Morning Glory: Kamala Harris is not ready to be president

Former President Trump has a record of doing the many jobs involved in being president. COVID obscured his many achievements, especially with an inflation-free period of economic growth, but his record is still there. We know how he will govern and we know he now has experience with selecting senior officials. While he is never predictable in persona or postings, his legislative agenda will be a continuation of his first term: renewal of his tax cuts, a defense build-up to deter our enemies abroad, support for our allies especially Israel, a huge push for energy production and deregulation and, hopefully, massive downsizing of the size and reach of the federal government. 

By contrast, Vice President Harris does not possess the minimum skills set necessary to be president. To borrow from the jargon of baseball, which highly prizes ‘a five tool player’ or even a ‘five tool prospect,’ the vice president unfortunately lacks any of the tools needed to be even a minimally qualified president. She’s a ‘zero tools’ political player. 

The 5 ‘tools’ in baseball are (1) hitting for power; (2) hitting for average 3) fielding ability 4) throwing ability and 5) running speed. A list of presidential tools is considerably longer but would include (1) great ability to absorb complex data sets and intelligence information and make hard decisions on difficult issues; (2) deep experience in national security issues; (3) deep experience in the federal administrative state (not familiarity with the mission of all 2.8 million non-military employees of the federal government, of course, but facility in the discussion and assessment of the hundreds of agencies in the executive branch which all answer to the president and which are guided by his or her appointees); (4) the ability to communicate with the American people via a variety of means, but especially the set-piece big speech designed to convey important decisions or choices and regular interviews and press availabilities and (5) the political skills of negotiation and compromise, both within a president’s own party but also across the aisle and with the governors of states and territories and of course other nations, both friends and enemies. 

Harris is eligible for the office of President to be sure. She is old enough and born in the U.S. We also know she has passed the California Bar Exam after graduating from Hastings Law School following her undergraduate education at Howard University. Harris failed the first time she sat for the Bar but that does not signify much. It is not typical of talented lawyers that they fail their first Bar, but it’s also not unheard of. In a New York Times 2016 profile Harris had recently consoled a young law student who also failed the test, telling her: ‘It’s not a measure of your capacity.’ Actually it is evidence sufficient to lose some young would-be lawyers their jobs which are often given on the condition of taking and passing a state’s Bar Exam, but it’s not dispositive on the question of legal ability. You can retake the Bar as Harris did and she passed on the second go around.

Harris’s career as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco is already a talking point in her stump speech, as was her time as the Attorney General of California and brief stay in the United States Senate. There are hundreds of thousands of current and former assistant district attorneys in the United States and some are brilliant and others are dumb as rocks. There are scores and scores of former and current state AGs and United States Senators. Those titles don’t tell us much. What has she done?  What did she accomplish? What does she think needs to be done by the Congress? What is her agenda?

She has been a loyal if bumbling number two to an increasingly frail president whose capacity to do the job is a question on the mind of everyone paying attention. It should also be on every voter’s mind: Is Harris up to this job? 

In answering that, we have zero interviews of Harris since Biden withdrew more than three weeks ago. We only have hours of cringe-inducing tape from decades in the public eye. It is her tenure as Vice President that should matter the most to voters, and neither she nor the president she served has accomplished anything of lasting positive significance. They spent a vast amount of money the country didn’t have on projects that have not come to fruition. That spending unleashed ruinous inflation. They failed to secure our southern border and more than 10 million migrants have crossed it without invitation since Biden and Harris assumed office. Their record on national security is awful and the support originally offered to Israel after the massacre of 10/7 waxed and since last year has steadily waned. The influence of America on the world has never been this low. 

The resume of actual accomplishments by Harris isn’t there and the record that is there is terrible. 

If the country chose its chief executive randomly out of one of many ‘hats’ marked only by vocation, I would pick from the hat labeled ‘president of local or regional bank’ or ‘successful principal of a large high school’ and—crucially—’successful real estate developer’ over the bag marked ‘local prosecutor’ any day. I would especially do so if informed that the ‘local assistant DA’ bag only included folks who had flunked their first Bar. 

Nor does election to any local or statewide office in California signify much beyond the backing of large public employee unions, for those unions in fact run the politics of the state now and have for more than a dozen years. Harris won the election to be San Francisco’s District Attorney in 2004. She then ran for and won the California Attorney General job in 2010 and again in 2014, and won a United States Senate race in 2016. Of course she was on the ticket with President Biden in 2020. She’s a standard-issue left-wing pol from the most left-wing city in America. 

All we have to judge Vice President Harris’s ability to be president by are her hundreds of votes, interviews and statements over an electoral career now approaching two decades. She hasn’t won a single presidential primary or caucus—ever. If you lived in California you already knew that Harris was never going to impress with eloquence or ability. Harris is the product of the San Francisco Democratic machine which competes, usually successfully, with the Los Angeles Democratic machine. Harris paid her dues in San Francisco and she rose in predictable fashion. When President Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate in 2020 he did so because he had promised to name a black woman as his running mate. Biden, whose judgment is no longer even debated, chose badly and we have Harris’s record as ‘border tsar’ as the single point of assessment, the single certain role she has held under President Biden.  Of course she failed there —which is why we have the elaborate ruse of a border bill talking point. To cover up her actual record as President Biden’s lead on all border issues. She has had no other high-profile designated role. 

Kamala Harris would be the least credentialed, least impressive and least prepared presidential candidate elected in the modern era. It’s impossible to imagine the damage her policies and personnel would do because they would be so far to the left of anything the country has ever experienced. Her campaign of invisibility is brilliant, but if it succeeds, the country is in for a terrible four years until she can be replaced. The legacy media has gone along with 23 days of silence. How long will it remain complicit?

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.