If anything out there sounds like Mission: Fail, it's the unpopular Kamala Harris going to the unpopular Hillary Clinton for advice on how to be popular with voters.

Even Democrats can't stand her. It's like Joe Biden going to Jimmy Carter on how to get a rip-roaring economy going. (And that seems to have happened, too).

So here we are, with the mendicant and her mentor -- with cackling that can be heard a mile away:

Vice President Kamala Harris is turning to Hillary Clinton for advice on plotting "a path forward," according to a new report.

The New York Times reports Harris sought out the counsel of Clinton, the first female Democratic presidential nominee and a fellow former U.S. senator, and other women when she came to Washington.

Harris and Clinton speak every few months on the phone, and the two met in the vice president's West Wing office in November, the report said.

That's the Washington Examiner's account. The New York Times account cited put it this way:

Faced with declining approval ratings, a series of staff departures and a drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and the conservative news media, she has turned to powerful confidantes, including Hillary Clinton, to help plot a path forward.

Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, whom she has described as all white and male. (Charles Curtis, who served as vice president under Hoover, spoke proudly of his Native American ancestry.) She also has confided in them about the difficulties she is facing with the intractable issues in her portfolio, such as voting rights and the root causes of migration. The White House has pushed back against scathing criticism on both fronts, for what activists say is a lack of attention.

It calls to mind that Hillary and Kamala have always been close, very close, dating from the days when Kamala learned 'politics' and some other stuff at Willie Brown's knee.

Kamala's original campaign was funded largely by Hillary Clinton's donors, and Kamala herself arguably represented the pocket-lining, finger-to-the-wind Hillary Clinton wing of the Democrat party, as opposed to the rabid Bernie Sanders wing, or the Biden-contemptuous President Obama wing, as Joe Biden chose her to be his vice president. I argued that in 2020 here.

Now the first interesting thing about this story is that Hillary Clinton isn't exactly good at this thing called 'popularity.' Her speaking style is wooden. She drones like nobody's business. Her Mao pantsuit look has made her a figure of fun. Her hair is frequently a dirty, stringy, unwashed mess. She scowls with bags under her eyes and cackles. Why anyone would go to get advice from her about being popular is a mystery. Even Democrats don't like her.

"You're likable enough," as Obama used to say, calling attention to the fact that voters didn't like her. If that isn't enough of an indicator, she lost her election to brash outsider Donald Trump back when all the pundits said she had it in the bag. DNC emails subsequently revealed that top Democrat operatives have been grossed out by her repeated recrudescences in the press in some kind of bid for a comeback.

That's the person Kamala goes to for advice, now that her dancing mice advisors have failed again and again to repackage Kamala as something palatable to voters?

The second interesting thing with this story about Kamala going to Hillary for advice is that that isn't really news.

Hillary has already been advising Kamala all through the duration of her entire vice presidency.

Here's Hillary Clinton minions defending Kamala's abysmal job performance and much-loathed chief of staff Tina Flournoy back in early July:

“She has become a trusted and loyal adviser to the vice president and the administration,” said Minyon Moore, a longtime adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton who worked on the Biden transition and is a friend to Flournoy. 

This Hillary bid to prop up Kamala continued through the rest of the year, too.

Here's one I wrote about on a "crisis" meeting of Hillary operatives attempting to make Kamala Harris popular, from August 6:

The team that was in charge of making Hillary Clinton "likable" to voters is sure it can turn this one around, too.  Ummm...

Axios went to great ends to report that this wasn't Team Kamala itself that was working on this makeover for Kamala.  That's a bit of a stretch.

According to this piece, by Peter Nichols, which ran in The Atlantic on the exact same day as the Axios report:

She consults a "kitchen cabinet" of people who offer her a perspective from outside the vice-presidential bubble: Minyon Moore, who oversaw her transition; Donna Brazile, who managed Gore's 2000 campaign; and Karen Finney, a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. She may soon hire some additional Washington veterans to bolster her staff.

See any matching names?  Too bad I can't give everyone reading this a highlighter pen to draw lines linking the matching names of these so-called Kamala advisers from one article to the other — Brazile, Moore, Finney, they're all the same people, and they all run the Kamala show for her.  Making Kamala likable has got to resemble one of the labors that Hercules was asked to perform.  Or maybe Sisyphus.

Then, in September, Kamala hired some "crisis communication experts" with longstanding ties to Hillary Clinton to launch the next operation. 

The result was a video of Kamala Harris surrounding herself with children, purporting to talk to them about space exploration in the cringiest makeover ever. She not only looked phony there, but she also looked very phony when it turned out that the children supposedly interested in space were all paid actors, some with Democrat machine ties.

So, Team Hillary has already been helping Kamala a lot -- and not for the better.

Rather than fire all of their keisters for underperformance, given that she's been at it with this crew for so long, Kamala now goes to the Grand Poobah of the operation itself, the failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose biggest political achievement is the perpetration of the Russia hoax and its phony, pervy, made-up Steele dossier, and her pioneering corruption through the Clinton Foundation, which took pay-to-play to new levels, for advice on how to be popular?

The only thing it shows is that Kamala is a fool, something who tries to do the same thing over and over again and expects a different result.

Worse still (for her) it comes as the backdrop is unfolding of Hillary Clinton repositioning herself to become president, which is what Kamala Harris herself is fervently hoping for, given that Biden is so senile he is not expected to serve out his term. 

Hillary has been popping out in the public lately by reading her 2016 victory speech and getting her name out there since that ridiculous moment. She may be positioning herself to be Kamala's vice president. Or more likely, she may be plotting against Kamala on the side to take the presidency from her. 

But there Kamala goes, off to get advice on how to be popular from one of the most unpopular, corrupt, and phony politicians in the American experience.

It seems a foregone conclusion that Hillary's advice is going to sink Kamala -- either because it's bad advice, or because Hillary wants her out of there to get her job herself.

What it shows the rest of us is that Kamala Harris has no judgment and little sense of survival. She might as well invite the Big Bad Wolf in, that's what this idiocy amounts to.

Image: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0 

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