By Dave Andrusko
When a pro-abortion “associate research scholar and lecturer in politics and public affairs at Princeton University” starts off an opinion piece with the decidedly odd conclusion that Vice President Kamala Harris’ first 100 days in office were “historically active,” you can’t help but scratch your head. Harris was essentially invisible.
But that imaginary burst of activity is only to buttress Lauren A. Wright’s thesis. If Harris was busy, busy, busy, “Why isn’t Harris leading the charge against the Texas abortion law?” she asks.
Why the “relative absence” on this issue, Wright asks.
My research on the deployment of White House surrogates suggests Harris’s limited comments on the Texas law amount to a missed opportunity for the Biden administration.
The key to successfully mobilizing presidential proxies is matching up speakers with issues where they have the most credibility, and using those opportunities to build support for administration priorities.
Few Democrats have more credibility on reproductive rights than Harris.
Aha! Here we can agree with Ms. Wright. The Abortion Industry could not have dreamt of a more committed anti-life partisan than Vice President Harris.
“There are several reasons putting Harris at the helm of the fight against Texas Law SB8 is a no-brainer,” Wright argues with supreme confidence.
In a nutshell, (a) “female politicians are perceived to be more competent on issues of reproductive rights than their male counterparts”; (b) she “memorably challenged then-candidate Biden on the Hyde amendment during a Democratic primary debate”; (c) “Harris’s legal background as a prosecutor”; and an egregiously demagogic grilling of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. That was Harris’s 15 minutes of ill-gotten fame.
What to say? It would be difficult to imagine someone—male or female—who makes a worse first impression or who makes the hackles even of supporters rise faster than Harris.
It is true—and I take it that Wright considers this a badge of honor—that Harris will say anything. In other words, if going rhetorically nuclear is a criterion for attacking Texas’s Heartbeat Law, then it’s right up Harris’s alley. After all, she came within a whisker of calling Biden a racist in one of the debates. She flamed out before the first primary.
Finally, Wright, who is busy touting Harris’s wonderfulness, concedes in a back-handed way early on that the vice president’s “schedule adjustments” could be “indicative of White House efforts to minimize her missteps….” But the thrust of her op-ed is that if that is the reason, the White House is missing a golden opportunity.
We’ll see if President Biden, her fellow pro-abortionist, decides to allow her to be the face of the attack on SB8. To quote the President in a different context, “Have at it.”