Kamala Harris's campaign team is having great difficulty meshing as a cohesive unit, according to several sources.
The campaign staff is made up of Harris loyalists, Biden holdovers, and Obama veterans, and the tension among them is becoming noticeable.
"Biden's campaign was insular, with a few long-serving aides making big decisions. The Harris campaign has become a diffuse 'Frankenstein' team with multiple power centers." reports Axios.
This is a campaign waiting to explode. With no overall philosophy guiding the staff, tensions are high, and we might expect resignations from some minor players very soon.
Harris has brought on her own staffers, but the Biden aides and alumni from Barack Obama's 2012 campaign apparently have their own ideas about how the campaign should be run.
“The entanglement of these different entities has led to many people feeling a real lack of role clarity,” one source said.
It doesn't help that Harris is a horrible boss. Her screaming rants at staffers, blaming them for any failures that were her fault, led to a 90% turnover rate over the past four years.
Right now, Harris is riding the media-created wave of approval. She doesn't have to do any heavy lifting. That's going to change soon as summer turns to fall and the pressure cooker of a national campaign stresses out the campaign team.
Unless there's camaraderie and cohesion, the campaign could easily break apart and devolve into backbiting when things go south (McCain campaign). Given Harris's past, campaign setbacks — a certainty in any national campaign — could cause the whole thing to unravel.
Another person involved with the campaign said there isn't "as much tension at the very, very top, where the question is more: 'Who is the first among equals with the vice president?'"
The confusion about who's in charge is happening more often "two or three rungs down," this source said.
The intrigue: Some on Biden's team thought many top Obama aides had been second-guessing their decisions for months — and were part of the effort to push the president to end his run for re-election.
"It's just a mad dash," one person involved told Axios. "Things are colliding occasionally, but it's not malicious."
All's well. Remain calm.
"The confusion about who's in charge is happening more often 'two or three rungs down,' another source said." "The clunky organization will be fine as long as the team believes it can win," another said.
Sorry, but in a close race, "clunky organizations" usually get clobbered.
Though some on Biden’s team believe Harris is more electable than the president after his June debate performance against former President Trump, and welcome the "burst of enthusiasm," some are disappointed they have to defend Harris for her past progressive stances on "Medicare-for-all" and banning fracking. Her positions on those issues, along with those of other Democrats, in part contributed to Biden’s 2020 nomination win.
The question of the moment is how her "Frankenstein" team is going to handle the numerous flip-flops Harris has made since her 2020 campaign. Trump's team is going to rake her over the coals for a dizzying change of heart on fracking and "Medicare for All."
It will be interesting to see how her messaging team finesse those and other issues from 2020.
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