Kamala Harris faces scrutiny and tests in first
six months as vice-president
The vice-president was handed what some saw as a
poisoned chalice of leading the southern border response and faces ‘unique
hurdles’ in the administration
David Smith
David Smith
Washington bureau chief
@smithinamerica
Sun 11 Jul
2021 07.00 BST
Kamala
Harris looked glad to be back at her alma mater, Howard University in
Washington. “The first office I ever ran for was probably the most difficult
campaign I’ve ever been in,” she recalled with laughter, “and that was freshman
class representative of what was then called the liberal arts student council.”
The US
vice-president had returned to this historically Black university on Thursday
for a difficult campaign of a different nature: protecting voting rights from a
Republican onslaught. It is just one test for a potential future president
burdened by heavy expectations and already gaining detractors inside and
outside the White House.
As the
daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, Harris, 56, is the first woman
and first woman of color to serve as vice-president. She is also deputy to the
oldest president in American history – Joe Biden is 78 – creating a heightened
sense that she is heir apparent. That puts her every move under the microscope.
“She’s
holding up and is excited about all of the challenges ahead,” said Donna
Brazile, former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), who
gave Harris what she called a “big sister” hug at the Howard event. “The fact
that we have, in 245 years, the first ever female vice-president, I’m not
surprised that she is facing a higher level of scrutiny and different standards
from previous vice-presidents.”
Many
vice-presidents have taken on clear and specific portfolios but Harris began
with a more nebulous brief. Asked in an interview in February what her primary
issue of focus is, she shot back: “Making sure Joe Biden is a success.”
Biden,
himself a former vice-president, has been at pains to include Harris at countless
set pieces and speeches and ensure officials make frequent references to the
“Biden-Harris administration”. But unlike her predecessor Mike Pence, she was
not assigned to be the point person on the response to the coronavirus
pandemic.
Whereas Biden
was once a useful interlocutor between the Barack Obama White House and
Congress, Harris has not been similarly deployed for critical negotiations on
legislation. She served only four years in the Senate, so she does not have
deep contacts, while her duty in casting the tie-breaking vote in an evenly and
bitterly divided Senate complicates things further.
I’m not surprised that she is facing a higher level of
scrutiny and different standards from previous vice-presidents
Donna Brazile
Instead
Harris was handed what some saw as a poisoned chalice of leading the
administration’s response to an increase in the flow of migrants at the
southern border. Headlines anointing her a “border tsar” prompted swift
pushback from her team that her focus was only on the root causes in Central
America’s northern triangle.
Republicans
and conservative media hammered away at the question of when Harris would visit
the border. Yet she seemed strangely unprepared when, during a trip to
Guatemala, NBC News host Lester Holt pointed out “You haven’t been to the
border,” offering the jarring riposte: “And I haven’t been to Europe.”
She did
then go to the border. Harris made the trip to El Paso, Texas – declaring “We
have seen extreme progress over these last few months” – five days before
Donald Trump staged a border stunt, prompting further criticism that she was
scrambling to avoid being upstaged.
Harris
volunteered to take on another tough mission: combating restrictive voting
rules passed by Republican-led legislatures in some states. The scale of the
challenge was laid bare when Republicans thwarted a landmark voting rights bill
in the Senate. On Thursday, at Howard, she announced that Democrats will invest
$25m in voter registration and education efforts.
She has
also had her share of negative headlines. Last month the Politico website
published a report based on interviews with 22 current and former aides,
administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden who described low
morale, poor communication and “a tense and at times dour office atmosphere”.
The article
singled out Tina Flournoy, Harris’s chief of staff, whom sources said “created
an insular environment where ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and
decisions are dragged out. Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility
for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.”
Then Axios
reported tensions between Biden and Harris’s teams, quoting several West Wing
officials as calling the vice-president’s office a “shitshow”. It said: “Some
Democrats close to the White House are increasingly concerned about Harris’s
handling of high-profile issues and political tone deafness.”
The White
House dismissed the accounts and supporters of Harris described it as a
whispering campaign. Some cite it as the latest example of female politicians
being held to a different and sexist standard.
Brazile,
still an at-large member of the DNC, said: “She has over 70 people in her
office and when one or two people complain because they don’t have the kind of
access they didn’t normally have, I call that palace intrigue.
“It’s not
worthy of an article but it’s worthy of what I like to call gossip. It’s sad
when you read an article that says that the chief of staff is guarding the
vice-president; that’s why you hire someone who is tough, someone who’s
decisive and someone who knows how to make decisions.”
But the
report, which said Biden’s team are concerned about the way Harris’s staff are
treated, echoed stories of infighting that plagued Harris’s presidential
campaign, which began with fanfare but fell apart in December 2019.
Symone
Sanders, senior adviser and chief spokesperson for the vice-president,
acknowledged that Harris’s status as the first woman and woman of colour in the
role “does bring along criticism. But I have to tell you this: she is focused
on the work and I think her work and the facts do speak for themselves.”
Sanders
denied that Harris is being set up to fail with un-winnable causes.
“Look, the
easy issues do not make it to the president’s or the vice-president’s desk,”
she said. “The hardest issues, the most complicated issues, the most pertinent
issues to our country is what makes it to their desks. I think that the
president has demonstrated his trust in the vice-president by having her
oversee some of the most complicated issues we face.”
But
Lawrence Haas, former communications director for Vice-President Al Gore, told
the Guardian’s Politics Weekly Extra podcast: “Kamala Harris, first of all,
does tend to have staff operations that are not what you would call smooth.
“Her
campaign for president was famously riven by controversy. I knew someone who
worked on the campaign and confirmed everything that we read in the newspaper.
So I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised to hear that she’s got a
dysfunctional and tension-filled operation as vice-president.”
Republicans
have seized on the accounts.
They
suggest that the former California senator has long been overhyped and the
perceived rocky trip to Guatemala and Mexico was indicative of someone
struggling to find their footing. They also suspect that taking on immigration
and voting rights puts her in no-win situations.
Bill
Whalen, a media consultant for California politicians including the ex-governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger, said: “The challenge here is really: is Kamala terribly
good at the job she is doing? It’s very easy to push back and say any time you
criticize her, you’re doing so because you’re a racist or you’re a sexist. I’m
sorry but that’s a lazy critique. It’s not objectively looking.
“First of
all, this White House has not done her very many favors. They have given her
two issues that they knew were political losers. The border is the worst area
that Biden himself polls in and it’s a losing area because essentially they’re
taking an issue in which the roof of the house is on fire and her approach, the
president’s approach, is to talk about the root causes of fire, not about how
to extinguish the fire. So she’s going to get burned on that. In some regards,
they’re almost setting her up to fail.”
To Whalen,
a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo
Alto, it is far from certain that Harris is serving an apprenticeship for the
top job. “Let’s assume that Biden is not running in 2024. Every time they give
her a task in which she is almost guaranteed to fail, they’re just guaranteeing
it’s going to be a competitive race in 2024.
“In other
words, it’s not really creating a great legacy for her, it’s not creating this
formidable issue and the more that you guys write about her maybe doing a shaky
job or not living up to the hype, it’s just an invitation for some aspiring
Democrat to say, ‘You know, I could take her down. She has a glass jaw.’”
But
Democrats contend that, if Biden had given Harris minor roles or responsibilities,
he would have been criticised for not allowing her to do the same kind of tough
job that he did when he was vice-president.
Elaine
Kamarck, a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings
Institution thinktank, said: “Biden is doing exactly the right thing in not
sidelining her, but giving her major initiatives. He’s giving her the hard
stuff to do and that is exactly what you should do if you want a vice-president
to be ready to take over.”
Brazile was
similarly upbeat after Thursday’s voting rights event at Howard. “I think she
is honored to serve and also grateful to be a part of this administration. When
I left her, she said, ‘I’ve got to get back to the White House, we’ve got a
civil rights meeting.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, you never stop.’ She never stops.
“One year
ago, when many of my colleagues and I sat down to discuss having a Black woman
on the ticket, we knew that whoever he [Biden] selected would face unique
hurdles, the double standards that we often see in American media. The fact
that she has not only shattered the glass, but she’s walking over the glass, no
one should be surprised.”
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