Our disappearing vice president

Whatever happened to Kamala Harris?

She shattered ceiling glass when Joe Biden made California’s junior senator his running mate. Since then, she’s largely receded from Washington’s daily doings and the cliff-hanging drama surrounding the fight over the president’s agenda.

What happened to Harris is she became vice president.

Even as she shoulders an array of policy portfolios, it remains a fact that the No. 2 job in the White House is a diminishing one. It’s neither racist nor misogynistic to point that out when the jobholder happens to be Harris.

Virtually every vice president in modern history—save Dick Cheney, who played an unusually prominent role guiding defense and foreign policy under President George W. Bush— has looked smaller than when he or she accepted the position. That’s because a main job requirement is stepping away from the spotlight, except when cheerleading for the president and his agenda.

After four years of emasculation, Mike Pence didn’t seem to mind that President Trump wasn’t at all upset that some of Trump’s supporters wished to kill Pence for refusing to illegally overturn Biden’s election. Pence has managed to set new standards for tolerance and self-abasement.

But there were heightened expectations for Harris, chiefly because of her groundbreaking election. No one like her—the first woman, first Black person, first Asian American elected vice president—has ever moved through Washington’s uppermost reaches. Her every move would be unprecedented and surely merit great amounts of news coverage.

But that one cardinal rule—to never overshadow the president—doesn’t yield to history or celebrity, especially when the chief executive is a brittle 78-year-old.

So Harris has made humility a top item on her public-facing agenda, alongside the assignments—voting rights, space exploration, women in the workforce, immigration from Central America—the president has given her. Caution has long been a hallmark of Harris’ political career, and the subservient nature of the vice presidency, as well as the scrutiny of Biden loyalists sensitive to the merest hint of personal ambition, reinforce that inclination.

Another reason for Harris’ fade to the background is her thin Washington resume. Biden, Cheney and Al Gore had the Capitol Hill experience that the presidents they served under—Barack Obama, Bush, Bill Clinton—lacked. Pence, a congressman for more than a decade before becoming Indiana’s governor, served as Trump’s emissary to the conservative and evangelical wings of the GOP.

There’s not a whole lot Harris can do that Biden cannot, or hasn’t done already.

Harris, who’s 57, was chosen to run alongside Biden in great part because she brought balance—relative youth, her race and gender—to the Democratic presidential ticket. In the White House, the president has strived to make his vice president appear to be a full partner in the “Biden-Harris administration.” In practice, though, she’s more like an apprentice.

Barring unforeseen events, Harris has at least three more years, and possibly as many as seven, to learn and grow in the White House. She’ll mostly do so out of sight and, for many, out of mind.