Harris: At odds with the White House
A rift of mutual “exasperation” has opened up between Vice President Kamala Harris and the White House, said Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jasmine Wright in CNN .com. Key aides to President Biden have “thrown up their hands” at what they see as “entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” by Harris and her staff. Meanwhile, Harris and her inner circle fume that she’s being “sidelined” with thankless assignments—like stopping mass migration from Central America—that aren’t “putting her in positions to succeed.” With tensions growing, the White House has been excluding Harris from Biden’s meetings and public appearances. Insiders say the Harris team has descended into “open panic,” said Noah Bierman and Melanie Mason in the Los Angeles Times. Her approval ratings have plunged to 28 percent, and last week, her communications director quit. The first woman of color to hold the vice presidency, Harris was once the presumed successor to Biden, but should the 79-year-old president decline to seek a second term, Democrats now expect an open battle for the nomination.
A few of Harris’ woes are circumstantial, said Jim Geraghty in NationalReview.com. “There is always a little tension” between the interests of the president and his second-in-command, and her staff contains mostly “newcomers and outsiders” in Washington. Still, it has become increasingly clear that Harris, who ended her own presidential campaign after polling at only 3 percent among Democrats, is just “not naturally politically gifted.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki last week took a familiar tack to defend the vice president, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, blaming her troubles on racism and sexism. “Sorry, a vast right-wing conspiracy doesn’t produce a 28 percent approval rating. Only Harris can do that.”
Harris’ biggest problem is that the vice presidency “is a terrible job,” said Joel Mathis in TheWeek .com. Apart from Dick Cheney, a “de facto prime minister” during George W. Bush’s presidency, most veeps become punch lines for jokes. Dan Quayle’s claim to fame was his misspelling of “potato,” while Biden’s was using the F-bomb on a hot mic during the Obamacare signing ceremony. Vice presidents are “enormously ambitious people who have to sublimate their own egos” as they wait impotently in the wings and endure public sniggering. Sorry, Madam Vice President, but what you’re experiencing “is nothing new.”