Kamala Harris Has One Giant Problem – Staff Turnover: Vice President Kamala Harris has a leadership problem.
Her staff has suffered from ongoing turnover. As a vice president, her office has been a revolving door. She has been known for raging tirades against her staffers. She has long been known for creating a toxic work environment throughout her career.
“With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why,” an anonymous former Harris staffer told the Washington Post.
Within six months of her becoming vice president, press reports were rife that infighting had taken over her office. Her then Chief of Staff Tina Flournoy took the blame for the problems in her office from West Wing leaders.
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy questioned former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki about the turnover in December 2021 asking, “Is the Vice President not satisfied with the staffing that she has had so far or do people just not want to work for her anymore?”
Psaki blamed burnout that frequently happens when campaign staffers work in the White House in their first year. She claimed that “working on a presidential campaign…and working in the first year of a White House is exciting and rewarding but it’s also grueling and exhausting” and “it’s natural for staffers who’ve thrown their heart and soul into a job to be ready to move on to a new challenge.”
Kamala Harris Burns Through Staffers
She lost her first chief of staff, deputy press secretary, and communications director all within her first 18 months as vice president.
Her Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Fuchs quit in April 2022, and her National Security Adviser Nancy McEldowney quit in March 2022.
A year ago, her domestic policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu announced her departure from Harris’ office. At the same time, Harris’ speechwriter Meghan Groob also announced she was leaving after only four months on the job.
Kosoglu has been with Harris since the earliest days of her Senate career.
Harris’ Leadership Style Has Problems
During the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, Harris was faulted for being indecisive about major decisions.
Her leadership style led to different parts of her campaign feuding with each other. The campaign suffered from a lack of direction and a lack of a clear message. The New York Times reported in 2020 that Harris sought advice from her advisers but seemed to lack any clear convictions.
“You can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign,” said Gil Duran, a former aide to Ms. Harris and other California Democrats and former editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner, told the Times. Duran worked for Harris for five months in 2013 before quitting.
Leadership guru Stephen Covey noted in his bestselling book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” that they need to begin with the end goal in mind. Harris’ inability to do so as a candidate and now as vice president makes it of little surprise that those problems persist because the problem is with her and no one else.
Harris Can Only Fix Herself
Duran told the Post in 2021 that Harris continued the same patterns after she went to Washington.
Duran wrote that Harris’ onetime lover former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown told Harris she should decline the vice-presidential office if Biden offered it to her. He noted that “the glory would be short-lived, and historically, the vice presidency has often ended up being a dead end.”
“Those of us personally familiar with Harris’ deficiencies know they cannot be fixed by new staff or pricey consultants. The change has to come from her,” he wrote in a December 2021 San Francisco Examiner column.
Such leadership questions add further doubts that she could successfully navigate a transition to the presidency in an emergency.
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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