FROM WASHINGTON DC

SHE’S A HEARTBEAT, or perhaps a dead brain cell, away from the Presidency of the United States, but fewer than twenty percent of Americans can name their Vice President. Indeed, less than forty percent know the Vice President is a woman. While fifteen percent think she’s the main actor from Madam Secretary.

She is Kamala Harris. And the only thing she’s done this year of any note may be a tour of Africa trying to drum up support for her country in the face of Chinese and Russian penetration of the continent.

“More Africans appear to know who she is than Americans,” says freelance journalist Torky Dorkington, who followed the Veep on her tour.

“Most Vice Presidents remain what they are, an understudy, during a presidential term. Occasionally you get a Dick Cheney, but on the whole they wait in the wings, hardly seen, except for their Senate role, hoping they can get the party’s nomination when the incumbent President leaves office for good.

“Harris has achieved an extraordinary level of invisibility. Hunter Biden is better known – indeed, some people actually think he is his father’s Vice President. Kamala’s problem is she believes in things that don’t get you elected and her ways of expressing herself are clumsy and patronizing. She was useful as a black woman when Biden sought to dethrone Donald Trump, and you’d have thought her presence in the Administration would have been an object of interest for those issues alone. But, no, since the election she’s eluded the limelight, filling in here and there, making a forgettable speech now and then, slowly being ignored and quietly being forgotten by the American public. While President Joe stumbles around, wondering where he is at times. Maybe if she became a cocaine addict, her poll numbers would improve. Interesting times, you might say. Pity the woman who’s Vice President in interesting times, you might add.”