All Harris had to do was refuse to take the bait.
I do not have a high opinion of Kamala Harris, and I never have. I think she’s a dishonest, vapid, opportunistic cipher who, in any serious country, would be considered ineligible to run a post office, let alone to manage the executive branch of federal government. But I must confess that even I have been astonished by how badly Harris has screwed up during Hurricane Milton. Perhaps this is what inevitably happens when you’re accustomed to throwing any allegation you can think up out into the ether and watching the press turn it into a scandal that benefits you, but . . . well, really? Trying to take on the governor of Florida during one of the worst hurricanes in recent memory? Even the Mafia-esque longshoremen’s union declined to do that.
The incident has been excruciating to watch. Harris came in hot, with the indignant accusation that Governor DeSantis’s refusal to take her call was “irresponsible” and “selfish,” and, in every moment since, she has been humiliated by the key figures on both sides of the aisle. As one might expect, DeSantis immediately noted that, while he didn’t know that she had called, there was, in fact, no reason for her to have done so. She’s not relevant here, DeSantis said. She’s never been relevant here. She’s never called before, because she has nothing to do with this. And, if she hadn’t noticed, he was rather busy.
Who was relevant? President Biden was. But, rather amusingly, Biden declined to save Harris from her fate. First, he sent out a tweet confirming that he had spoken with DeSantis. Then, he refused to criticize DeSantis, instead describing him as “cooperative” and saying that he was “doing a great job.” And, finally, as if to drive in the shiv, he responded to a direct question about Harris’s phone call by reiterating that he had “talked to Governor DeSantis,” and that DeSantis had been “gracious.”
This, in turn, gave DeSantis the opportunity to repeat over and over what he had said in the first instance: That he has worked on hurricanes under both President Trump and President Biden and that he has never seen anyone try to politicize one in the way that Kamala Harris has. Naturally, President Biden didn’t explicitly agree with that. But, by being as professional toward DeSantis as DeSantis was being toward him — and by signaling that, on this, he was on the same team as Florida’s governor — he didn’t have to. His silence made exactly the same case as DeSantis’s words.
Thus, courtesy of her own bad judgment, was Harris cast as a petty nonentity throwing stones from the outside. A good candidate would have said that the administration of which she is a part would do everything possible to help Florida, and then moved on to the next issue. But she couldn’t, because she’s a fool, and she now looks as ridiculous as can be.