Why Don't Democrat Elites Like Kamala Harris?
For some time now I have been trying to figure out why Democrat elites have such a dislike of the Vice President. The dislike, in some quarters, is almost visceral.
For some time now I have been trying to figure out why Democrat elites have such a dislike of the Vice President. The dislike, in some quarters, is at times almost visceral. James Carville in the War Room podcast alluded, darkly that the chatter inside Democrat party circles is more than worried. Biden, clearly, has doubled down on his running mate. He is not going to ditch Harris, otherwise he would probably lose a significant portion of the African-American vote to Cornel West in the general and thus lose the Presidency altogether. But political and cultural elites, from places as far flung as The Boston Globe and the Times to continue to cavil in public. So, we ask the question: Why don’t Democrat elites like Kamala Harris?
First of all, this is grown up politics. Whether or not Democrat elites like of don’t like Kamala Harris shouldn’t matter. Electoral politics, ultimately, is not about who is going to sit next to who at the Bloomberg table at the White House Correspondents Dinner, after all. It is about gathering the wagons around the leader and winning elections.
And yet, the Vice President’s general likeability is in fact an issue in electoral politics. “49% of registered voters have a negative view of Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to 32% with a positive view,” according to the latest NBC News poll. Less than 500 days to the ‘24 general election, there is no way around this, considering that Biden, himself, is under water. Harris, at present, not adding anything to the ticket. And that makes her something of a large target in DC. Rick Wilson in the Enemies List said the quiet part out loud (as he often does):
“The hostility for Harris in the Democratic elite sect is inexplicable and I have had to stop and ask people a couple of times, recently… what is your issue? What is your real problem … What is the underpinning? What do you think it is? She gets a much harder hit than she deserves here.”
Fer realsies. When Rick Wilson, former Republican strategist, is defending the Vice President against the depredations of Democrat Party insiders, things are not going swimmingly on the campaign trail. Forget the fact that Harris has been exemplary on African diplomacy, omnipresent on African-American college campuses during Commencement season, barnstorming on the abortion issue and the Courts. Still, even Dan Abrams — not particularly relevant, politically, but a media voice with some clout — is sounding the alarm that Harris might be “not likeable.”
And it is not just Democrat elites. Senator Kennedy of Louisiana thinks English is “not even (the Vice President’s) first second or third language.” This is a not an uncommon or even un-racist line of attack. Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney basically called Kamala Harris an affirmative action hire. “He was a white American male (Joe Biden) and they needed the balance on their ticket,” Mulvaney told Sky News Australia, with all the sangfroid of a Proud Boy. This gross oversimplification of the process of picking a running mate might explain why Mulvaney did such a pathetic job during his own time in high politics.
Predictably, the Murdoch media has targeted the Vice President from the beginning. Fox News was on the case, ab initio, referencing the Vice President constantly. Gee, I wonder what that’s about? And Governor Abbott of Texas, because the cruelty is the point, bused migrants to the Vice President’s residence on a frigid Christmas eve, wholly ambivalent at his seasonal proximity to Ebenezer Scrooge.
Jasmine Wright and Edward-Isaac Dovere in CNN delve into why all of this is potentially politically dangerous:
Embedded in many top Democrats’ thinking as Biden appears headed toward a reelection campaign announcement, according to CNN’s conversations with three dozen leading Democrats, is fear that years of Harris negativity could now prove a political problem. Any running mate is a heartbeat away from the presidency, they say, but that’s a different proposition when the heart in question has been beating for more than 80 years.
Multiple Democratic leaders contend that if people don’t start feeling more positive about the next person in the line of succession, they might turn away from the ticket entirely. They’re urging allies to stop the Harris pile-on, if only for Biden’s sake – or for Democrats’ sake, or the party’s future.
Trump, clearly, is going to make “President Harris” a campaign issue. A dogwhistle as subtle as a gale force wind. You already see the trial balloons being flown in the Murdoch media. Painting President Biden with a broad brush as “Sleepy Joe” was just the first coating. Attacking black women, one of Trump’s favorite activities, will almost certainly be his second act.
Harris, further, breaks the mold of recent Vice Presidents. In earlier times, Vice Presidents represented their administrations at the funerals of dead foreign Presidents. That was the old joke. As recently as Dan Quayle, running mates were regarded as not especially important until election time. In fact, Quayle was more politically relevant to his country leading into January 6th than he ever was during the entirety of the Bush, 41 Presidency.
Al Gore, in ‘92, kind of broke the mold for Vice Presidents. Clinton doubled down on regional strength —a risky gamble — to pick an established-Establishmentarian southern Senator as his partner. Both were younger than Bush the Elder and contrasted the generational change of rising Boomers against the receding Greatest Generation. The Cold War was over, the argument went, and Gore was a Clinton partner in full in putting the economy of the sole remaining hyperpower at full strength (“Its the economy, stupid”). Gore spearheaded NAFTA against H. Ross Perot on Larry King Live in 1993 (a move, in retrospect, that helped lead to the anti-Clintonism that elected Trump). And since Gore, Cheney and Biden have also followed this new reality of Vice President as full partnerships …
Until Kamala Harris, that is. On the surface at least there is more internal disfunction than partnership in this White House. “Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff – deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns,” is the stunning first sentence of a CNN piece dated November 18, 2021. “The exasperation runs both ways,” Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jasmine Wright, added.
I suspect this break with the new modern Vice Presidential tradition, this break with Biden’s “assignment” is a large part of the dissatisfaction with Vice President Harris. In a recent piece titled “Five Ways to Elevate Vice President Harris” I wrote:
Whatever happened to making Vice President Harris the administration’s point person on immigration? Earlier this year, efforts in that direction all but appear to have evaporated. But those hopes ended even earlier, around October 2022, just before the midterms. Imagine if for two years continuously the Vice President visited — every couple of weeks — a border city, doing a listening tour with local officials? Or if she had become became an expert on and defender of John McCain’s last pleas for immigration reform? Harris could have become the administration’s point person, delivering the Democrat rapid-response to border populists. But, alas, this was not to be, for whatever reasons.
Duly noted. But Vice President Kamala Harris is not going anywhere, so it is time to put aside the childish intramural quibbling. As we move into 2024, the party should be united. There are many reasons for Democrat elite dissatisfaction with Vice President Harris, some of which, to be sure, involve race. For example: Whenever “word salad” or English-as-a-foreign-language is employed to demean Harris, it is safe to assume that there is some racism involved. Because whatever one might think of the Vice President — a former US Senator from California and an Attorney General — she is quite fluent in the English language.
Vice President Harris should have taken the border portfolio assignment, tough and thankless a job as it was and is. Joe Biden, a former Vice President himself, was not trying to sabotage her by giving her such a complicated, unattractive task. If Kamala Harris succeeds Biden as President, as Biden succeeded Obama, then immigration will be one of the top three issues of her administration. And publicly tossing aside the President’s border portfolio assignment was rash. It could have bolstered her national security credentials, familiarized her with the residents of the border states and provided the President with a powerful surrogate, like Al Gore was to Ross Perot in the service of President Clinton’s administration.
That is, of course, leaving aside fact that Ross Perot was probably historically correct about NAFTA. And Al Gore’s political career is also over after he lost a Presidential race. Of course, it is not inconceivable that the Vice President could be looking at Gore and history and the NAFTA debate and worrying, perhaps, about what that could mean for her future or her legacy.
Just saying.
“It's clear that Elon Musk himself is worried, with the unhinged Twitter owner repeatedly assailing Zuckerberg over the last few days, calling him a ‘cuck’ and challenging him to a ‘literal dick measuring contest.’" (You really cannot make any of this up.)” (Reliable Sources)
“On one end of the spectrum, a few elite publications—notably The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—figured out new business models and flourished. Since the internet removes the cost of physical distribution, it hugely encourages the centralization of information and knowledge, with the result that a handful of sites—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, the pre-Musk Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.—utterly dominate.” (David A. Bell)
The Nowhere Election (John Herrman)
“Pakistan is among the frontline states in the China-U.S. contest for influence in Asia.” (Furquan Khan)
“Senate approval of military promotions has hitherto been routine, but now Tuberville has blocked some 256 officer promotions and counting—including most recently the head of the Marines, which now lacks an official chief for the first time in 164 years.” (The American Prospect)