Oct. 10, 2023

All the conditions seemed right for a chance to reset the narrative.

At the Munich Security Conference in February, amid rising international angst about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris led a delegation of Americans, including around 50 lawmakers from both parties. She spent her first day in Germany in seclusion, preparing for the next 48 hours: meetings with European leaders the first day and a keynote speech the next in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. When she emerged, head high and shoulders back, Harris exuded what her staff members have argued is a particular comfort with her role on the international stage. There, they say, she is respected.

“I spent the majority of my career as a prosecutor,” Harris said in her speech, in which she announced that the United States had formally concluded that Russia had committed crimes against humanity. “I know firsthand the importance of gathering facts and holding them up against the law.”

As I scanned the crowd from a balcony in the ballroom, its makeup was a visual reminder of the shattered glass ceilings in Harris’s wake. They were nearly all men; she’s a woman. They were nearly all white; she’s Black and South Asian, a first-generation American from the Bay Area.

In 2017, when Harris arrived in Washington as a senator from California, these contrasts were supposed to make her the Next Face of the Party, the rising star with an inside track to be the next Democratic presidential nominee. But after a disappointing 2020 campaign, and the reputational sting that has lasted ever since, Harris has often been a politician in search of a moment, rather than a leader defining this one.

In Munich, it was another case of what could have been. Harris’s stilted delivery of her speech caused the international audience to miss certain applause lines. Her chief of staff, seated in the front row, tried to start some clapping herself, but the members of the Biden administration in the audience only tepidly joined her efforts. Harris returned to Washington a day earlier than originally scheduled. Later, the reason for the switch became clear: President Biden was secretly traveling to Kyiv. The impact on the vice president was all too familiar. Her three-day trip to Munich, intended to be a showcase, would be largely ignored.

Biden and Harris should — theoretically — be entering the 2024 contest riding high. Democrats staved off a “red wave” in the 2022 midterms and continue to perform well in special elections and on ballot referendums, driven by a backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, poll after poll shows Biden, who will be 81 in November, locked in a close race with his most likely opponent, Donald Trump, and hounded by voter concerns about his advanced age and his ability to complete a second four-year term.

But if Biden’s age is the Democrats’ explicit electoral challenge, Harris, 59 this month, is the unspoken one. Three years after she and Biden were presented as a package deal, a two-for-one special that included a younger, nonwhite candidate to counterbalance Biden’s shortcomings, Democrats have not embraced the president in waiting. In interviews with more than 75 people in the vice president’s orbit, there is little agreement about Harris at all, except an acknowledgment that she has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls, compounded by the realities of racism and sexism. This year, an NBC News poll found that 49 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of Harris, with the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president since the poll began in 1989.

Republican presidential candidates like former Ambassador Nikki Haley have already argued that a vote for Biden next November is a vote for a President Kamala Harris. Trump recently gave an interview to the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he mocked Harris’s speaking style and also said aloud what many people seem to be whispering: that the closer Harris gets to the presidency, the further she has become from convincing the country that she is presidential.

“This is not a president of the United States’ future,” Trump said in a preview of Republican attacks against her in the coming election. “And I think they probably have some kind of a primary and other people will get involved.”

Trump isn’t the only one floating a Harris-replacement scenario. In September, New York Magazine published “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris,” and a Washington Post column argued that “Biden could encourage a more open vice-presidential selection process that could produce a stronger running mate.” In the same week, two Democratic House members — Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party titan and fellow Bay Area native who has known Harris for decades, though the two are not particularly close — evaded saying on CNN whether they thought Harris remained the strongest running mate for Biden in 2024. (Raskin, after receiving backlash, later went on a different network to clarify his support).

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the progressive who ran against Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary, demurred early this year when asked by a local radio station if Biden should keep Harris as his running mate in 2024, saying, “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team.” (Warren later called Harris twice to apologize. Harris initially ignored the calls, CNN reported at the time.)

ask the question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to: Was Kamala Harris really chosen as a running mate because she had the right identity at the right time, the highest-profile diversity hire in America?

In nearly three years in office, Harris has stood dutifully by Biden’s side. But in terms of her own political profile, she has remained a vacuum of negative space, a vessel for supporters and detractors to fill as they choose, not least because she refuses to do so herself.

“My career, for the most part, has not been one of being focused on giving lovely speeches or trying to pass a bill,” Harris said to me in an interview in Chicago after an event for Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group that has endorsed Biden and Harris for re-election. “And so that’s how I approach public policy. I’m probably oriented to think about, What does this actually mean, as opposed to how does this just sound?”

Harris has leaned on this sentiment for years, even as lovely speeches are considered core to the job of president. It reflects a figure who is fundamentally uncomfortable with having to make an affirmative case for herself to the public — and feels she shouldn’t have to. Since 2019, the year I first covered Harris for The Times, I have often asked her variations of the same questions about her vision for the future and where it fits within the Democratic Party. Sometimes I can sense the frustrations of an elected official who clearly is skeptical of the press — a career prosecutor who is more comfortable asking pressing questions than giving straightforward answers.

In Chicago, I directly placed in front of her the question others had only insinuated.

“When someone asks, ‘What does Vice President Kamala Harris bring to the ticket?’ what is that clear answer?” I asked. Her team made clear it would be my final question.

“Were you in this room of 2,000 people?” she asked. I nodded.

“Did you see them cheering and standing?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I say.”

She stood up and walked out of the room.

The unofficial end to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign came four months before she formally dropped out. In late July 2019, at a Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, the California senator faced an unexpected attack from Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who has since left Congress — and the party.

“The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not,” Gabbard said to Harris, arguing that the former prosecutor, who had criticized Biden for creating policies that contributed to mass incarceration, was also part of the problem. ‘‘She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.’’

The left-wing critique that “Kamala is a cop” had been raging on social media for months, complete with a meme that depicted Harris handcuffing a child, a viral interview where she laughed about smoking marijuana and a photo in which Harris donned a police jacket during her time as California’s attorney general. But Harris was rarely forced to answer it directly, and not in such a public setting, from a candidate she considered beneath her. “I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor but actually doing the work,” Harris said onstage, broadly defending her record, citing the re-entry program she started as attorney general. Gabbard came back at her: “People who suffered under your reign as prosecutor — you owe them an apology.”

After the debate, Harris was more dismissive. “This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I’m a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I’d be on the stage and take some hits tonight,” she said on CNN. “When people are at 0 or 1 percent or whatever she might be at.”

the Illinois Statehouse. She was elected to the Senate on the same night in 2016 that Trump beat Hillary Clinton. After just two years in the Senate, she was already a presidential candidate — pitching herself as a bridge between the party’s progressive and moderate wings. In her current role as vice president, Harris is a professional support act, in a position that has both made her more visible and given her less of a distinctive voice.

“I love my job,” Harris told me in Chicago. “There are certain opportunities that come only with a position like being vice president of the United States to uplift the voices of the people in a way that I think matters and makes a difference.”

When Harris’s name was first introduced on the national political stage in 2009, it was accompanied by a set of sky-high expectations. The week before Obama was inaugurated as president, the PBS journalist Gwen Ifill name-checked Harris during an appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman,” adding rocket fuel for Harris’s political ambitions. Ifill said Harris, who was the San Francisco district attorney at the time, was “brilliant” and “tough.” Then she went further: “They call her the ‘female Barack Obama.’”

But that label, and the expectations that came with it, would also have a downside. Harris was not the “female Obama,” nor was she the mixed-race Hillary Clinton, the only other woman who has come this close to the presidency. Without a clear ideological brand, and because she has avoided the issue with which she has firsthand expertise, the historic nature of Harris’s role seems to have boxed her in. A year away from the election and a heartbeat away from the presidency, Harris is an avatar for the idea of representation itself, a litmus test for its political power and its inherent limits.

criminal-justice philosophy.

“I came up with the phrase,” Harris proudly reminded me during our interview in Chicago. “I proposed we should ask, Are we smart on crime? And in asking that question, measure our effectiveness similar to how the private sector does,” she said. I told Harris that I read the book and came away struck by how differently she — and Democrats — talk about criminal justice now, 14 years later. And like Gabbard, I decided to ask her how I should think about the changes in her philosophy. Were they “an evolution based on new evidence? Or is that a kind of tacit admission that the view from 20 years ago might have been incorrect?” I asked.

“Why don’t we break it down to which part you’re talking about, and then I can tell you,” she said, leaning forward.

I mentioned the elimination of cash bail, which Harris embraced during her run for president but never during her time in California.

“I think it depends on what kind of crime you’re talking about, to be honest,” she said.

I tried to ask another way.

“When you think about what changed from then to now, is there anything you look back and say, I wish we did differently?”

“You have to be more specific,” Harris said.

By this point, the vice president would not break eye contact, and suddenly I had more in common with Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh than I ever expected. Just as in those Senate confirmation hearings, Harris’s tone was perfectly pitched, firm but not menacing — confrontational but not abrasive, just enough for you to know she thought these questions were a waste of her time.

I asked her where she would define herself politically on a spectrum of moderate to progressive.

“Why don’t you define each one for me, and then I can tell you where I fit,” she responded. “If you want to say, for example, that believing that working people should receive a fair wage and be treated with dignity and that there is dignity in all work, well then, I don’t know what label do you give that one. If you believe that parents should have affordable child care? I’m not sure what the label is for that.”

“The labels are used as kind of proxies for kind of root-cause conversations,” I said. “Progressives believe that structural inequality is such that it has to be upended. Liberals are thinking more about working within a system.”

“Well, name the issue and then I’ll tell you,” she said.

“OK, inequality,” I proposed.

“Let’s just take the African American experience from slavery on. And we don’t have to even go back that far to to understand where the inequality came from,” she said, listing redlining, the Tulsa riots, the G.I. Bill. “There were issues that were about policy and practice that excluded, purposely, people based on their race.”

“But one of the quotes I most remember from your presidential run was you saying, when asked what you believe in, that you weren’t trying to restructure society. How do you solve those kind of deep systemic inequalities?”

“I think you have to be more specific,” she parried, “because I’m not really into labels.”

“It was a governing decision,” Dunn said to me during an interview. “Who can be president, if necessary? But really, Who can be a good partner for me in terms of governing and bringing this country back from the precipice?”

Two days after the announcement, another Times article quoted Harry Reid, the retired Democratic Senate leader from Nevada, who said approvingly that Biden selected Harris because “he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman.”

“I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate,” Reid said.

For years, Moore, Daughtry, Brazile and Yolanda Caraway, a political strategist, have formed what is colloquially called the Colored Girls, a group of Black female insiders in Democratic politics. Brazile said that when Biden selected Harris, the group “committed themselves to helping him get elected, but we also committed ourselves to her.”

Their investment in Harris speaks to why the diversity-hire framing is too simplistic. There is power in being the first, even if there are limits in being the only. Brown dismissed the idea that the public lobbying efforts for Harris’s selection created the impression of an affirmative-action hire: “When don’t white people think that?” she asked.

During our interview in Chicago, I tried to ask Harris whether quotes like Reid’s bothered her, reducing her selection to her identity rather than her record.

“I don’t think I understand your question,” Harris said.

“I’m saying, does it matter — that kind of narrative around Biden needing to choose a Black woman as running mate still exists and that has hovered over your selection?”

“He chose a Black woman. That woman is me,” Harris said. “So I don’t know that anything lingers about what he should choose. He has chosen.”

private conversations, however, some Democrats close to Biden say that they encouraged her to stay visible and that it was Harris’s decision alone to step back, over the advice of her chief of staff and Biden’s senior advisers.

Her public absence would not go unnoticed. In November of that year, The Los Angeles Times ran a column declaring Harris “the incredible disappearing vice president.” In January 2022, on the anniversary of her ascent to the office, the BBC ran an article that painted a dire picture of a flailing politician with the headline: “Kamala Harris one year: Where did it go wrong for her?”

In that first year, she also had the opportunity to select several issues to fill out her policy portfolio, a chance for a vice president to own a signature policy lane. According to several people familiar with the discussions, though, Harris had no interest in taking on criminal-justice reform and policing, her area of career expertise.

Instead, Harris insisted that she would take on voting rights after consulting with Black leaders in the party, including the team of Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who had previously made no secret of her desire to be Biden’s vice president, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The issue bears a civil rights legacy and is embraced by all sides of the party. One Biden adviser, however, said they made clear to Harris at the time that there was little chance that meaningful legislation could pass on the issue given the deadlocked Senate.

Within a year, the prediction would come true. After Biden made an 11th-hour trip to Atlanta to give a speech exhorting the Senate to pass the administration’s expansive bills on voting rights and election reform — a speech some activists and even Abrams chose not to attend — it would be clear that the legislation would not go forward.

Harris also received an assignment she didn’t want, according to White House officials familiar with the discussions. The president charged her with addressing the root causes of migration in Central America — coordinating public and private funds that could support people in their home countries before they tried to flee for the United States. Some of that nuance was lost in June 2021, however, during the same international trip when she sat for the interview with Holt.

In Guatemala, Harris warned migrants “do not come” to America, repeating the phrase for emphasis at a news conference alongside President Alejandro Giammattei. While the message wasn’t unique — other administration officials had communicated a similar stance — the messenger was, and it earned Harris the ire of some pro-immigration groups and progressive lawmakers.

“This is disappointing to see,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response on Twitter. “The US spent decades contributing to regime change and destabilization in Latin America. We can’t help set someone’s house on fire and then blame them for fleeing.”

Republicans also seized on the controversy, depicting Harris as the Biden administration’s unofficial “border czar,” overseeing a constant stream of migrants bringing fentanyl to the United States. Representative Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor closely aligned with Trump, has twice introduced legislation that would remove Harris from a role she doesn’t have.

This month, the Biden administration authorized the construction of up to 20 miles of wall along the Southern border, highlighting its failure to curtail migrant crossings into the United States. The issue is sure to be a centerpiece of the 2024 election — particularly as Republicans say Democrats can’t address a crisis they refuse to acknowledge.

In our interview, Harris made the case that the money that has been invested would be an important stopgap in the absence of congressional action. “We have raised over $4.2 billion dealing with issues like what we can do to support agriculture, which is a main facet of the economy of a lot of these countries,” Harris said.

“I get the roadblocks in Congress, and I get that your root-cause work is long-term,” I responded. “I’m saying, if you’re a voter in the short term who is saying, ‘Is our border secure?’ And what is this administration’s answer to that? What’s that answer?”

“The answer is that we are absolutely making it secure and putting resources into it to do that work,” Harris said.

they had turned a narrative corner.

Now, even after open speculation about dropping Harris from the ticket, Palmieri is adamant that Harris is “the most valuable running mate for a ticket in recent history.’’

“Nothing that has happened to her has surprised me,” Palmieri told me. “I knew, like, this is going to be a very hard road, no matter how talented you are. It is not a situation that’s set up to fail. But it is not a situation where you will be set up to succeed.”

This month, in a swearing-in ceremony conducted by Harris, Laphonza Butler became only the third Black woman ever to serve in the United States Senate, following in the footsteps of her ally and mentor. Newsom’s decision to appoint the Emily’s List leader surprised many Democrats, but it shouldn’t have — in addition to her activism, Butler was a former partner in Smith and Clegg’s consulting group, which has close ties to the governor and the vice president.

Newsom, like Biden, was also under significant pressure to appoint a Black woman in the role after he made a public pledge to do so in 2021, amid speculation about Feinstein’s possible retirement. Such pledges have become more common in liberal politics, a way to signal solidarity with an increasingly diverse electorate, and a go-to move for white male Democrats in particular.

have made her a Washington outsider. “Her only problem right now is what she looked like when she was born,” he said to me. “That’s what these people are holding against her.”

Rashad Robinson, the president of the racial-justice advocacy group Color of Change, who traveled with Harris this year to Africa — a trip that included stops in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia and face time with prominent Black celebrities and activists, including the director Spike Lee and actors like Sheryl Lee Ralph and Idris Elba — said he feels that American media outlets refuse to cover her success, including the images from that trip. “When we arrived to Black Star Square in Ghana, there were upwards of 10,000 people who were excited to see her,” Robinson said. “And I thought, What’s the other vice president that could get that type of crowd outside the United States — or even inside the United States?”

But not everyone agrees with these supporters, including a number of Democrats — when granted anonymity to speak freely. A top Democratic consultant said that “she has a little Ron DeSantis in her,” in terms of the disconnect between political talent and expectations. One major donor said there’s an agreement among the party’s heavy hitters that having Harris as vice president to Biden “is not ideal, but there’s a hope she can rise to the occasion.” Sometimes the arguments against her feel more petty: A member of Harris’s staff remarked on the amount of down time the vice president schedules on trips, which includes an inordinate amount of time dedicated to hair care.

Harris is largely absent from the post-Biden jockeying that is already taking place among prospective candidates and donors. One major donor told me: “I’ve gotten invites from people like Whitmer and Booker. And even people like Buttigieg and Ro Khanna are cultivating meetings and donors. It’s radio silence from Kamala and Kamala World. They’re not keeping alive the network of people that supported her.”

This summer and fall, Harris has sought to answer critics with a travel-heavy schedule that highlights her connection to key blocs in the Democratic coalition. She inaugurated her Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour at Hampton University, the historically Black college in coastal Virginia; the tour also includes lesser-known schools with large Latino student populations, like Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania.

It was easy to see Harris as an underappreciated electoral asset for Biden at a gathering of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Orlando this August. In a crowd numbering thousands of older, predominantly Southern Black churchgoers, there was palpable pride in Harris, evident from the hundreds who lined up for pictures or the group of senior bishops who privately prayed for her.

In a speech, Harris took direct aim at new statewide education standards restricting how race and Black history could be taught. “Right here in Florida,” Harris said, her voice rising in outrage, “they plan to teach students that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”

The members of the audience rose to their feet in anticipation of what they sensed was coming next: a smackdown of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had sent a public letter that week challenging Harris to a debate. “Well, I’m here in Florida,” she said defiantly, “and I will tell you, there is no round table, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”

The roar of approval served as an audible reminder — to DeSantis, the Republican Party, the Beltway press corps and even some Democrats too: Writing off Kamala Harris is a mistake, as overly simplistic and premature as the “female Barack Obama” label that once followed her.

“When you are the first, serving at the national level, it is a significant responsibility and weight on your shoulder,” the Massachusetts attorney general, Andrea Campbell, said at the annual N.A.A.C.P. convention this summer. She made it a point to stress that Harris, with whom she was in conversation at the event, was “our” vice president — implying Black people specifically. Campbell continued: “We were remarking, you know, ‘They’re coming for us.’ And what that means is that you have to sustain yourself. Of course, be protected, but also do the work.”

She then asked the audience to rise, a manufactured standing ovation with a clear message: Harris needs your support.

“As we go into this round of applause for our vice president, really thinking about what elected officials, particularly people of color, are going through in this moment in time,” Campbell said, “I ask everyone to just stand up — I’m going to do the same — and give our vice president a round of applause for the work she does every single day.”

The crowd rose to its feet — but it felt more like an act of politeness. Unlike in Orlando, where the audience was at rapt attention, the version of Harris in Boston more resembled the version I saw in Munich. It served as a reminder that Black communities are not a monolith and that their assumed kinship to Harris — or to the Democratic Party — cannot be taken for granted.

During our interview in Chicago, which was supposed to be the first of two, I asked Harris about the party’s relationship with Black Americans and the policy priorities that matter most to them. I asked whether the administration’s ineffectiveness on voting rights was indicative of a broader pattern on things considered to be “Black issues” — lots of promises during the election season and lots of excuses during the time in office.

“Has there been enough substance that the administration has put on its inequality agenda?” I asked, pointing out that Black turnout had softened for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. “Has that promise made to Black communities been kept?”

Harris launched into a recitation of talking points: the amount of money the administration has invested in historically Black colleges and universities; how the capped price on insulin would help Black seniors; the new federal restrictions on no-knock entries and chokeholds by the police; Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge’s work on affordable housing.

Her answer spoke to a fundamental tension facing Democrats ahead of next year’s election: No matter the administration’s policy accomplishments, which are real but often incremental rather than sweeping, they are not yet galvanizing the voters they most need.

By this point in the interview, the window that was slightly open when Harris sat down felt as though it had been firmly shut. Over the weeks that followed, the vice president’s aides would repeatedly postpone the second interview that had been agreed to for this article. But here, while I still had the chance, I wanted to try once more to get at this important question: Maybe people are yearning for something policy can’t provide — not just a fancy speech, but a more forcefully declared vision.

“What’s the disconnect then, between all that and it translating to more Black votes?” I asked, pressing further.

Harris refused to entertain the scenario. Instead, she had a question for me.

“Why don’t you talk to me after 2024?”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5424221&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310443",#46913166)

that makes you a stupid fuck

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5424221&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310443",#46915980)

*Michael Bloomberg has entered the chat*

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5424221&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310443",#46913595)

In the summer of 2020 many areas of the country were in the midst of hysteria about George Floyd. Idealogical purges, grandstanding, shaming, metaphorical burnings at the stake made the headlines. When Biden had to select his VP he did so realizing that in the moment, the most important thing was to select a black woman.

Now it’s time to pay the bill. You don’t select people based on identities because you think everyone who looks the same thinks the same. You pick people based on how capable they are and how they’re perceived.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5424221&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310443",#46913509)

Harris told me that she has to let the Secret Service know a day in advance if she is going to be wearing a dress instead of a pantsuit, because agents have to pick her up in a different kind of car.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5424221&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310443",#46914618)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5424221&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310443",#46916073)