The Washington Examiner‘s Tiana Lowe thinks Joe Biden may have just blown his chances of winning the White House this November.
“Biden might just have botched the most vital decision of his entire career,” Lowe wrote in an op-ed published Tuesday, shortly after Biden announced that he had chosen California Sen. Kamala Harris (D) to be his running mate this fall. Lowe’s headline: “Biden bets it all on Kamala Harris, a crooked cop.”
“Biden just bet big”
Writing Tuesday, Lowe broke down why left-wing Twitter users might be wrong to celebrate the addition of Harris on the Dems’ 2020 White House ticket. To be sure, “Biden is finally dominating presidential election polling,” Lowe wrote.
“As it turns out, bunkering down in a Delaware basement and issuing milquetoast policy drafts while [Donald] Trump tweets his way out of the presidency is a pretty decent strategy when you’re not nearly as despised as Hillary Clinton,” she added.
But it looks like Biden may be getting a little too comfortable on top.
“Biden just bet big on his lead, throwing caution to the wind and tapping Kamala Harris as his running mate and thus making her the most likely person on the planet to become the 47th president,” Lowe contended Tuesday, noting that Biden would be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan, America’s oldest president in history, was on his last day.
It doesn’t help matters, Lowe wrote, that Biden essentially “boxed himself into choosing a woman after functionally besting Bernie Sanders, and then the killing of George Floyd spurred the push that he specifically pick a woman of color, and ideally, a [B]lack woman.” That left Biden with a short list of possible VP picks — among them, “Susan Rice, Karen Bass, Keisha Lance Bottoms, and Val Demings,” according to Lowe. But none could beat out Kamala when it comes to name recognition.
“A risky bargain”
Of course, the question remains of whether Dems will be willing to look past Harris’ record to “vote blue no matter who.” The California senator previously declared herself California’s “top cop,” according to the Sacramento Bee, an epithet that hasn’t aged well, considering progressives’ recent push to defund local police departments.
Indeed, Lowe writes that “Harris alienates both the uber-Left and libertarians thanks to her ham-handed, tinpot authoritarianism as a California prosecutor.”
As CNBC noted last month, Harris has also faced criticism for being “too ambitious” as some wonder whether she really wants to be Biden’s VP — or she’s just teeing up for an Oval Office bid of her own.
“It’s hard to imagine Trump-skeptical independents now aching to pull the trigger for Biden with Kamala on the ticket, just as it seems unlikely that the 10% or so of Sanders supporters who sat out voting for Clinton are now persuaded to go back to the blue,” Lowe noted Tuesday.
“It’s a risky bargain to make,” the columnist concluded of Biden’s VP pick, “and we’re about to find out if the greatest gamble of his life was worth it.” Only three months to go.
No comments: