Category: South America

(CNN)The first six-ish months of Kamala Harris’ time as vice president have, generally speaking, gone according to her plan. She’s been a consistent messenger for President Joe Biden while learning the possibilities (and limitations) that come with being second-in-command.

That smooth ride ended this week, thanks to a confluence of events — some within her control, others not.

* The White House made a big deal out of Harris’ two-day trip to Central America earlier this week. And Harris’ main goal was simple: To send a message to Central Americans to stop coming to the US southern border. Which she did, to the consternation of liberals but the satisfaction of Biden. But the visit wound up being overshadowed by her seemingly flippant answer to a question from NBC’s Lester Holt about why she hadn’t yet visited the southern border. (Biden has tasked Harris with leading the administration’s response to stemming the flow of migration from Central America.)

“At some point, you know, we are going to the border,” Harris said in the interview. “We’ve been to the border. So this whole, this whole, this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”

Holt responded: “You haven’t been to the border.”

“I, and I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris replied to Holt, with a laugh. “And I mean, I don’t — I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” Which, not great. As CNN reported on Tuesday: “Several sources say there was a real hope inside the White House that Harris’ first trip abroad would be a success, and worry that what looked like ill-prepared answers to that inevitable question would overshadow it.”

Source: Kamala Harris is having a bad week (and it’s only Wednesday!) – CNNPolitics

Kamala Harris is playing a historic role in 2021: the nation’s first black, Asian, female vice president to serve as a sacrificial lamb.

Like many other women before her, Harris has been tasked with coming in late to clean up a mess made by her boss. Joe Biden probably wouldn’t do too well in a “Jeopardy!” contest, or even on a circle-a-word puzzle, but he’s smart enough to know that when you’ve got a problem you can’t solve, you should grandly announce a plan to deal with it by … fobbing it off on someone else.

Alas, unlike Barack Obama’s plan to cure cancer by announcing that Joe Biden would cure cancer (yes, that really happened), Biden’s buck-passing set up Harris for a spectacularly visible failure.

When friendly questioner Lester Holt pointed out to Harris that she hadn’t visited the border once, she pulled her trademark move (whenever she gets busted) of breaking into that famously weird dismissive laugh and replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe,” as though an equivalent problem is coming out of Europe. Hordes of damp Irishmen desperately washing up on the shores of Maine, perhaps.

The Biden administration created the border crisis with a “Yay, illegal immigrants” rhetorical style that was received in Latin America like an embossed invitation: “President Joe cordially invites you to El Norte.”

During the presidential campaign, Biden generously offered to suspend deportations and end family separations. In 2019, both Biden and Harris vowed to give health care to illegal immigrants, and two years before that, she insisted that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.”

Biden was so intent on reversing everything President Donald Trump did that he moronically reversed one of Trump’s biggest successes: the “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum-seekers to stay south of the border while their claims were being heard. Unsurprisingly, there was a record-setting run on the border, and suddenly there was a serious human cost to all of the knee-jerk anti-Trumpism.

Source: Biden throws his clueless vice president under the bus