The Wall Street Journal‘s Saturday article headlined Harris Was Hamstrung by Caution. Now She’s the Democrats’ Driving Force[] had a couple of examples that don’t bode well for our nation under a Kamala Harris administration.

In her first months as vice president, Kamala Harris’s staff faced a dilemma: when a military officer saluted her as she boarded Air Force Two, should she salute back?

Her Vice President predecessors had routinely returned the salutes. Harris, though, listened to her “national security advisor” Nancy McEldowney, who told her she’d be overstepping her bounds if she returned the salute, so at the first encounter, she did not. And caught flack for the implied disrespect. Rationalizing that, and trying to justify her own poor advice, McEldowney said,

She really wanted to do the right thing and did not want to be out of step either with military protocol or with perceptions of her role as vice president.

If Harris truly had been interested in “doing the right thing,” she could have asked an actual military man, someone like, say, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or even the man in charge of the Presidential—or Vice Presidential—detail that provides personal security and crews for the President’s and Vice President’s transportation. In any event, it’s not that she wasn’t capable of asking actual experts; she just didn’t want to risk rocking the boat from her Number Two position.

Then there’s this.

She also was wary of offering her own policy views and in building out her political infrastructure. Much of her behavior has been driven by a desire not to overshadow President Biden and to demonstrate loyalty to a man she vigorously attacked during the 2020 Democratic primary.

Never mind that a Vice President’s role is to offer his/her own policy views, even to play devil’s advocate, in order to ensure the President is getting a variety of perspectives. See, for instance, then-Vice President Joe Biden’s advice to then-President Barack Obama to not pull the trigger on the operation that got Osama bin Ladin. Biden was the only one in the room offering that advice. Or that a Vice President needs his/her own political infrastructure in order to offer competent and informed advice. Further, a Vice President demonstrates loyalty—to the extent personal loyalty ever is appropriate—by doing his/her best to carry out the President’s decisions once those decisions have been made.

Now that she’s at the top of the Progressive-Democratic Party and unchallenged in any serious way, she’s becoming more aggressive—becoming Party’s driving force.

That she didn’t want to expose herself to differences or differing opinions, keeping her head down even when that was counterproductive, unless and until she was the absolute top dog indicates a dangerous weakness for our nation—for her—as she faces aggressive enemies like Russian President Vladimir Putin, or People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, or Iran’s mullahs; even aggressive friends like France’s President Emmanuel Macron or Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. In those milieus, she’ll be back to her status as not the top dog, but worse than before: having to deal with other top dogs person to person without the excuse that she isn’t herself highest in her hierarchy.