Kamala Harris’s mistake in the White House

When Ron Klain admitted to me a year ago that the White House could have done more to raise Kamala Harris’s profile, he had no idea that the Democratic Party, and perhaps American democracy itself, would soon depend on her becoming president. But maybe he should have.

It was July 2023, and as I interviewed President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff at his downtown Washington law office, I asked him whether the administration had done enough to showcase Harris as a governing partner for the oldest president in history. Promoting your vice president is “always difficult,” Klain, who was known to be a Harris advocate, told me at the time. “Obviously, I would like to, you know — you can always do more, and you should do more.”

Four months before the election, and a week after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Harris’s ability to lead the Democratic Party and the free world has never been more relevant. And yet many Americans, after three years of Harris’ mismanagement by the West Wing, are now looking at their vice president as if for the first time.

In another version of the Biden presidency, this would indeed be Kamala Harris’s moment. A growing list of leading Democrats, including Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina and, in a conversation with me this week, Sen. Laphonza Butler of California, are touting Harris as the candidate best positioned to take on Trump should Biden decide to drop out of the race. Tim Ryan, the former Ohio congressman who challenged Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary, has taken his support a step further, calling on the president to “rip the Band-Aid off” and promote Harris immediately. A recent CNN poll shows the vice president now more aligned with Trump than the president.

From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem

This is precisely the kind of moment that Biden, 81, once claimed to anticipate, or at least be prepared for: the moment in which, after soberly assessing the diminishing results of his leadership, he would step aside for a new generation. But if you believe Biden took seriously the fact that this might happen, it’s because he would be forced to hand over the leadership of his party to herso I have a bridge to sell you in Wilmington.

It would, of course, be the same bridge that Biden sold to voters in 2020, when he cast his presidency as a return to normal for a nation clamoring for a return to normal, a gardening exercise while the next party leader was ready to take office. “Look, I see myself as a bridge, not anything else,” he said in March 2020, campaigning alongside Sen. Harris, Sen. Cory Booker and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, just months before he officially chose Harris as his running mate. “You’ve seen a whole generation of leaders stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

Four years later, it’s fair to wonder how seriously Biden has taken the job of bridging the gap. In profiling the vice president last year, I learned that Biden’s team didn’t particularly like to discuss Harris’s preparation for the presidency—not so much because they doubted her ability to lead the country, it seemed, but because they were irked by the idea that the day would come when she would have to. For all Biden’s efforts to present his presidency as a generational handoff, those around him seemed dismissive of the idea that his legacy might be irrevocably linked to the vice president’s. My questions about Harris’s preparation were routinely brushed aside as a distraction, supposedly informed by arguments made at the time by Republican primary candidates, including Nikki Haley, that a vote for Biden was effectively a vote for President Harris.

“People who are at the bottom of the polls are doing things and saying things to try to be relevant and get oxygen,” one official told me at the time. Yet Biden was The oldest president in history, I said: Is asking questions about Harris’ ability to do her job so ridiculous? “She’s the closest to the presidency, as all her predecessors have been,” the official responded.

Mark Leibovich: So Much for Biden, the Bridge President

In my interview with Jeff Zients, Klain’s successor as White House chief of staff, I asked him if he could recall a time when Biden “significantly relied on Harris for advice.” Zients noted that Harris had been instrumental in making “equity” a priority of the administration’s COVID response, but he couldn’t immediately give me another time; he said he would ask his team to give me an additional example. I followed up on the question several times, but the anecdote never came to me.

I asked Tim Ryan on Tuesday whether he thought Biden had done enough over the past three years to boost public confidence in Harris. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, she’s been very quiet for a long time.” Echoing a complaint that many of Harris’s allies have made since Biden took office, Ryan argued that the vice president’s portfolio had been filled from the start with unwinnable missions, including immigration; Harris was chosen early on to lead the administration’s approach to the so-called root causes element of border policy. “You send her to deal with immigration, but you’re not prepared to do anything about it,” Ryan said. As a result, he said, Democrats have now “completely lost” the issue to Republicans. “And you certainly can’t blame her for that.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Ernesto Apreza, the vice president’s press secretary, wrote in an email: “Vice President Harris is proud to be President Biden’s governing partner. As the president has said, he relies on her counsel and advice, and together they will continue to move the nation forward for the remainder of this term and the next.”

Adam Serwer: Biden must resign

Of course, Harris’s staggering unpopularity with voters—she and Biden both have approval ratings below 40 percent—is largely her own fault. As I noted in the fall, her first year as vice president was marked by a series of brutal headlines, with her office plagued by dysfunction and senior and junior aides resigning one after another. Her communication problems quickly defined her public image; even today, it’s hard to have a conversation about Harris without someone bringing up the infamous Lester Holt interview, in which she inexplicably insisted that she had traveled to the southern border when she had not.

Yet when commentators accuse Democrats of “political malfeasance” for keeping Harris “under wraps,” as CNN’s John King did after Harris’s post-debate interview on the network, they are only half right. The White House has rarely put Harris center stage, but it’s not as if she’s hiding. As I wrote in the fall, Harris had traveled to 19 foreign countries and met with about 100 foreign leaders by then. She spent the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections crisscrossing the United States as the administration’s spokesperson on abortion, one of the few officials in Washington who correctly anticipated the issue’s importance to voters.

Kamala Harris’s work on reproductive rights has since become a focal point of her vice presidency. Senator Butler, in her previous role as president of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that seeks to elect women who support abortion rights, launched a $10 million investment to promote that work. So when the senator saw Biden ramble on about abortion in last week’s debate, “it was really painful to hear,” she told me. I asked her if she would support Kamala Harris, a longtime friend, as the front-runner if Biden stepped down. “No one should ever question whether or not I support Kamala Harris for president,” Butler said. “I think I have all the confidence in the world, and I remain confident, so the answer to that question is yes.”

Since the debate, Harris has fiercely defended the president and worked to allay donor concerns about the viability of her campaign. Many of her aides and allies I spoke with in recent days have been frustrated by the kind of awe with which these presentations — news interviews and fundraisers — have been greeted. “We’ve just seen Vice President Harris do an incredible job in crucial moments,” Representative Joyce Beatty, chair emeritus of the Congressional Black Caucus, told me. But for Beatty, after years of interacting with Harris — co-sponsoring bills with her during her Senate years, visiting Beatty’s grandchildren in person at the White House — Harris’s critically acclaimed appearances last week were no different from the performances she’s grown accustomed to. “So maybe, yes,” Beatty said, “we should be paying more attention.”

For the vice president and her team, the perverse irony is that it took Biden’s implosion on stage for many Americans to finally notice her. “She’s been in the spotlight since the campaign launched,” a former Harris adviser, who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity, told me. “She got attention, and will get even more attention, because of what happened with her performance.”

In the end, Biden’s most effective promotion of his vice president may have been entirely unintentional.