Kamala in crisis
Democrats aren't sure the heir apparent is up to the task.
Kamala in crisis
Vice President Kamala Harris has had a tough go of it in the media lately. Deputized to deal with the crisis at the border, she has become the public face of the Biden administration’s biggest policy and public-relations problem.
Harris and her team have protested that her task is really to deal with the root causes of the migration surge — humanitarian and economic problems in the migrants’ countries of origin, they say — while the Department of Homeland Security handles the border itself.
But her first diplomatic trip of that mission was widely panned as well. By the time she made an actual border visit, only after former President Donald Trump announced Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had invited him to go, she had already scoffed that she hadn’t been to Europe either, so she didn’t understand the question.
Harris’s interviews became an issue. “There are now concerns that some of that progress may have been overshadowed by her answers to some of these questions that her team knew that she would be facing,” CNN’s Jeremy Diamond reported. “And all of this has left some administration officials perplexed and the vice president's team frustrated.”
Then came reports that Harris’s office was a difficult place to work. “People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses, and it’s an abusive environment,” a source told Politico, which described the workplace as “rife with dissent.”
Much of the whispering campaign appeared aimed at Tina Flournoy, who serves as Harris’s chief of staff. But within days, there was talk of concern about her ability to step in for President Joe Biden, who will turn 82 shortly after the next presidential election, if she needed to do so.
Some even used the worst fighting words imaginable in Democratic politics to describe Harris’s political acumen. “Yet many Democrats, including some current senior administration officials, are concerned she could not defeat whomever the Republican Party puts up — even if it were Donald Trump,” Axios reported. One Democrat was quoted as saying party operatives weren’t thinking, “Oh, no, our heir apparent is f***ing up. What are we gonna do?” but rather “Oh, she’s f***ing up. Maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent.”
The public numbers bear out this skepticism. The RealClearPolitics polling average finds 46.3% hold an unfavorable view of Harris to just 44.3% with a favorable impression. Biden’s numbers are 51.5% favorable to 43% unfavorable. That’s not far off from his 51.3% of the national popular vote last year.
“It’s early, so I don’t think any of this is fatal,” a Democratic operative said of Harris’s recent struggles. “But it definitely isn’t good.”
While Republicans have struggled to land blows against Biden dating back to the campaign, with even Trump failing to land a negative portrayal of his Democratic opponent that stuck, they have had more luck with Harris. “This week, Kamala Harris passes 100 days as border czar,” Republican National Committee rapid response director Tommy Pigott said at the beginning of July. “That’s 100 days of failure.”
Even the defenses of Harris feel like backhanded compliments. “Based on how things look now, her work as his No. 2 could end up being baggage more than a boon,” worried Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University, in the pages of the New York Times. “Mr. Biden and his team aren’t giving her chances to get some wins and more experience on her ledger. Rather, it’s the hardest of the hard stuff.” In this telling, Harris should be protected by not being given anything important or difficult to do.
"Kamala Harris will probably be the Democratic nominee in 24 or 28. Biden's team should be giving her portfolios that make it likelier she'll win. Instead they're giving her impossible problems that will likely become liabilities," tweeted Ezra Klein, a leading liberal pundit.
For much of her career, Harris has been a woman on the rise. She is still only a decade removed from her service as district attorney of San Francisco. She spent six years as attorney general of California, her first statewide elected office, and served less than one full term in the Senate. Now, Harris finds herself a 78-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency.
In fact, Harris owes her current job to the age and identity of the president. She was selected to balance the ticket. Biden is an old white man in an increasingly diverse Democratic Party. Harris is 56, black, of Asian ancestry, and a woman, becoming the first in each of those categories to hold the vice presidency.
But it hasn’t always been easy. Harris ran behind California Gov. Jerry Brown, the top of the Democratic ticket, during her first run for state attorney general in 2010. In the deep-blue state, she edged out her Republican opponent with 46.1% of the vote to 45.3%. Brown defeated Republican Meg Whitman 53.8% to 40.9%.
Harris did much better running for reelection in 2014, winning 57.2% of the vote. But she still ran behind Brown. Her first impressive statewide win came in her 2016 Senate campaign, when she did not face a Republican opponent. Harris beat fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez, the distant second-place finisher in the nonpartisan “jungle primary,” 61.6% to 38.4% that November as Hillary Clinton won California in a landslide.
While that might have become a safe Senate seat for Harris, it was not the beginning of an electoral juggernaut. She announced that she was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination on Jan. 21, 2019, with a formal launch six days later. She suspended her campaign on Dec. 3, less than a year after that and before a single primary or caucus vote was cast.
The criticism of her presidential campaign sounds similar to some of the complaints lodged against her performance so far as vice president. “Ms. Harris is the only 2020 Democrat who has fallen hard out of the top tier of candidates,” the New York Times reported before she dropped out of the race. “She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions.”
By October 2019, Harris was winning just 8% of the vote among Democrats in her home state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California’s poll. Then, that December, California Democrats told a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times that they wanted her to drop out by a margin of 61% to 24%.
Ironically, Harris’s presidential campaign peaked with her criticism of Biden on race. In a Democratic debate, she dinged the aging front-runner and her future running mate for his past opposition to forced busing to achieve racial balance in schools. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” she said. “That little girl was me!”
But then, Harris was unable to articulate a current position on busing that was appreciably different from Biden’s. Her stance on “Medicare for all” was similarly muddled. It became unclear whether Harris, who described herself as a “coalition building” candidate, was running in the left or center lane. Soon, she was driven off the road entirely.
The standard complaints about Harris are that she is calculating and beset by staff morale complaints. Of course, the former is a common trait among politicians, including past rivals such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Biden himself. The president has long chased the center of gravity in the Democratic Party.
The scrutiny of Harris has intensified because of Biden’s age and the prominence of her role in the administration. She meets with foreign leaders, and the White House releases readouts of their calls. Harris often appears close to Biden in the Oval Office and at public events. The speculation that she will be the 2024 Democratic nominee if Biden, the oldest president in history, does not run, both magnifies the concerns and gives others in the party who might like to derail her an incentive to dish.
Despite rumors of a contentious relationship between Harris’s office and the West Wing, Biden’s top brass hasn’t left the vice president hanging.
“I try not to speak to or engage on anonymous reports or anonymous sources," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a daily briefing when asked about the metastasizing Harris stories. "I will say that the vice president is an incredibly important partner to the president. She has a challenging job, a hard job. And she has a great, supportive team of people around her. But other than that, I'm not going to have any more comments on those reports."
The White House brought out even bigger guns to offer a full-throated defense of Harris. “She’s delivering for the American people on immigration, small business, voting rights, and economic growth,” Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, told Axios in the story that described her office as a “s***show.” Klain said Harris was “off to the fastest and strongest start of any vice president I have seen.”
In the same story, Biden senior adviser Cedric Richmond accused Harris’s mostly anonymous internal critics of trying to “sabotage” her. “At some point, it just becomes, one person says something long enough, and it becomes an urban legend,” he added. “It doesn’t have to be credible. It doesn’t have to be real. Someone says something, and it can just snowball.”
To many Democrats, it is a familiar tale of double standards for ambitious women.
“I think it's both unfair and normal D.C. backstabbing,” said Democratic strategist Jessica Tarlov. “Women in particular are criticized for being harsh or difficult bosses — see Amy Klobuchar — and rarely if ever hear about such things when the principal is a man.”
Now, amid reports that the White House is contemplating ways it can better support Harris and her team, some suggest they begin with the vice president's policy portfolio.
“She was also given a completely thankless and near impossible brief with the border, like Biden was under Obama, and needs other issue areas so that there's a chance at success,” Tarlov said. “The border crisis has been a crisis for as long as I've been paying attention to politics — no one person can fix it, and the notion that they can is ridiculous.”
With the midterm elections looming and Democratic control of the Senate hanging on Harris’s tiebreaking vote, the job won’t get any easier.
