RB, Being's hyperbole aside, it's certainly true that Harris is a flawed albeit obvious choice. She has quite of bit of baggage from her time as a prosecutor and attorney general, and her time in the Senate was marked by more grandstanding for the cameras than solid policymaking. She is an adequate but hardly exceptional campaigner.

I don't think she was a bad choice, but I think she's not a fantastic one either. The issue is that many of the other choices were equally bad: if you're looking for a woman of color (woman because Biden already committed to it, of color because of the current racial unrest that Trump has handled so poorly), there are only a few prominent options: Susan Rice, Karen Bass, and Stacey Abrams being the biggest ones (I'm not going to mention Demings or Lance Bottoms because frankly they were unlikely options to start with). Rice is problematic because of her time in the Obama administration (don't think for a moment they wouldn't trot out Benghazi again, among other missteps) and because she is frankly not a politician and has no campaigning experience. Bass isn't a bad choice temperamentally but she just doesn't have a national profile and her civil rights associations might be ammunition for opponents (as opposed to Harris, who is of color but can be spun as a 'law and order' candidate, for better or worse). Abrams is pretty inexperienced from either a federal or executive position, and losing a gubernatorial election - albeit in style - is not exactly a sterling qualification.

Harris isn't a slam dunk, but she's a reasonably safe and not awful choice. It's hard to be too excited about her, but to be honest you could say the same about the top of the ticket. But I would be hard pressed to think she would cause the same kind of damage to the ticket that e.g. Palin did to McCain.