Erica Stanford’s name is again being thrown around on the short list to replace Obama loving Luxon. Two fun facts about Erica, her maiden name is Poppelbaum, and she modelled herself on Kamala Harris. National = Democrats.
It beggars belief that she can be so stupid as to support such a useless piece of trash. Just like Key and his undying love for Obama, I expect Luxon to come out and say he models himself on Joe Biden. This would explain his stupidity and lack of political awareness.
No Minister 
Cringeworthy…
In Erica’s defense, she said this in 2018. At the time, Harris was the Junior Senator from California, and was leading the charge against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, with a bunch of pre-scripted set pieces on the Senate committee. By Democrat standards, with someone telling her what to say, she did indeed come across as pretty accomplished and articulate, and was only revealed to be a complete vacuity when she ran for President the next year.
I’ve been acquainted with both Erica and her husband Kane for the last thirty years or so. They’re good people whom I like personally, but in Erica’s case, she has always been tribally National, but ideologically Left, and now that she is a government Minister I’ve never expected her to act in any other way, or expected to agree with her on much.
She’s an intelligent woman who probably would make a good National Party leader, given that National is basically a Left-leaning Party now. Whether that would be good for New Zealand is another matter.
That’s a fair point. I recall writing two posts about the Democrat contenders in 2019 and also thought at the time that Harris had a good shot at winning the nomination, based purely on what I knew of her then – that she was a “women of colour” who had climbed the greasy pole of California Democrat politics.
In fact I hoped she’d win because I figured she was so buried in CA politics that she wouldn’t know how to appeal to the rest of American. As it turned out of course, she was just an awful candidate and vanished before the first primary election.