Sonya Molodetskaya is smart, in a way. A striking blonde with a degree in civil engineering, she hooked up with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in the early aughts. In return, Brown launched the Moscow native’s life as the Golden Gate City’s premier fashion icon.

What Kamala Harris got out of her Willie Brown experience is less obvious. Harris is Brown’s most famous other woman—but she was disappointed in her main objective: marriage to the godfather of the San Francisco machine. Brown might be a notorious libertine, but he’s only married once and has no intention to divorce. Still, Brown is an expert at getting his way with women, partly because he’s well known for returning favors. Harris didn’t get a fashion career, but Brown plugged her into the San Francisco political machine elevator, which took her all the way to the United States Senate.

That and other aspects of the Democratic presidential candidate’s history are not well known and purposely obscured by her handlers. They continue to try to reinvent her past in a way that distances her from her wealthy liberal background and paints her as “middle class,” like her supposed origins in Oakland rather than Berkeley and an unverifiable summer job at McDonald’s. Her muh hyped penchant for wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers is a transparent attempt to dress down her image as a limousine liberal.

Whatever she might be, one thing is certain, she doesn’t know how to filibuster a question. The doyenne of unburdening, Harris has made herself notorious for long-winded interviews. Her now-viral response to a question about inflation is a perfect example of how uncomfortable Harris appears to be with being in the limelight:

Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother raised my sister and me. She worked very hard. She was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager. I grew up in a community of hard-working people, you know, construction workers and nurses and teachers. And I try to explain to some people who may not have had the same experience. You know, a lot of people will relate to this.

Is she sure about that?

“You know, I grew up in a neighborhood of folks who were very proud of their lawn,” she continued.

And I was raised to believe and to know that all people deserve dignity, and that we as Americans have a beautiful character. You know, we have ambitions and aspirations and dreams, but not everyone necessarily has access to the resources that can help them fuel those dreams and ambitions. So when I talk about building an opportunity economy, it is very much with the mind of investing in the ambitions and aspirations and the incredible work ethic of the American people and creating opportunity for people, for example, to start a small business.

For reasons unknown, Harris likes to repeat the words “dreams,” “ambitions,” and “aspirations”—her repetition of bland, platitudinous synonyms is in the style of Amanda Gorman, the “Youth Poet Laureate” who recited her poetry at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Harris is generally big on synonyms. If she can’t come up with three, she’ll repeat a word thrice, like she did with “holistically” in a recent interview.

Although Americans across the political spectrum agreed that Harris did better than Trump in the presidential debate, her performance failed to move polls. While Trump was sloppily raging at the ABC moderators, his opponent dutifully recited her answers, managing to avoid her trademark word salads. She showed some amount of discipline, though memorizing a dozen statements and recognizing which one to use is easy. Most high school and junior high students can be trained to perform this task satisfactorily. In other countries we call that passing an oral exam. What the debate audiences didn’t see that night was a President Harris.

In a very friendly post-debate town hall with Oprah Winfrey, Harris came across as a sheepish extra. Oprah completely dominated the screen. The talk show host appeared subtly irritated at being saddled with helping a woman with zero charisma answer softball questions.

How Harris made it this far without any political talent is easy to explain. Conservatives shied away from touching on the vice president’s personal life, but her personal life is the key to understanding her career.  Then, in 2020, at the peak of #MeToo, the presidential nominee Joe Biden hinted that he would choose a female running mate. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was a contender. But once the George Floyd riots took over the country, Biden was boxed in—he needed someone who was also black, but Warren was only a faux Indian. For all their decades-long efforts to nurture black female leadership, Democrats were short of contenders when the moment called.

I would posit that some combination of being in the right place—the U.S. Senate—at the right time, the #MeToo ebb and BLM surge made Harris the luckiest girl in American politics—except for one major thing: She’s clearly not enjoying herself. In fact, I don’t understand why she’s doing it at all.

It’s not just that she’s not a public person. Some say Harris is camera shy and tongue-tied because she’s suffering from imposter syndrome. Who wouldn’t be? It takes a special kind of character not to doubt one’s qualifications to be the leader of the free world. The former prosecutor is clearly not that sort of person. Nor does she seem to crave power like fellow San Franciscans Nancy Pelosi or the late Dianne Feinstein. And she’s also not a policy wonk like Feinstein. Harris seems to be so averse to working with law that she doesn’t appear to have left any record of trying a case as a district attorney—and yet she somehow ended up in our highest law-giving body and now in this unfortunate position.

She could have been another Molodetskaya—a fun, exotic long term side squeeze, dreaming up fanciful gowns. In 2014, Molodetskaya’s neon tulle hi-lo skirt with fuchsia roses peeking out from the inner liner turned heads at the San Francisco Opera opening gala. The outfit, complete with a matching top, was her collaboration with the local couturier Vasily Vein. So actually, never mind. I don’t think Kamala in her drub pantsuits could even have lived up even to her ambition of being the San Francisco First Lady. Brown chooses his girlfriends carefully and let’s face it—he saw that Kamala didn’t have what it takes, so he dumped her on us, the American people.

For too long, American girls of middling intellects, like Kamala Harris, have been fed the idea that in order to be a woman of substance one has to be involved in politics. While it is true that smart people very often are inclined to discuss ideas and some of those ideas concern history, social organization, and politics, encouraging midwits to get into politics will not make them intelligent.

I’m not suggesting that Americans stop paying attention to our elected and unelected betters unless they pass an IQ test—far from it. We all ought to pay a reasonable amount of attention. But for the sake of the republic, we need to stop treating public life as a substitute for religion and meaning in people’s lives and stop making a public fetish of politics. That’s how we end up with obedient young girls shrieking about intifada and ripping off posters of the Bibas babies. Moreover, it’s how we end up with the likes of Kamala in senior leadership positions.

Democratic leadership is well advised to rethink their recruitment strategies and maybe have a heart-to-heart with Willie Brown.

In the end, it’s the American people who will suffer from the ascendancy of the likes of low IQ leaders like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Their presence in the White House demoralizes the citizens and emboldens our enemies. There will be hell to pay.