Distance makes the heart grow fonder — at least that’s the thinking in the Kamala Harris camp. How else to explain the vice president’s disappearing act during the most trying time of Joe Biden’s presidency?

Whatever the reason for her recent invisibility, it appears to be working. A September 22 Gallup poll showed 49% of folks approve of the job she’s doing, which is six points higher than Biden’s 43%. But it’s not hard to poll higher than Scranton Joe these days. According to Gallup, he’s dropped six points since August and a whopping 13 points since June, which is about what we’d expect for a guy whose presidency has gone off the rails.

Of course, Harris, who herself has managed to become remarkably unpopular in relatively short order, hasn’t done Biden any favors. She cackles, and she condescends, and she fails miserably as our nation’s Border Czar — although a strong counterargument can be made that she’s succeeding wildly in this role, since her party’s unstated goal is to keep the borders open and permanently change the nation’s demography.

Surely her handlers know that every time she appears in public, she loses a few points of popularity. The most recent example of this occurred just last week, when she made a surprise visit to a political science class at nearby George Mason University. What could go wrong, right? Well, if you’re Kamala Harris, plenty. When a student claimed that Israel is engaged in “ethnic genocide and displacement of people, the same that happened in America,” Harris neither corrected the petulant child’s slander against Israel nor the one against her native land. Instead, she shamefully threw up a straw man and then dutifully knocked it down: “Unity should never be at the expense of telling anyone personally that, for the sake of unity, ‘Oh, you be quiet about that thing. You suppress that thing. Let’s not deal with that thing.’ That’s not unity. True unity is everyone in that room has a voice.”

Huh? Who said anything about being suppressed? Answer: no one. Harris’s handlers did a fine cleanup on Aisle 6 afterward, but she’d already shown her true colors — the colors of an America-hating San Francisco leftist.

Harris’s seeming inability to keep from rubbing folks the wrong way might be one reason why she’s hired two seasoned flacks, Lorraine Voles and Adam Frankel, “to help finesse messaging and long-term planning after a rocky first nine months in office.” Voles is a crisis communications expert, and Frankel is a former speechwriter for Barack Obama.

We’re not sure what sort of “long-term planning” these spin doctors have in mind for Harris, but they might want to hedge their bets. A July survey of likely voters found that 59% of respondents were “not confident at all” that she’s ready to be president “based on her performance as vice president,” and an additional 5% said they were “not very confident” in her. Thus, nearly two-thirds of likely voters had significant concerns about the woman who’s one heartbeat away from the presidency.

Call her Joe Biden’s impeachment insurance.