Amateur Hour Needs to End

In Vice President Harris’s nomination speech, she labeled President Trump an “unserious man.” She was right, but she should know: she could wear the “unserious” label just fine herself.

Some of you may already have your blood boiling. After all, half of us are convinced that a second Trump presidency will ruin the nation, stripping away democracy and placing us within the nearest dystopian novel. Meanwhile, the other half of us believe a Harris presidency will re-establish the U.S.S.R. in a way Putin could only dream of. The hyperbole does not serve us well, but the threat from our constant selection of bottom-of-the-barrel candidates is real.

Consider: Harris took a full week after her nomination speech, after a month as the anointed replacement for Biden as the Democratic nominee, before agreeing to a single interview. The person who is “one heartbeat away” from the presidency, as the cliche goes, took 39 days to be ready to campaign — much less lead.

This is not the vice president demonstrating seriousness. If you need more than a month to get ready to speak to the press, how long would it take to prep for leading the free world? What if Putin or Xi called rather than CNN?

It is low-hanging fruit at this point to note that she was indeed appointed “border czar,” if not in those words, but failed miserably at dealing with immigration during her tenure as vice president. Likewise, to note that she has a knack for saying profoundly confusing and often unintelligible things that make her look woefully unprepared at crucial moments.

Even when she’s on script, it is hard to say the vice president is a serious candidate. After all, her one and only policy speech — with just weeks before voting starts — was an economic plan that even many liberally inclined publications winced at. Price controls have not and will not work.

Apparently, her team recognized the problem clearly enough to avoid revisiting her only policy issue during her nominating speech. The Democratic National Convention in general felt largely devoid of any sense of direction other than: “lots of abortions, Trump is bad and we need a different catchphrase than Hope but want to be Obama-like, so… JOY!”

I could go on, but we need to turn to her nemesis. After all, if there’s one reason not to have, well, joy about this race it is we have a BOGO of bad candidates.

As Harris flounders trying to figure out how even to appear ready to be president, one would expect a keen, serious opponent to zero in, present policy and to project the gravitas of a president (doubly so if one were already president). What has the man who is a former president, and who hopes to be the president again, been up to?

He’s made jokes about how to pronounce the vice president’s name — frequently enough the DNC featured a speech on how to say her name — and, when that got old, started playing the same game with the name of the reporter scheduled to interview his opponent. He has argued that he’s more attractive than she is. He has appeared confused at the idea that someone might be biracial.

He continues to distract from his sometimes actually rather presidential acts, like appearing at Arlington Cemetery. Trump can show leadership — even many progressively-minded folks appreciated his strength immediately after the assassin tried to kill him — he just cannot seem to resist burying those moments in the infantile thereafter.

The Republicans had a full assortment of (marginally, at least) more level-headed candidates on a debate stage a year ago. But here we are. The Democrats had the opportunity to admit Biden’s decline sooner and let a primary attempt to surface a better candidate. But here we are.

And all I can think is, “Can we please get an actual professional for the job of leading the free world?”