SACRAMENTO — How did a convicted felon, serial liar, sexual abuser, and wannabe dictator allow himself to be elected president of this country? Three words: Democrats have failed.

I shouldn’t have been able to compete against a disqualified man. And in fact, it wasn’t. Republican Donald Trump won easily.

This is my post-mortem on the political death of Democrat Kamala Harris.

Just as years of bad standing and neglect of moderate voters have allowed the California Republican Party to sink into irrelevance in state government, it is the party’s own fault, as well as top Democrats in the 2024 presidential election. The nation was in a state of groping.

It started with President Obama’s betrayal in 2016. Responsibility begins with President Obama.

Obama reportedly pushed aside his own vice president, Joe Biden, and endorsed Hillary Clinton as the presidential candidate. He discouraged Biden from running.

The Democratic Party thus missed a golden opportunity. At the time, Biden was at the peak of his powers and likely would have defeated Trump and nipped his political career in the bud.

Why did Mr. Obama do that? We can only guess. But my guess is:

After Obama defeated Clinton in a tight race for the party’s nomination in 2008, he desperately needed her united support. They met in person at California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s home in Washington, D.C., but I don’t know what agreement they reached. But after President Obama was elected, he gave Clinton the coveted post of secretary of state and eight years later endorsed her as his presidential candidate over Biden.

Clinton proved to be a poor candidate.

Many Democrats believed she lost because America was not ready for a female president. But as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote:

“Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipped Wisconsin, and barely got to Michigan. She didn’t come. She was confused about her gender…”

Trump was thus elected president for the first time.

And in 2020, Biden finally won the Democratic Party’s nomination, but in my view he fumbled in choosing a running mate. He had promised to name a female veep and was under intense pressure to choose a woman of color.

It’s a mistake to confine yourself to a narrow field of potential choices months before you need to make a decision.

And perhaps it’s time for Democrats to tone down their identity politics. Whatever the policy’s merits, it doesn’t seem to benefit Democrats politically.

In any case, the woman of color Biden chose to be his vice president was then-California Sen. Harris, whose own bid for the White House was a fiasco. She withdrew before the primary vote was cast, avoiding an embarrassing defeat in her home state.

Biden was drawn to Harris because she and her late son, Beau, were close allies when she was the state’s attorney general.

Perhaps he would have been better off using then-U.S. Rep. Karen Bass of Los Angeles, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, who was likeable, energetic, and a achiever. Bass was later elected mayor of Los Angeles.

But the Biden-Harris ticket ousted Trump from the White House. The scheming, pathetic losers refused to concede defeat and incited a mob at the Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the certification of the election results.

As vice president, Harris would ultimately become less popular than the waning Biden, according to polls, and was generally seen as a drag on the president’s 2024 re-election prospects.

But the biggest stumbling block was Mr. Biden himself, 81 years old. And he shares significant responsibility for Harris’ defeat last week. That’s because he became interim president, reneging on his 2020 campaign promise to pass the torch to a younger generation.

He stubbornly refused to face reality and listen to Democratic voters who kept telling pollsters they wanted a smart candidate. Biden bowed to party pressure in July and left after delivering one of his worst performances ever in a televised debate.

But I also fault Democratic Congressional leaders and big party donors for not aligning with the president and giving him a pep talk sooner.

Biden’s bid for re-election has prevented Democrats from conducting the normal competitive nomination process that is essential for the party’s standard-bearer. Hone your fighting skills, test your voter message, and build your national support base.

Harris may have been chosen by voters in the primary. we never know. She won the nomination by default without receiving a single vote in the caucuses or primaries. No other Democratic candidates had the energy to challenge her, so there was no contest at the convention.

Harris actually turned out to be a pretty good candidate, exceeding many people’s expectations, including myself. She defeated Trump in her only debate.

But that didn’t really matter. Voters wanted change, and she represented the status quo.

She failed to adequately address working-class voters’ major concerns about the economy and illegal immigration.

She overemphasized abortion rights, an issue that Democrats will win in the 2022 midterm elections, which ended last week.

And voters didn’t want to hear that Trump was the worst. They already knew that and didn’t really care. The majority no longer have the standard of decency to be a presidential candidate, or if they do, they are less than a rattlesnake.

Mothers can still tell their children that in America, anyone can be president. And now we can also add that it is true even though they lie, deceive and incite deadly rebellion against the national government.

Just don’t be a California Democrat.