By Peter Lemiska

Most of us recognize leadership when we see it. Leaders inspire with enviable qualities like character, broad knowledge, commitment, fairness, and authenticity. But there’s another important attribute sometimes overlooked.

President Eisenhower associated leadership with accountability. He defined leadership as “taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”

Winston Churchill also recognized the importance of responsibleness, being accountable for one’s decisions. He said, “The price of greatness is responsibility.”

Another well-known modern-day figure said this: “Leaders, true leaders, take responsibility for the success of the team and understand that they must also take responsibility for the failure.”

Of course, Kamala Harris is the last person to take advice from Donald Trump — or any of those earlier leaders, for that matter. Like Joe Biden, she instinctively rejects and deflects all responsibility for the failures of their administration.

Many see her presidential campaign as a paradox, something that should not even exist. It wasn’t that long ago that virtually everyone saw Kamala Harris as an anchor around Joe Biden’s neck, a major obstacle to his reelection. Stalwart liberals were urging Biden to save his campaign with a different running mate. They pointed to Kamala’s first disastrous presidential campaign, her abysmal performance as vice president, and her disastrous poll numbers.

In September 2023, New York magazine published this article: “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris.” Earlier, The Washington Post published a similar article: “For the country’s sake, Vice President Harris should step aside.”

According to Axios, even Biden believed Harris could not defeat President Trump in a head-to-head competition.

Back then, Democrats were all calling Joe Biden the most brilliant politician in recent history. Kamala Harris was irrelevant, at best. But Biden’s mental decline was becoming so apparent that they could no longer pretend. So the party ousted him and effortlessly switched its attention to Kamala. The Democrat Party, it seems, doesn’t require much of an attention span — only absolute loyalty.

Still, Kamala had to convince Middle America that she had undergone some sort of transformation, that she no longer embraced her ultra-liberal, anti-American positions on policing, border control, and fossil fuels.

That effort began on September 20 with the Oprah Winfrey event, which can best be described as bizarre.

Oprah began the rally by recognizing the new, “improved” Kamala Harris. “Something happened to you … the moment that Joe Biden, President Biden ‘stepped aside’ … a veil or something dropped and you just — stepped into your power.”

She rose to demonstrate Kamala’s new swag, and the audience roared.

The vice president humbly explained that when she learned about her new role, she was filled with a “a sense of responsibility.” She even referred to herself as a leader, seeming to understand at least some correlation between leadership and responsibility.

Then came the first question from the audience. A young man naïvely asked, “What will be your specific steps for strengthening the border?”

Kamala began tossing her now-famous word salad, rambling about the transnational criminals she prosecuted back in the day. Then she blamed Donald Trump for the border crisis, claiming he blocked a bill intended to fix the problem. In fact, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 would have done absolutely nothing to stem the flood of illegal aliens. It would have actually worsened the problem. Eventually, the host brought Kamala back on point, and the audience enthusiastically applauded her eventual irrelevant answer.

Everyone there was unaware of, or pretended to be unaware of, these overriding facts:

1. When Trump left office, illegal border crossings had slowed to a trickle, and under the Biden/Harris policies, it exploded.
2. Since March 2021, Kamala Harris has been Biden’s “point person” on the border problem, and throughout her tenure, she continued to repeat the lie that “the border is secure.”
3. As senator, Harris publicly compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the KKK. She once told a reporter, “We have to critically reexamine ICE and its role.”

And they all must have missed that video of Kamala gleefully joining a group of protestors chanting “Up, up with education, down, down with deportation.”

The next question, just as naïve, was about the economy. Apparently unaware that the Biden/Harris administration drove inflation up to a breathtaking 9% in 2022, a young couple wanted to know what Kamala’s plan was to help lower the cost of living.

Like most Democrats today, everyone there was exuberant but woefully uninformed. If those audience members had paid a little closer attention, or been more honest with themselves, they would have known that Joe and Kamala are entirely responsible for both the border crisis and inflation, two of the top concerns Americans face today. Both were completely under control during Trump’s administration.

Kamala Harris has never given any indication that she’s changed. Nor has she shown even a glimmer of leadership. Yet she now stands a 50/50 chance of election to the most powerful office in the world.

It’s often said that in this country, anyone can become president.

If that means “anyone” regardless of character, competence, or fitness, then that statement doesn’t stand as a tribute to the boundless opportunities America offers. It’s an indictment of a corrupt political party and a sad commentary on the profound ignorance, willful or otherwise, of those who support that party.