Apparently, no one in the Kamala Harris camp was thrilled when Joe Biden fobbed off onto her the job of stemming the surge at the border.

Back on March 24, Biden said:

In addition to that, there's about five other major things she's handling, but I've asked her, the VP, today — because she's the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.

Now the truth comes out: Harris's staff were actually panicking, according to this report from CNN:

After the announcement, Harris' aides appeared to "panic," according to one of the officials, out of concern that her assignment was being mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the border, which at the time was facing a growing number of arrivals. But another White House official pushed back on the sentiment, saying the vice president's team wasn't panicked.

"Most qualified" was definitely a joke, which would be the best explanation as to why they could panic.  Some told CNN she was actually thrilled, but let's just say the publicity-loving, selfie-taking Harris's failure to visit the border or hold any press conferences tells a different story.

The staff argument, though, that it might be misconstrued, and become a public relations problem, is pure nonsense.  You can't solve a border surge by ignoring a border, Republicans noted in the report, so the claims that Harris was on to some separate issue from that was happening at the border, and that there was absolutely nothing to learn from people on the ground at the border, whether they were Border Patrol agents or actual migrants, is horse hockey.  That nonsense was easily discernible by the Republicans the report said the staffers were panicking about, if for nothing other than that their criticisms resonated with voters.

So off they went, panicking staff continuously putting down the claim that Harris's task was about "root causes" and "diplomacy," as if there was nothing to learn from the migrants themselves as to why they were choosing now to enter the U.S. illegally.

That's made Harris's "analysis" of the situation absolutely idiotic — little more than grade school–level premises and conclusions:

"The work is guided by two principals [sic]," Harris said. "One, people don't want to leave home. When they do it's because they are afraid for their life. The second is we have the capacity to give people hope. That should mean if they stay, help is on the way." 

Really? Do people who are afraid of gangs approach those same gangs and ask them to smuggle them into el norte, and then move into gang-infested U.S. neighborhoods once in?  It couldn't be that big free basket of goodies offered for them in America that Joe Biden offered on day one, including the prospect of "free" U.S. citizenship and U.S. voting rights, along with "free" health care, "free" education, U.S. stimulus checks, earned income tax rebates, tax-free living with under-the-table earnings, easy remittance services, "free" cell phones, a reliable electricity supply, a reliable internet, and zero possibility of deportation once making it over?  How exactly could a job hacking coffee plants at Honduran wages, or a tiny microcredit loan in a country with one of the world's worst ease of doing business rankings, or bigger salaries for NGOs and government bureaucrats via the proposed $4-billion U.S. aid package, or new internet lines top that?  Those are the items in the big basket of goodies Kamala is offering now to Central America's three northern triangle countries in her version of "diplomacy."  That'll keep 'em from coming over.  The human-smuggling rackets operating on social media will find themselves getting nothing but rejections from their enticements for "business" for this.

This is idiocy.  And it doesn't end there.  How's the actual diplomacy going?

Well, Harris has made two contacts with two of the four nations involved in this Central America/Mexico area of focus, which only includes two thirds of the border surgers — the rest are rolling in from socialist hellholes such as Venezuela and Cuba and big nations with advanced migrant-smuggling networks such as India and Brazil.  Two Central American nations in this limited Kamala "diplomacy" portfolio have not been contacted at all (El Salvador and Honduras), though there are claims that lower-level flunkies of some kind have been in touch with them.  Harris herself has been in touch with the presidents of Guatemala and Mexico, which is kind of a favor for them to do, given that presidents usually talk only to other presidents and Harris ranks below either of them.  What's more, both have pinned the root cause for the border crisis onto Biden himself and his rescission of President Trump's U.S. agreements with their nations, knowing full well that these new contacts from Harris effectively bid to get them to pull Joe's chestnuts out of the fire.  Mexico's president, though, walked out on Kamala's phone call early, having better things to do than waste time with this banalities-spewing ignoramus with the droning nasal voice.  That left Guatemala, because El Salvador's president isn't taking U.S. phone calls following the insulting treatment he got from the Biden administration during his visit to Washington last February, and the Honduran president has been accused by U.S. prosecutors of being involved with the drug trade.  Suffice to say, doing diplomacy with either of those presidents is not exactly a job for an amateur.  No wonder Kamala's staff are panicking.

What she has offered in substitute for it is corporate involvement, calling up her old business cronies and campaign donors for an assist, it appears.  Five U.S. companies and two Colombian banks agreed to sign on, none of them promising jobs for the region, all of them just offering "investment" and free stuff.  All of them went where their opportunities were, which in the case of all but one was in some means of supporting the illegal alien trade — from dropped fees for learning English on an app to remittance service expansion to better internet service to enable more remittances.  One promised to buy coffee but didn't seem to be setting up shop there.  The rest were NGOs.

What we have seen, though, is that very quietly, real diplomats are taking the lead here, having to cover up for Kamala's amateur-hour selfie diplomacy nonsense.  One, a U.S. special envoy, Ricardo Zúñiga, is busily doing actual negotiations with these countries.  The USAID office in Guatemala is busily trying to do other tasks to fill the void, with far more activity than Harris is indicating.  Worst of all, now we have secretary of state Tony Blinken, a longtime Biden foreign policy aide, getting involved.  He's taken the initiative to contact the president of Costa Rica and visit him for advice on how to handle this problem, something Kamala couldn't possibly have thought to do, despite all that talk about "root causes."  Tony will handle this; Tony's kind of a pro here.

No wonder Harris's staff fell into a panic.  Harris is uniquely unsuited to the job of diplomacy.  She knows nothing about foreign affairs, for starters, spending most of her time on racial grievance issues and identity politics, as well as posing for glamour shots and selfies.

She's also uniquely bad at diplomacy itself, even without the foreign affairs aspect.  She couldn't even fall into a consensus during her days in the Senate, regularly finding herself in the position of voting "no" on measures the other Democrats have agreed upon in order to bring in some Republicans.  She's the most partisan member of the Senate, according to those who study this.  Diplomacy is the last thing she ought to be allowed to be around.

Her performance as Biden's point person on the border surge speaks for itself with all its amazing incompetence.  Her staff claims it's a public relations problem rooted in Republicans, but actually, it's a problem of substance.  She doesn't know jack about any of this stuff, and Newt Gingrich speculated that Biden appointed her to the task because he was sure she would do nothing.  She certainly delivered on that.  Rest assured: the public notices, and that's the real reason Kamala's staff continued to panic.  Be glad you are not they.

Image: Screen shot from GOP War Room video, via shareable YouTube.

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