.