Joe Biden is out, and all signs point to Kamala Harris. And it’s no wonder why: a brief look at her long career of failing upwards shows she is the perfect regime figurehead to replace him.

Harris has never won a national primary. Her staff can’t stand to be around her. The voters found her unpalatable, and she knows she owes them nothing. Every step of her ascension to power came by the grace of the Democratic Party machine. And the elites calling the shots know it.

Think back to 2020: as a former prosecutor, Harris was too far right to energize the blue-haired radicals; as a politically opportunistic light-weight, she wasn’t popular with center-left folks either. Implying her then-opponent Biden was a racist on the debate stage might have sounded gross to well-meaning moderates, but the left flank was still calling her a “cop” anyway.

She hardly even qualifies as an also-ran. She peaked at just 15% in the polls after her nasty hit on Biden at the debate, but even this modest surge quickly evaporated. She dropped out of the race just a few months later in December 2019, well before the first primaries began. She was too inept to lock down a lane, as moderates and leftists both fled to their respectively more concrete candidates. Despite being a well-credentialed, young-ish, not-bad-looking black woman at a time when the race/gender card was a Dem’s most valuable asset, she simply did not have the political aptitude to make it work to her advantage.

And donors noticed. In her dropout speech, Harris cited a lack of funds as the reason for her withdrawal. “As the campaign has gone on, it has become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete,” she said.

But then, through no skill of her own, the race/gender card came back as a Deus ex machina. Biden committed to a black woman running mate, and Harris was just politically squishy enough to fit the bill. Not too radical but radical enough, enough name recognition but not notable enough to have a fiercely opposed record — like Biden, Harris was another perfectly benign figurehead for her prescribed role.

Until she got into office, and Democrats realized what political poison she truly was. First, it was the strange gaffes, cackling and world salad meditations — supposedly the hallmark of a deep thinker. Then it became clear her staff could not bear to be around her. A “staff exodus,” as reported by The Washington Post in 2021, revealed juicy tidbits of ex-aides complaining about what a horror she was to work for. By 2022, it became clear she had a  “revolving door” of staffers for a reason. Biden assigned her intractable issues like the border crisis to keep her out of the spotlight, lest she embarrass herself — and the party — further.

For most of her VP tenure, she learned to keep her head down. But now, through sheer good luck, she failed upwards yet again.

With hundreds of endorsements and millions pouring in overnight, the entire Democratic machine seems to be coalescing around her now that Biden bowed out. Notably absent from the endorsement list are Pelosi, Schumer and the Obamas — but there seems to be a reasonable explanation. They are likely, in fact, calling the shots. But holding out their endorsement gives the thinnest veneer of democratic legitimacy as the party playacts yet another rigged primary.

Harris surely has the political acumen to realize this. A true open primary would be far too chaotic; after losing control of the narrative the past three weeks, Democrat elites will not risk losing it again. The elites need to seamlessly unite around her to maintain their grip on power. In other words, they need her. All she has to do is continue what she’s been doing these past three and half years: stay relatively quiet, let party ops do all the heavy lifting, and take her place as America’s first black female president. She can have the historic legacy that Biden dreamed of, and all she has to do is… absolutely nothing.

But if she learned one thing from Biden, it’s that she can only keep winning for as long as she stays useful to the powers that be. Biden became a liability, and after years of singing his praises, they threw him in the White House dumpster. Harris is at least smart enough to realize she needs to keep the real power players happy: they’ll give her staff, give her talking points, and call all the shots, but as long as she goes along with it, she’ll get all the praise and privilege.

Republicans treat Harris as a joke at their risk. We’re all too used to seeing 15-second clips that make her look like a clown, and are set to be caught off guard by the blitzkrieg of political mobilization that will begin in the coming days. Harris might not be smart, charismatic, or inspiring enough to make a great leader, but she has all the trappings of a perfect puppet