John Nance Garner didn’t think much of the job he held under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. ‘The vice presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit,’ he once declared.
But he was wrong. Over the years, the role has regularly been a platform for the Oval Office.
Some 15 vice presidents have gone on to take the top job, including Joe Biden, who served eight years as Barack Obama’s deputy.
As America prepares to go to the polls this autumn, there is a strong chance that Biden’s own controversial sidekick, Kamala Harris, could follow him into the White House. Tonight, Harris takes part in her first televised debate against Donald Trump.
It will be a vital test, particularly because – owing to the unorthodox nature of her selection after Biden’s sudden announcement in July that he would not stand against Trump – she has not endured anything like the usual media examination that a presidential candidate has to suffer.
As a seasoned political journalist and author of Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris In The White House – a comprehensive investigation into how this eccentric San Francisco attorney was fast-tracked to becoming potentially the next leader of the free world – I find the lack of scrutiny applied to this shallow and desperate political figure to be maddening.
Since winning the nomination, ‘Calamity Kamala’ has given just two short, lacklustre media interviews that did nothing to enhance her authority. Senior Democrats in Washington tell me that her campaign is increasingly riven and dysfunctional.
She calls herself ‘a joyful warrior’ with an upbeat message – yet I hear of repeated power struggles with the Biden team.
Three generations – Biden’s doddery cronies, her own experienced coterie and legions of Gen Z and millennial activists – are all pulling in different directions.
One former official told me that Harris is reluctant to take drastic action against Biden’s crew in particular: ‘She won’t get rid of them because that would create too much of a distraction.’
Her aides have been trying to shield her from Press scrutiny over this and much else by running out the clock towards election day.
But one well-connected Democrat tells me that many fear this approach is backfiring: ‘It’s not a great long-term play for her. She needs to prove she can be unscripted.’
The trouble for Harris is that, without an autocue, she flounders. She could easily perform badly in tonight’s debate, given her limited grasp of policy and her notorious habit of descending into meaningless verbiage and gaffes under pressure.
She might, however, land some blows if she lives up to her carefully crafted image as a tough prosecutor: a skill she claims to have honed as district attorney and attorney general in California, with a highly aggressive and interruptive style of questioning.
But if she does emerge victorious, the presidency will be within her grasp – a scenario unthinkable until recently. So how on earth did we get here?
Branded the most unpopular vice president in modern history, Harris has for years been viewed by some around Washington as an incompetent lightweight, whose trademark unhinged cackle could not conceal her inability to communicate effectively, and whose obsession with identity politics failed to hide her lack of convictions on policy.
Even some in America’s liberal Press regarded her as a national joke who stumbled from one embarrassment to another.
Many of her most incomprehensible pronouncements went viral on social media: take her 2022 assertion that ‘it is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day’.
Her record may be devoid of real achievement, but her greatest political talent has always been her gift for self-advancement.
In my opinion she combines naked political ambition with an instinctive cunning, a lack of scruples and a willingness to jump on every fashionable bandwagon.
Hailed as America’s ‘diverse’ political saviour after the division of the Trump years and Biden’s flailing tenure, with spectacular cynicism Harris has recently been presented by the party machine as a bold new voice for the country – even though she was integral to Biden’s administration for four long years.
At the Democrats’ recent convention in Chicago, she officially accepted the presidential nomination amid scenes of hysterical adulation.
Praise was lavished on her by Biden, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, while Harris basked in the personal endorsement of billionaire megastar Oprah Winfrey.
The Chicago convention succeeded in generating a feelgood factor around Harris, but this is beginning to dim.
Already, polls show that her early ‘bounce’ is slowing – a New York Times survey at the weekend showed Donald Trump overtaking her by 48 per cent to 47 per cent, marking the end of what the liberal paper called her ‘euphoric August’.
Harris may have hoped that enveloping herself in lavish tributes from celebrity Democrats would help to dodge troubling questions about her candidacy.
More fool her. The 59-year-old has one of the thinnest CVs of any modern presidential contender – and people have noticed that.
It is genuinely alarming that with the world in turmoil, from war in Ukraine to escalating conflict in the Middle East, this comparative novice could soon be in power.
When she ran to be California senator in 2017, it looked at one stage that she might secure the Democratic nomination for that role without a fight, even though she had no experience of Washington.
Long-serving Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez believed that such a coronation would be a democratic outrage, so she decided to stand against Harris.
‘This is too important a state and too important a position for someone to get on-the-job training,’ said Sanchez.
Those same words could be applied far more accurately to the presidency of the United States. The West is confronted by an array of tyrants and terrorists, but our destiny could be imminently in the hands of an amateur.
Unlike Roosevelt’s vice president John Nance Garner, Harris has conducted no major negotiations or presided over the passage of any significant legislation.
Even among Democrats in the Senate, she was unpopular because of her hectoring, partisan style and her obsessive focus on her own career.
Other vice presidents, such as Richard Nixon under Dwight Eisenhower, Walter Mondale under Jimmy Carter or Dick Cheney under George W. Bush, had an important influence on US foreign policy, but Biden never respected Harris enough to give her such a role.
Like so much else she does, her fleeting forays into foreign affairs have been cringeworthy: among many of her gaffes, I might cite the moment that she referred to North Korea – one of the West’s most implacable foes – and its ‘alliance’ with the US.
Her explanations of the Ukraine war and the role of Nato in the world smacked of childish simplicity, while her behaviour during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan similarly commanded little confidence.
She claimed that she was the last person in the Oval Office when Biden made his decision to pull out, but then she went missing for days as the operation unfolded.
Her handling of one of the few major tasks she was given as ‘Veep’ – dealing with the immigration crisis on America’s southern border – was equally maladroit.
Handed the grandiose title of ‘border czar’ in 2021, she celebrated by offering journalists biscuits, baked with her image, on a flight to Guatemala, her first big trip outside Washington.
On landing, she pointedly told migrants ‘do not come’ to the US. It may have been an indicator of her irrelevance that the huddled masses ignored her and instead streamed across the border in ever greater numbers – allegedly almost ten million since Biden came to power.
As the crisis worsened, her political stature was further diminished when she was interviewed by the liberal network NBC and asked why, given the scale of the problems at the border, she had not visited the region herself as ‘czar’. ‘And I haven’t been to Europe!’ she replied, laughing awkwardly.
Two other issues as vice president suggest to me her comprehensive unsuitability for high office.
One is her historically dismal relations with some of her own staff – allegedly because of a mix of impatience and insecurity.
Throughout her time as VP, there was a steady exodus of talented people who could not put up with her management style.
One staffer told the Washington Post that Harris would refuse to analyse briefing materials, then scold her team if she appeared unprepared. ‘You’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,’ they added.
Shocked Washington insiders have told further tales of dysfunction and even abuse. She berated staff who failed to fulfil her erratic demands, or handed her the wrong type of pen.
‘With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence,’ said one of her former aides.
Another told Politico magazine that her office was ‘not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated’. Her team have denied these reports.
After her shambolic primary bid in 2019 one campaign manager said: ‘I have never seen an organisation that treated its staff so poorly.’
Her eccentric use of English has often featured politically correct jargon mixed with cloying platitudes and repetitions.
One of her most infamous comments came at a White House reception in March 2023 to mark Women’s History Month, just the sort of woke event in which she delights.
‘So, during Women’s History Month, we celebrate and we honour the women who made history throughout history, who saw what could be unburdened by what had been,’ she told her puzzled audience.
It is, all told, a worrying CV for the highest office. So it is perhaps ironic that, even though she does not come across as a serious operator, she takes herself and her image very seriously.
One of her first and most telling acts as vice president was to complain about a photo of herself on the cover of Vogue magazine, claiming that she should not have been depicted wearing trainers.
Her defenders have claimed that she is cleverer than she likes to appear, and certainly it is true that her language was sharper and more concise when she was a young prosecutor.
She climbed the political ladder in California, demanding that Democrats give her positions of power while coolly dismissing her political rivals.
But when she first got to Washington, experienced political figures described her to me as a ‘show horse’ in obvious pursuit of the presidency, not a ‘work horse’ trying to prove her abilities as a senator.
Harris’s parents divorced when she was seven and she was largely raised by her Hindu mother, with her Jamaican-born father working as a senior professor at Stanford University.
This mixed-race upbringing has been useful for her career amid the American Left’s fanatical embrace of identity politics, particularly after the unrest that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement.
Always looking for applause from the Left, Harris has accused the immigration authorities of acting like the Ku Klux Klan, and ludicrously compared the pro-Trump protests in Washington on January 6, 2021 to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour and the 9/11 atrocities.
Throughout her career, Harris has repeated her motto that she ‘eats ‘no’ for breakfast’ when she is told by others that she is not ready for higher office.
Tonight, in the presidential debate, viewers will see the real Kamala Harris: a politician of loquacious mediocrity.
Does that mean she will lose the election in November? By rights, the presidency should be a step too far for a candidate of her calibre.
But there is no predicting the American electorate – and I fear the prospect of this individual becoming president is all too likely – and all too terrifying.
Charlie Spiering is the author of Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris In The White House.