White House defends Kamala Harris after reports say she’s struggling
Jen Psaki fires back after several media outlets portray a vice-president struggling to make her mark
John Nance Garner, vice-president to Franklin D Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941, famously said the office “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss”. Kamala Harris may now agree.
The White House was moved to defend her on Sunday night, after leading US media outlets portrayed a VP struggling to make her mark.
“For anyone who needs to hear it,” said the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, Harris “is not only a vital partner to [Joe Biden] but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country – from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband.”
Psaki was firing back on multiple fronts.
On Friday, as Harris wrapped up a visit to France, the New York Times said: “Ten months into her vice-presidency, Ms Harris’s track record on delivering on the administration’s global priorities has been mixed.”
Célia Belin, of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, told the paper: “I think she’s been really hidden this whole time and out of the sight of most Europeans. I think she’s been quite under the radar.”
Then, late on Sunday, CNN published a lengthy report headlined: “Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ frustrating start as vice-president.”
The report contained supportive voices, including the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, who said Harris was “off to the fastest and strongest start of any vice-president I have seen”.
CNN said Klain emphasised Harris’s work on Covid vaccine equity and foreign policy, and said: “Anyone who has the honor of working closely with the vice-president knows how her talents and determination have made a big difference.”
Kamala Harris sidelined amid growing tensions with Biden
Vice President Kamala Harris is being increasingly alienated in the White House as her approval ratings plummet — as the first female veep feels she’s not getting the same support President Biden gives to white male politicians, according to a detailed new report.
Despite their public show of unity, Biden and his right-hand woman have a dysfunctional relationship that has reached an “exhausted stalemate,” CNN said based on interviews with nearly three dozen insiders.
At a time when the president would usually be expected to promote his vice president as a future replacement in the White House, Biden has instead been sidelining Harris as a potential liability, the report said.
She is increasingly being pushed aside into inconsequential jobs and left out of key meetings as her poll numbers sink even lower than the president’s and the Democratic base appears to be giving up on her, the report said.
Her alienation is so clear, her defenders told CNN they have even passed around an Onion story headlined, “White House Urges Kamala Harris To Sit At Computer All Day In Case Emails Come Through.”
Harris — the first woman as well as first woman of color as vice president — is also becoming more and more frustrated at the lack of support she gets from the White House during her numerous PR nightmares, the insiders said.
That became abundantly clear when the White House sprang to publicly defend the paternity leave taken by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a potential challenger to Harris for the next Democratic presidential nomination, the insiders told CNN.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” a former Harris aide told the outlet.
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White House goes into damage control mode after reports of dysfunction in Kamala Harris’ office
The White House dove into damage control this week after reports of dysfunction and infighting in Vice President Kamala Harris’ office, with the administration trying to stop a drama-filled narrative from taking hold, according to five people who spoke to CNN about the dynamics within Harris’ office.
Two people close to Harris’ team said some individuals inside the vice president’s office are frustrated with what they see as a dysfunctional operation that has been at times waylaid by internal conflict. Some of that ire is directed squarely at Harris’ chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, those people said. Another source close to the staff said there were “challenges and struggles” and heard complaints about Flournoy from staff, but denied it amounted to dysfunction or that the tensions were directly Flournoy’s fault.
Sabrina Singh, deputy press secretary to the vice president, told CNN in a statement that Harris’ focus remains on her work.
“The Vice President and her office are focused on the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda to build an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, to making sure racial equity is at the core of everything the Administration does, to combatting the existential threat of climate change, and to continue protecting the American people from the Covid-19 pandemic,” Singh said.
And White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday said, “I will say that the vice president is an incredibly important partner to the President of the United States. She has a challenging job, a hard job, and she has a great supportive team of people around her. But other than that, I’m not going to have any more comments on those reports.”
Still, conversations are now underway in the West Wing about how to better support Harris’ team, one source close to the White House said.
That help from the West Wing is a sign that the spiraling narrative could start to affect Harris, who is considered the next in line to lead the Democratic Party — with a potential for a presidential run coming as soon as 2024 if President Joe Biden decides not to seek reelection. Biden has said he does intend to run.
Top White House officials and aides to the vice president went on the record to defend Harris and Flournoy, calling reports of infighting and dysfunction overblown or simply untrue. And Harris’ outside allies and advisers — like influential adviser Minyon Moore and Democratic strategist Bakari Sellers — quickly took to Twitter, looking to drown out the criticism.
On Friday, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, a longtime friend of Flournoy, said in a statement to CNN: “Vice President Harris and her team are off to the fastest and strongest start of any Vice President I have seen. She’s Delivering for the American people on immigration, small business, voting rights, and economic growth. The President’s trust and confidence in her is obvious when you see them in the Oval Office together.”
The trip to El Paso, Texas, last week was without incident and some people close to Harris called reports alleging dysfunction overblown. But others told CNN that the office is rife with frustration and occasional infighting.
“I think everybody is just feeling overwhelmed,” a source close to the White House said of the dynamics in the vice president’s office.
“It’s a tough place, obviously,” the administration official said, not just of the vice president’s office but of all administration jobs, which operate at a high level of stress and pressure. “But for the most part, people are focused on the mission.”
That official contended that Flournoy has been asset to Harris as her chief of staff, and a source close to Flournoy credited her with keeping Harris’ circle tight, saying her role “is to be the gatekeeper, it is to keep the principal on task and it is to be the person that is the last voice before the principal’s make the decision, so in that regard, she is doing the job that she’s supposed to be doing.” Some of the complaints voiced in media reports alleged that Flournoy has limited access to Harris too much.
Biden aides offer praise for Harris after critical CNN report
West Wing aides came to the defense of Vice President Harris following publication of a CNN report that detailed frustrations among the vice president’s team and more broadly among White House officials about her role in the administration.
“For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country — from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted late Sunday.
White House communications director Kate Bedingfield shared Psaki’s post on Monday morning, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain amplified multiple messages on Twitter supportive of Harris.
Kamala Harris
Kamala Devi Harris is an American politician and attorney who is the 49th and current vice president of the United States.
(/ˈkɑːmələ ˈdeɪvi/ (About this soundlisten)
KAH-mə-lə DAY-vee; born October 20, 1964
She is the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well as the first African American and first Asian American vice president.
A member of the Democratic Party, she served as the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017 and as United States senator representing California from 2017 to 2021.
Harris became vice president upon inauguration in January 2021 alongside President Joe Biden, having defeated the incumbent president, Donald Trump, and vice president, Mike Pence, in the 2020 election.