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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30561 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak.

If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious. The VP just doesn't have a lot of formal power to do anything, and even leaks will get found out in a non-Trump administration if they're consistent. The VP is just utterly at the mercy of the head honcho, and this was doubly true in the uncertain times around Biden's dropout since plenty of people wanted to have a mini-primary.

Every new administration tries to give the VP a prominent role after the election, and then like 2 months in they do something embarrassing, and the President's office just goes, "yeah, that will be a one-way trip to Siberia." Are there signs of life from J.D. Vance?

The framers almost immediately knew the VP was a dead office, I wonder why they didn't just significantly alter it when they passed the Twelfth.

She is ambitious, but I get the sense more in the context of California. Had Biden not decided to run for a second term, I wonder if she would have concentrated instead on running for Governor of California, as Newsom would probably then be gearing up for the presidential primary challenges?

But Biden did decide to run, and she was brought along as VP, and I imagine everyone expected either "we win and things go the same as before for a second term" or "we lose and I go for governor" and not the whole implosion and being left with no real choice but to shove Kamala out there as their candidate.

Harris isn't blameless, but she surely has less blame than the surrounding figures, particularly those that actually made Biden's presidency so unpopular like his Chief of Staff and Secretaries of various departments. She is a classic case of a schoolteacher level intelligence person being elevated far beyond her competence (in this circumstance due to race and willingness to sleep with older men). But she doesnt even know that. Her whole worldview is predicated on her being incapable of learning that.

AAND on top of that all she was the VP, which is typically a useless and powerless position.

If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious.

Surely the anecdote about Biden telling her "no daylight, kid" and Harris agreeing to put that albatross on her neck displays either a lack of ambition, or a degree of loyalty to a ship already 9/10 sunk that overrode the ambition.

I'm not familiar with that anecdote. Is this article an accurate summary? If so, I don't see how that's really related to ambition. She couldn't forge her own path that much when she was the nominee because 1) Biden was fairly popular with Dems, and her campaign was all about not rocking the boat to hold the fractious coalition together, and 2) people wouldn't believe her anyways since she was the VP.

I don't get how here strategic choice on the campaign trail is reflective of her ambition.

I feel like we've heard more from Vance in the last six months than we heard from Harris for her entire term. Maybe some of that is at the President's discretion (giving speeches to NATO and such), but I think Harris could have been more visible if she wanted. Vance is posting that-which-Trump-is-probably-contractually-bound-not-to to X, and had that notable incident on Bluesky recently.

Yes, this is mostly Harris' fault, although her advisors were always quick to blame Biden. Most notably, she asked to be put in front of something significant, and Biden gave her immigration. Then, she turned around and complained about being put in charge of a "no-win" type of issue, and sulked about it. Biden's advisors then got mad and thought she was being ungrateful. However, you could perhaps imagine a world where Harris actually took that lead on immigration and pushed for more border enforcement - might that have deflected later attacks by Trump against her? Actually, quite plausibly. Instead she did some tours of Central American countries to try and pressure them to stop the flow and tried her best to dodge media attention about it. (Ironically this was at least mildly effective, as far as I'm aware, but selection bias means that it's hard to take credit for this kind of thing).

At any rate, the bad feelings about the immigration assignment meant that Biden's camp dragged their feet about giving her something else. She was also eventually put in charge of "voting rights" (federal level) as a portfolio, but IIRC they never managed to pass anything. Instead she just spent the whole time accusing Republicans of various things, which I think most people easily tune out. If she had managed a win there, maybe she could have talked about it more.

Immigration was always going to be a mess, given the Democratic Party's agenda there - they rely on the votes of immigrant citizens and being seen as the compassionate party that wants to help your cousin Manuel to come join you here, as well as all the "kids in cages" campaigning they had done, so they can't very well turn around and go "back to your side of the border, no we don't care if you drown crossing the river!"

So she pretty much was handed the poisoned chalice and no real plan as to what to do with it. On top of that, she was using her own "my family are immigrants" backstory to win votes, and she was struggling with the Copmala perception so probably wanted to soften that (nationally, being pro-law'n'order isn't a handicap, but if her ambitions were to run for Governor in California, it very much would have hampered her there).

Harris was out there too, it was just on more "typical politician" stuff like holding speeches on the migrant crisis. Trump's administrations have both been anomalous in how much you heard about non-presidential actors, e.g. Jared Kushner was practically a household name in Trump 1 but almost nobody heard of Mike Donilon during Biden's term, despite the latter being almost certainly more important and influential than Kushner ever was (and Kushner was quite influential!).

This is true, but also still feels atypical. This goes back into childhood ignorance, but I remember precisely zero about George Bush Sr's VP except people clowning on him. Al Gore I remember precisely zero about during his term as VP. Dick Cheney was always more of a shadowy figure, presumed to be pulling the strings from the shadows, but rarely out in front doing anything visible to the public. The only thing I remember about Joe Biden as VP was when he got in trouble for saying "Shylock" and the ADL came out and said he was up to date on his protection money donations and that he was absolutely not an antisemite. Oh, and when Obama put him in charge of curing cancer during a State of the Union address. Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.

That Vance is out there, regularly, and seemingly successfully, advocating the President's agenda feels atypical across all my life experience. He gives on strong podcast "Debate me bro" energy that might just be an artifact of the times we live in.

Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.

You don't remember the hysteria about he was going to be running the gay torture camps as he set up the theocracy that Trump would oversee? The fact that he did the job quietly was much more of an achievement than you think, including hosting our gay Taoiseach and his boyfriend during St Patrick's Day visits! That, and the mockery over the Pence Rule which was really common-sense for the crazy times we're in.

I think we should be more reassured about the fact that "this guy will kill us all!" messaging of the time then turns out years afterwards to be "that guy? sure he did nothing!"

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