After losing the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris slipped away to Hawaii for six days and holed up in a seven-million-dollar mansion to lick her wounds. As Number Two in an administration, and in the waning days of her role as vice president, one would think she would try to make an impression that would perhaps negate the failed vice presidency and the failed presidential run and set her up for the next big thing. Harris is reportedly in talks for a lucrative book deal and is rumored to be thinking about a run for California governor. But instead of ending her final days in Washington, D.C., with esteem, she appears to be choosing ignominy.

When Harris returned on January 6 to fulfill her Constitutional duty as President of the Senate to certify the 2024 election, it offered her an opportunity for magnanimity and engagement, and some of this was expressed as she sat with House Speaker Mike Johnson, and as she greeted the House and Senate Tellers. But when Harris began to perform the ceremonial duties of certifying the election, it became an act of going through the motions through barely gritted teeth. Many people stated that Harris fulfilled her duties with grace, especially because of the fact that she was certifying her own defeat. My oppositional analysis is filtered through the lens of what we have seen her entire career. Even with the simplest of duties, Harris simply phones it in. 

If you watched any of the certification ceremony, the former candidate of “joy” had absolutely none. Her French-pressed hair, French-tipped nails, and boxy brown suit could not obscure how utterly unenthralled she was to be there. Traditions, while perfunctory, should also bear a sense of honor and a bit of awe. Contrast Harris’ demeanor with that of House Speaker Mike Johnson and you have trifling regard and taciturn demeanor versus measured joviality and pride of place.

This is the end result of a person who has spent her entire career being carried and propped up while others do the actual work, then comes in for the curtain call before exiting the stage. Directly after the certification, she scurried away, with reporters chasing her. She suddenly stopped, pivoted, and allowed the reporters to address her. One reporter asked, “How was it?” And Harris’ response turned into this execrable soliloquy.

WATCH:

Well today was a obviously a very important day.. um… and it was about what should be the norm, and what the American people should be able to take for granted: which is, that one of the most important pillars of our democracy is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power. 

And today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which included today performing my constitutional duties to ensure that the people of America, the voters of America will have their votes counted. That those votes matter, and that they will determine the, the outcome of an election. 

I do believe very strongly that America’s democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. Every single person they’re willing to fight for and respect the importance of our democracy; otherwise, it is very fragile and it will not be able to withstand moments of crisis. And today, America’s democracy stood.

Harris sounded as if she had practiced in front of the mirror, and she probably did. The constant repetition of “And today” is a tick that helped her memorize this rehearsed declaration. If Harris really meant it when she took the oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, then she wouldn’t prattle on about “democracy.” But this is the vice president who flubbed the Pledge of Allegiance, so she may have missed that part about “to the Republic for which it stands.” Then there were her usual tics that we have seen in her terrible one-on-one interviews: the head-scratching, looking down or away, along with the phrase repetition. 

From California to D.C., Harris has had 40 years of being in public office to hone, refine, and develop political and personal chops. So, how did she turn out to be this bad? This could have been what President-elect Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama discussed and laughed about at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, which elicited Harris’ icy stares and strangely doctored X photo from the event.