In Brief: Democrats’ Kamala Harris Problem
Harris was set up to fail, some of her defenders say — and fail she has.
It’s no secret that Vice President Kamala Harris is immensely unpopular. That’s why we’ve called her Joe Biden’s impeachment insurance. Veteran political analyst Byron York digs deep into the problem Democrats have created for themselves with her.
The Democratic Party has a unique problem when it considers the 2024 presidential election. Joe Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history, will be 82 at the end of his first term. There is widespread speculation he will not run for reelection, although he insists he will. The suspicion among many in the political world that Biden will not run again threatens to turn him into a first-term lame duck. Or perhaps it already has.
The situation has naturally resulted in attention being paid to Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be Biden’s obvious successor should he not run. To say Harris has not shone in the job would be an understatement. Her defenders say Biden has given her some impossible tasks, such as slowing the flow of illegal border crossers from the Northern Triangle countries and passing the Democrats’ doomed voting procedure bills on Capitol Hill, although she specifically asked for the second job.
It’s gotten so bad that New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns have written about just how bad it is. In This Will Not Pass, the pair write, “One senator close to her, describing Harris’s frustration level as ‘up in the stratosphere,’ lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy.’ Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”
The rumors of discontent about, whether from Biden himself regarding anti-Harris leaks or from Harris’s staff themselves, who seem to have a rather short average duration on the job. Harris isn’t happy either, York says:
For her part, Harris, the first woman vice president of color, stewed over her sense that the Biden team looked down on her. According to the book, she sent a top aide to complain that White House aides did not stand when she entered a room, which she took as a “sign of disrespect.” Burns and Martin continue: “Some of Harris’s advisers believed the president’s almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved. Harris worried that Biden’s staff looked down on her; she fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious.”
York concludes that Democrats are in a pickle:
It’s hard to exaggerate how odd the Biden-Harris situation is for Democrats. A first-term president is expected to run for reelection. No president wants to be a lame duck in his first years in office. And yet that is where Biden could be headed. And that shines an especially intense light on the question of succession, and the first in line: a very unpopular, very problematic Vice President Kamala Harris.
