There are still a lot of Democrats who see Vice President Kamala Harris as the future of the Democratic Party. As delusional as that sounds, it only shows that you don’t think like a national Democrat — and thank God for that.
For many Democrats, the package Harris comes in is almost too irresistible; black, Asian, female, and far-left, Harris says all the right things and checks all the right boxes.
But from her first moves as vice president, Harris has been the biggest embarrassment of any high office holder in recent history. Her office, described in a Politico piece as dysfunctional, has seen incredible turnover.
When “racism” was blamed for the description of “dysfunction” in the vice president’s office, one former Harris aide said, “white supremacy does not explain the internal psychodramas causing Harris’ staff and her White House colleagues to betray her in public repeatedly.”
Certainly part of Harris’s problem is the White House staff’s pathological desire to destroy anyone who could challenge Joe Biden in 2024. But in truth, Harris has made their task extraordinarily easy. Reason.com points to “bungled interviews, unhappy staffers, flip-flops, a failure to own any issue or commit to anything, a lack of a clear message or overarching reason for being.”
Related: The Morning Briefing: President Harris Really Stinks at Her Job
But now that the midterms are out of the way, Harris supporters in Washington are trying to create an artificial boomlet to begin repairing the extensive damage to her public personae that makes any talk of a Harris presidential run a bad joke.
“Now that it looks like he’s running, she’s really being treated like what I would call a ‘normal vice president,’” said one former Harris aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There’s just less attention, which I think actually frees her up to focus on excelling and not have to worry about the relentless scrutiny.”
Whether Harris can take advantage of being freed up — and how that would play out — are the main questions facing the vice president and her staff heading into 2023, questions that could go a long way in determining her and President Joe Biden’s future.
Remember when Biden put Harris in charge of fixing the border? In September of 2022, she claimed the border was “secure,” indicating that her mission was accomplished. Harris has made no statements since then about the border.
The Harris rehab project will not include any high-profile tasks assigned to her by Biden. Instead, her job will be to take Biden’s message to the faithful via carefully stage-managed appearances with West Wing-authored speeches.
Harris partisans are trying to put the best face on the demotion.
“One of the challenges that this administration had is I don’t think that the White House writ large fully understood what it meant to have a historic first vice president,” one White House ally said. “You have to put her out front more on some things because it looks different and it is different, right?”
So it’s Biden’s fault that Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history?
Yet Harris is far from an overwhelmingly popular figure. The same Harvard-Harris poll put her national favorability rating at 40 percent, while 50 percent viewed her unfavorably. A Los Angeles Times analysis of national opinion polls said that as of October 2022, Harris was at 39 percent favorable, 53 percent unfavorable. Harris does especially poorly among important voting blocs, including older voters (only 33 percent favorable) and independents (30 percent favorable).
Moreover, she’s seen a notable drop in favorability from when she first took office—down 14 percentage points, according to the Los Angeles Times. Harris’ vice presidency has been marked by the same fanfare and then fizzle as her presidential campaign. She got the job, but she couldn’t make the case for herself.
Harris supporters will spend the next few months trying to save her job as vice president. If Biden’s numbers are still underwater at the end of the summer, a change may be seriously discussed. In the meantime, any rehab project for Harris will run into the reality that she’s not popular, she’s incompetent, and she has nothing to recommend her to the American people except her sex and race.
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