Some questions for Kamala Harris ahead of big SF speech

Democrats who’d like to pretend that it’s still October 2024 are in luck, former Vice President and failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is hitting the podium on Wednesday in San Francisco.

As The Hill reported, it’s going to be business usual, theme-wise when Harris addresses the 20th anniversary gala for Emerge America, a candidate training program that backs Democratic women.

She plans to urge voters to push back on Trump’s economic policies and what she will cast as ongoing threats to American institutions and global leadership, according to a person directly familiar with her plans and granted anonymity to discuss them.

So, the same as virtually every other Democrat with access to a microphone.

Harris also plans to expand on her “courage is contagious” theme, the person said.

That theme has to be ironic, as courage was what Americans needed from the Biden-Harris administration when it was under full sail. The courage to stop pandering to potential voters with pricey spending programs, the courage to own up to the inflation that caused, and the courage to pull back on further money drains like student loan forgiveness.

But mostly, what America needed from Harris and others in the White House was the courage to be honest about the president’s decline.

In the runup to the 2024 election, the White House and leading Democrats insisted that Biden was sharp, clear-headed and capable of fulfilling all presidential duties, as Newsweek reported. Biden told NBC News’ Lester Holt “my mental acuity has been pretty damn good.”

Then came that June debate with Trump. Weeks later, Biden bowed out and Harris was tapped as the new candidate. But Biden didn’t suddenly flag, his decline was evident.

Axios reporter Alex Thompson called out media outlets’ “cover-up” of Biden’s cognitive decline during an acceptance speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night.

In his speech, Thompson stressed the importance of reporting, saying the failure to properly address the issue has led some people to lose faith in the media, adding that “acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it.”

It also causes people to lose faith in Democratic leadership, and raises questions about who knew what, when.

There may or may not be a question-and-answer session at the Emerge America event Wednesday. If there is, it would be exceptional if a member of the press had the courage to ask Harris what she knew of her boss’s mental state, and just who was making the big decisions in the White House.

Harris is expected to decide on whether she will run for California governor by the end of this summer, Politico reported last month. Harris’ allies have said that if she does run, it would almost certainly eliminate a 2028 presidential run — a bid that she is still considering.

So this could all be a very, very early campaign speech, in which case, the “Trump is a threat to everything” tack favored by fellow Dems will preach to the choir, and do little else.

Trump is approaching 100 days in office, and it’s been a wild ride thus far. The question Democrats need the courage to ask themselves is this: if the president’s tariffs bring trading partners to the bargaining table and he makes deals favorable to the country, if ICE agents continue to uncover sex offenders and drug traffickers and the like in their stings, and if American manufacturing starts to grow back, what will they build their platform on then?