He came, he saw, he fell.

Kamala Harris he had a job on Tuesday night — to separate herself from the last four years of a failed administration and make a compelling case that the next four years under her leadership will be like night and day.

Achieving both goals would be a challenge for even the most talented and sincere candidate. Since Harris is neither, her claim that she’s up for a promotion fell flat.

No thanks, no sale.

He certainly gave it his best shot. While her speech was predictably heavy on the supposed dangers of Donald Trump, it was otherwise good enough to serve as a closing argument, and her delivery was nearly flawless.

She looked strong and looked almost as confident as she did back then gave her acceptance speech at the party convention in Chicago.

Shadows loom

But much has changed since then, and Tuesday offered no escape from the two shadows that loom over her. One is Joe Bidenprobably the worst president in modern times and among the most unpopular.

To this day, Harris can’t say what she would do differently from Biden, which makes her both a blank slate and a consummate partner in a disastrous term.

Even the setting for her speech — the Washington Ellipse, with the White House in the background — was a reminder of that baggage.

It was an odd choice, with Biden just hundreds of feet away, perhaps watching her on TV trying to get away from him and their administration.

She can’t escape it, because she often admits that she was the last person in the room with him for such terrible decisions as the deadly exit from Afghanistan.

Worse, it won’t admit one mistake they madewhich is an affront to the millions of voters unhappy with the administration’s mandate, especially Gold Star families and those who have lost loved ones to the killers of illegal immigrants.

The other shadow looming over her, of course, is Trump, whose presidency has been a huge success compared to the past four years.

He compounded her problems with a barrage of criticism and by laying out specific and credible plans on top issues — the economy, inflation, the border and America’s place in the world.

Almost every poll shows that most voters trust him more on these issues and think they were better off with him in the Oval Office.

The fact that Harris could not escape the shadow of Biden or Trump tells me that she has run out of new arguments for her election. With early voting in full swing and Election Day next Tuesday, this was her last best chance to redefine herself, and she didn’t.

Consider it one of many missed opportunities. After wasting precious weeks hiding from the media and refusing to lay out specific policies she would pursue, she thought all she had to do was take the scorched earth on Trump.

Her assumption seems to have been that legacy media would amplify her message and that by now she would be headed for victory. The media have done their part, but fortunately they no longer have enough public power to elect their presidents.

Given her hatred of Trump and the party dog ​​whistles for violenceit’s also not unreasonable to think that Harris would have believed that an assassin would solve his problems.

Although she finally dropped the most odious references to Hitler and the Nazis on Tuesday, she did not swallow. Like a junkie, she needs her fix of calling Trump a “petty tyrant,” a “wannabe dictator” and accusing him of being “unstable” and “obsessed with revenge.”

All quite remarkable when you remember that her White House broke 200 years of precedent by impeaching Trump, trying to shut him down and keep him out of the vote.

Calling him a threat to democracy is the biggest lie in politics since Hillary Clinton called him a Russian agent. We know how that worked out for her.

Another vile effort by the Dems is the appeal to race. Both Obamas have created new bottom by scolding black men who don’t support it.

Harris certainly played, adopting various versions of southern accents when he spoke to a predominantly black audience.

Stripped of all beauty, it is a call that says all black Americans must vote for all black candidates. No wonder race relations are quickly turning around.

The upside is one of the best parts of the campaign — Trump is picking up significant numbers of black and Latino voters. Our democracy works best when both parties have to fight for every vote instead of taking them for granted based on race, gender or ethnicity.

Then again, it was probably inevitable that the Dems would finish the campaign in the gutter. Their decision — again, the Obamas were key players — to push Biden aside after his disastrous June debate performance set in motion a thoroughly undemocratic process.

We still don’t know the full reason why the president agreed, but it almost certainly included a promise that he would be able to finish his term without the threat of impeachment under the 25th Amendment.

That means the cabal found him compelling enough to be commander-in-chief in a war-torn world, but not compelling enough to be the candidate.

That sounds more like love of power than love of country.

But the party was able to pull it off because the media was as desperate to defeat Trump as the most rabid Dem. Note that there have been few retrospective articles about who knew what about Biden’s cognitive decline, and Harris gets away with insisting that he was just as insightful.

We were simply told that it was time for him to step aside and pass the baton to him.

The immediate impact was euphoria, as the mountain of delegates who voted for Biden to be the nominee switched to Harris within hours. The party rejoiced that it no longer had to drag its political corpse around, and the relief rally was soon referred to as the days of rejoicing.

But as summer turned to fall and Harris revealed himself unable to do so, the polls plummeted and joy turned to panic.

That gave birth to accusations of Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, which were outrageously offensive and it may cost the dignitaries many Jewish votes. Domestic polls must show as much, so there was Harris on Tuesday night, who attacked Trump as divisive while promising to unite.

She managed to keep a straight face as she insisted: “We need to stop pointing fingers” and declared that “I promise I will look for common ground.”

It sounds familiar because it echoes Biden’s inaugural address. As I wrote then, he used variations of the words “unity” and “together” more than a dozen times, as when he declared: “Today, on this day of January, my whole soul is in this: The gathering America. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.”

He never tried, of course, and the divisions in America today are at least as great and certainly more heated than when Biden said those words.

So now we have to believe his vice president, who can’t think of anything he would have done differently in the past four years, when he makes the same promise.

Fool me once. . .