When President Joe Biden launched his 2024 re-election campaign in April, he made it abundantly clear that he would retain Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate, which, given his age and health, heightens the possibility that she could eventually assume the presidency.
Former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently revealed that the prospect of a Harris presidency is one of the main reasons why she will not vote for Biden in 2024 "under any circumstances," the Washington Examiner reported.
Gabbard explained that Harris was "completely unqualified" to serve as the nation's commander-in-chief and, if elevated to that position, would prove particularly "dangerous" in terms of getting the U.S. involved in additional conflicts and wars.
Those remarks from Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who also continues to serve in the National Guard, came during a two-hour interview on the PBD Podcast with host Patrick David-Bet and co-host Adam Sosnick that covered a wide range of topics.
At one point in the conversation, while discussing some of the various presidential candidates on both sides of the political divide, Gabbard explained her shift from supporting President Biden in 2020 to now being completely opposed to his bid for re-election.
"Before long, we would have a President Kamala Harris as commander-in-chief, which I and others who wear the uniform find to be scary beyond belief," Gabbard said of her chief concerns with a re-elected Biden administration.
Asked to further clarify that concern, she replied that the "most important responsibility" for any president is to serve as the commander-in-chief and that she believed that "Kamala Harris is completely unqualified and lacks not only the knowledge and experience but the temperament to serve in that position."
"And what's dangerous about that is, number one, she will be manipulated by the military-industrial complex, by people who have a lot of stars on their shoulders from the Pentagon, who would like to see us continue to be in a state of war, for a number of reasons rather than to pursue peace and diplomacy," Gabbard continued.
"And she would, as we've seen with others in the past, she would feel as though she needs to project strength," she added. "It's the most dangerous thing to have a weak person feel like they need to project strength and have the U.S. military at their fingertips to do that."
The show's co-hosts went on to briefly discuss just how unpopular and unpresidential VP Harris was perceived in her current role, much less the actual presidency, and noted how disturbing and potentially dangerous it would be for the nation to have to rely upon Harris to represent the country's interests during negotiations with enemies and rivals like Russia' Vladimir Putin or China's Xi Jinping.
The anti-Harris sentiment expressed on that show by Gabbard and the co-hosts is one that is seemingly shared by a majority of Americans with regard to the VP and her clearly unqualified nature in terms of being the nation's leader.
Indeed, FiveThirtyEight's conglomeration of job approval polls shows that only around 38.7 percent of Americans actually approve of the job Harris has done thus far as vice president while just shy of 50 percent have registered their disapproval of her.
In terms of simply her personal favorability, the numbers are even worse for Harris, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, which shows that Harris is perceived favorably by just 40 percent compared to 53.5 percent who view her unfavorably.
