Run, Kamala, Run!

Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

Kamala Harris walks onstage in Largo, Maryland, August 15, 2024.

Kamala has been running for political office for the last 22 years. She’s been holding politically connected jobs since a year after her graduation. She’s a member of a professional political class and like much of its members doesn’t know how to do anything else. Her career as a prosecutor remains a political fiction with little to show for it except, like Buttigieg’s military career, a prop for running for higher office.

So is she going away after losing a presidential election? Going away to do what? She can’t do anything else.

In other words, we’re stuck with Kamala.

The vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open — whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, “I am staying in the fight.”

Kamala’s one skill is fundraising and after blowing through over $1 billion, expect her to be the public face of more fundraising.

Harris and her advisers are working to define how and when she will speak out against Donald Trump and reassert her own role in the Democratic Party.

What role? She was Biden’s diversity hire, failed through her vice presidency, ousted her boss and then failed even worse as a presidential candidate.

But why not do it again?

In interviews with Harris aides and confidants, as well as Democratic luminaries, there’s broad acknowledgment that Harris represents an “X factor” in the next Democratic primary. While some Democrats are dismissive of a 2028 run — and few, if any, prospective opponents would defer to her — Harris notched more than 74 million votes and was able to build goodwill among a large group of Americans.

Did they watch the same campaign everyone else did? Kamala suffered historic losses after historic unpopularity. But diversity hires can never fail, only be failed, and considering Kamala’s life has been running for things, the myth that anyone wants her in any office must be propped up.

At the same time, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will have a long checklist to plow through before they leave the Naval Observatory for good. They have to decide whether they’ll take up permanent residence at their home in Los Angeles, or establish a base elsewhere.

That will be the real tell. If they go back to Brentwood, she’s going back to California politics. If she decides to hang around D.C., the nation as a whole may be stuck with her.

{Reposted from FrontPageMag}