If you want to seem smart, surround yourself with dumb people.

So goes the logic, and so went Joe Biden’s decision to pick Kamala Harris as his vice president. The last thing Team Biden wanted was a veep whose intellect would upstage Joe, and they got their gal in Kamala, whose meteoric rise from district attorney for San Francisco to vice president of the United States is the stuff of bad fiction.

Unfortunately, Harris is now one heartbeat one brain aneurysm one bribery conviction one palace coup away from the presidency, and her doddering boss seems more likely than ever to make it happen. As David Catron opines at the American Spectator:

Something changed last week inside the Beltway that suggests the people who run the Democratic Party now realize President Biden’s tenure in office is not sustainable beyond 2024. The “tell” was not, however, the latest revelation by IRS whistleblowers about his corrupt administration. It was instead the sudden awakening of the White House press corps. The same “reporters” who snored through more than two years of preposterous claims by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and her predecessor simultaneously woke up Friday. Correspondents from media outlets CNN, CBS, NBC, and even the New York Times aggressively questioned Jean-Pierre about the metastasizing Hunter Biden scandals.

What’s this Great Wake-Up that Catron is talking about? Oh, this:

“I’m just not going to get into family discussion, personal family discussion. As you know, Hunter is his son.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre fields several questions from reporters regarding Hunter Biden. pic.twitter.com/pprsUNObbl

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 23, 2023

What seemed to finally pique the press corps’ interest was Joe Biden’s decision to invite his crack-smoking, hooker-schtupping, selfie-taking, influence-peddling, tax-evading, plea-copping deadbeat dad of a son to a state dinner Sunday night for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Even milquetoasts like the New York Times’s Peter Baker got into the act when Jean-Pierre repeatedly stonewalled. “Are you gonna answer the question?” Baker asked. “It’s not an unreasonable question to ask, when the president of the United States was involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of coercive conversation for a business dealing by his son.”

What Baker calls a “coercive conversation” we call a bribe. It’s shorter and sweeter and less disgracefully euphemistic than “coercive conversation.” But still. Even a competent and quick-thinking White House press secretary would’ve had a tough time with that series of questions. Needless to say, Jean-Pierre is something rather less than that, and she sounded like a broken record, repeatedly insisting that her non-answers were actually answers and repeatedly referring the press to her fellow paid liars “at the White House counsel.”

That a bunch of heretofore toadies and trucklings have finally found the nerve to ask legitimate questions of Joe Biden’s mouthpiece does, it seem, suggest a change in their behavior. In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll see whether this was a fleeting moment or a renewed commitment to actual journalism.

Couple the cascading exposure of the Biden Crime Family with a recent NBC News poll, and it’s not hard to imagine the sort of panic that’s setting in among the Democrats.

Yes, yes, NBC’s polling shows that Donald Trump has built a 29-point lead over Ron DeSantis on the Republican side, which, as NBC reports, “is an increase from April’s NBC News poll, when 46% preferred Trump as their first choice versus 31% who picked DeSantis.” (Who knew incessant witch hunts and sham indictments were akin to an in-kind contribution to one’s presidential campaign?)

But on the Democrat side, the numbers are even more ominous. There, 68% of registered voters said they have real concerns about 80-year-old Joe Biden “not having the necessary mental and physical health” to be president.

And worse, only 32% of registered voters admit to having a positive view of Harris, compared to 49% who have a negative view, including 39% who have a very negative view. This gives the VP a stunning net -17 rating, which, as NBC glumly reports, is the lowest number for any vice president in the poll’s history.

Ouch. Try as they might, the Democrats can’t rehabilitate Kamala Harris, can’t make her ready for prime time, can’t fix the fact that she hails from the one-party state of California, whose politics don’t prepare its candidates to appeal to an audience of a broader spectrum than left to further left.

And that’s what Joe Biden gets for picking a vice president based not on her competence but on her sex and on the color of her skin.

And this is what the Democrats get for propping up Joe Biden. As columnist Kurt Schlichter writes, “The problem with keeping a gerontocracy in power for a couple decades past its sell-by date is that you don’t build a bench.”

Indeed, the Democrats are without a bench. And they have Kamala Harris waiting in the wings.

Talk about a tough spot.