Kamala Harris Struggles In VP Role – Kamala Harris’s blunders worry her allies.
Her public perception has been underwater for two years and has not recovered.
Many have compared her with former Vice President Dan Quayle and suggested that she be tossed from the GOP ticket.
Republicans have panned her. So has Washington Post columnist David Ignatius who wrote last month that she should be tossed.
“… I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump,” Ignatius wrote. “Because of their concerns about Biden’s age, voters would sensibly focus on his presumptive running mate, Harris. She is less popular than Biden, with a 39.5 percent approval rating, according to polling website FiveThirtyEight. Harris has many laudable qualities, but the simple fact is that she has failed to gain traction in the country or even within her own party.”
Harris briefly served as acting president in November 2021 while Biden underwent a colonoscopy.
The Kamala Harris Problem
Atlantic staff writer Elaina Plott Calabro writes that several Biden and former Obama staffers she spoke with said that Harris is risk adverse.
“Those closest to Harris have tried to make sense of why the vice president’s positive qualities—her intelligence, her diligence, her integrity—have failed to register with Americans. It is impossible, of course, to talk about perceptions of Harris without laying some of the blame on racism and sexism. The briefest glance at the toxic comments about Harris on social media reveals the bigotry that motivates some of her most fervent detractors,” Plot Calabro wrote.
“But the vice president’s allies also acknowledge that she has struggled to make an affirmative case for herself. Judging from what has gone viral online, she is better known for her passion for Venn diagrams than for any nugget of biography; right-wing personalities enjoy mocking this predilection almost as much as they enjoy mocking the way she laughs.”
Such analyses run shallow. Harris’s biggest problem is her unlikability as a person. Those around her in the past have called her a “bully” or noted that she has had a rocky relationship with those in the White House.
Harris Struggles In Vagaries of the Vice Presidency
She has struggled to define herself in the vice presidency, an office that FDR’s first Vice President John Nance Garner called not worth a bucket of warm spit.
Her defenders have argued she has not been able to be herself throughout her vice presidency.
“Kamala Harris is a leader but is not being put in positions to lead. That doesn’t make sense. We need to be thinking long term, and we need to be doing what’s best for the party,” said a top donor to Biden and other Democrats told CNN in 2021. “You should be putting her in positions to succeed, as opposed to putting weights on her. If you did give her the ability to step up and help her lead, it would strengthen you and strengthen the party.”
Democrats remain frustrated that the public refuses to give her a chance.
“The Biden administration has every incentive to embrace Harris. Why does addressing preparedness seem so difficult? Harris has affirmed that she is ready, if need be, but there’s a limit to what she herself can say,” Plott Calabro wrote. “By virtue of her position, she is among those who represent the future of her party, and she represents its mainstream, not its fringe. Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready.”
She continued, “This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation—by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst 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.
