It appears
that no one was more taken aback than former
Vice President Kamala Harris, whose
tight political circle had been enraptured with
confidence on election night that they had
probably prevailed with a victory during such a
frenzied and breakneck campaign. Indeed, such
confidence was so evident that celebratory fans
were ready to prepare cupcakes reading “Madam
President,” served with champagne on ice. “It
says a lot about how traumatized we both were by
what happened that night that [my husband] Doug
and I never discussed it with each other until I
sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in
her new memoir, 107 Days,
which
functions as a reflective and candid postmortem.
The former Vice President says
that the Biden team were cautious of her from
the outset, due partly to the dynamic between
the president and the vice president coupled
with the fact that she challenged Biden about
his opposition to federally mandated school
bussing during a 2019 democratic candidate
debate.
The former VP
writes, according to the first book excerpt published
by The Atlantic, that although
the White House has a huge communications team,
getting “anything positive said about my work or
any defense against untrue attacks was almost
impossible.” Harris claims Biden’s inner circle
even seemed to encourage negative stories about
her: “Worse, I often learned that the
president’s staff was adding fuel to negative
narratives that sprang up around me. One
narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I
had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff
turnover during my first year. When the stories
were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner
circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as
if they decided I should be knocked down a
little bit more.” Harris further states polls
indicating that she was becoming more popular
among voters made the situation worse with the
Biden team: an example of such hostility was
when after her
second year as vice president, The
New York Times derided
Harris in
a lacerating article that said
“dozens of Democrats in the White House, on
Capitol Hill, and around the nation” believed
that Harris “had not risen to the challenge of
proving herself as a future leader of the party,
much less the country.”
John Morgan, a
Democratic fundraiser, told The
Times, “I can’t
think of one thing she’s done except stay out of
the way and stand beside [Biden] at certain
ceremonies.” This comment in and of itself seems to be
confounding given that historically speaking
this has been the official role of the office of
the vice presidency. You are the standby and
fill in for the commander-in-chief. Yet, it
appeared that the duties abruptly changed when
the race and gender of the vice president
differed from those of previous incumbents.
One notable quote, “Their
thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s
dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well,
he did well. That given the concerns about his
age, my visible success as his vice president
was vital. It would serve as a testament to his
judgment in choosing me and reassure that if
something happened, the country was in good
hands. My success was important for him.”
Historical
Rifts
Such
acrimony is not all that surprising. Under the
original Constitution, the vice president was
not the running mate of the president but the
second-place finisher in the Electoral College,
making competition widely expected. Such rifts
originated during the early republic with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. During
the latter part of the nineteenth century,
President Andrew Jackson and
his vice president, John C. Calhoun, frequently
clashed.
In the first
trimester of the twentieth century, Franklin
D. Roosevelt overcame
John Nance Garner for
the Democratic nomination in 1932 and then made
him his running mate to bring the party
together. But the new conservative vice
president from Texas criticized parts of the
liberal New Deal and later opposed the
president’s plan to pack the Supreme Court.
Garner bristled at the idea that Roosevelt would
run for an unprecedented third term in 1940 and
sought the Democratic nomination for himself.
After Roosevelt pushed Garner aside to secure
renomination, he replaced him on the ticket with
Henry
Wallace - and
then ousted Wallace four years later for Harry
S. Truman.
Likewise, John
F. Kennedy offered
the vice presidency to Lyndon
B. Johnson after
surpassing him for the Democratic nomination in
1960 in a bid to appeal to Southern Democrats.
Johnson, however, was never a part of the inner
circle of the Kennedy White House and was deeply
resentful. After Kennedy was assassinated and
Johnson became president, his acrimonious
relationship with Robert F. Kennedy resulted in
a significant fracture after the mid-1960s.
Though deeply embittered by his treatment as
vice president, Johnson, interestingly, bestowed
similar treatment upon his vice president Hubert
Humphrey.
Gerald
R. Ford, who served
as vice president and resented it, considering
it the most terrible period of his life,
appointed Nelson
Rockefeller to
replace him after becoming president following
the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. But
Rockefeller was deemed too liberal for most
Republicans, and Ford took him off the ticket in
1976 in pursuit of conservative support to
secure the party nomination, only to lose in the
general election.
Ronald
Reagan and George
Bush Sr. had a
notably distant relationship.
Bill Clinton and Al Gore were
initially seen as a politically ideal pair: both
bright young Ivy League-educated Southern baby
boomer Democrats representing a transformative
generation. But by the end, the relationship had
disintegrated, primarily due to a falling-out
over the Monica
Lewinsky sex
scandal that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment.
As he ran to succeed Mr. Clinton in 2000, Mr.
Gore picked a critic of the president as his
running mate and declined to dispatch Mr.
Clinton to campaign in key states where he might
have made a difference.
After the
Supreme Court ended a recount in Florida,
finalizing Mr. Gore’s defeat, the vice president
confronted the president in the Oval Office in a
heated argument marked by mutual recriminations.
Mr. Gore blamed his loss on Mr. Clinton’s
scandal. Both men begin to ideologically diverge
during the second term, with the two disagreeing
on issues like Iran, North Korea, climate
change, and same-sex marriage.
George
W. Bush relied
immensely at first on his seasoned vice
president, Dick
Cheney, who was
viewed as arguably the most powerful vice
president in American history. In fact, in some
quarters, he was cynically referred to as
“President/Co-president” Cheney.
Barack
Obama and Joe
Biden had
diametrically different personalities. In fact,
their dispositions were probably more diverse
than any previous president – vice president
duo. Nonetheless, both men formed a good
relationship. The relationship, however, became
frayed after Obama’s decision to support Hillary
Clinton, as opposed to Biden, as his heir
apparent in 2016. Mr. Biden later went on to run
and win in November 2020.
No
partnership between a president and vice
president self-destructed quite as dramatically
as the one between Donald
J. Trump and Mike
Pence. Though the
stoic Mr. Pence was painstakingly deferential to
the combative Mr. Trump for nearly the entire
tenure of their presidency, the vice president
eventually broke ranks with the president over
his efforts to reverse the results of the 2020
election.
Personal
Dilemmas
Harris is more
than candid in discussing what she undeniably
perceived as the intersection of race, gender
and religion with the transportation secretary’s
sexual preference working against her and her
campaign. Harris explicitly states that Pete
Buttigieg was her “first
choice” as running mate and he “would have been
an ideal partner - if I were a straight white
man.” She continues: “I had nagging concerns
that, of America: to accept a woman, a Black
woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.”
Then, on adding a gay man to the ticket: “It was
too big a risk.” A sentiment she believes
Buttigieg understood with “mutual sadness.” The
former Biden transportation secretary responded
by stating: “My experience in politics has
been that the way that you earn trust with
voters is based mostly on what they think
you’re going to do for their lives, not on
categories. I wouldn’t have run for president
[in 2020] if I didn’t believe that.” Perhaps he
does; that being said, it is highly probable
that Buttigieg is either alarmingly naive or
intellectually dishonest.
The truth is that a sizable
percentage of voters - in particular, older
voters, including many Democratic supporters
primarily over 60 - including Black voters who
harbor conservative positions on homosexuality
and abortion, Latino voters with similar views,
White “Christian” voters, conservative
blue-collar Democrats, and so on, know that
hostility and resentment would have been even
more intense among similarly aged Republicans.
Second, though not as prevalent as in previous
generations, there is a sizable percentage of
homophobic young people, especially men. We
reside in a politically correct society. Many,
if not most, people are more inclined to provide
what they perceive to be socially acceptable
answers in public. The same people who would
declare they have no problem with interracial or
gay marriage in public - and would, in fact,
likely stand up and clap if a celebrity or
certain individual told them that they were gay
or married to a person of another ethnicity -
would, behind closed doors, be making all sorts
of derogatory remarks about such situations. We
live in a society that is rife with hate, deception, and hypocrisy.
Harris
is unsparing in her critiques of Pennsylvania
governor Josh Shapiro and her eventual
selection, Minnesota governor Tim Walz,
declaring the former as too focused on his own
future as opposed to being sufficiently loyal to
her and the latter as “fumbling, too
conciliatory and lacking a killer political
instinct.” Josh
Shapiro, in
response, commented that “Kamala Harris will
‘have to answer’ for why she did not publicly
alert people to Joe Biden’s declining ability to
serve during his term in the White House.”
The former vice
president remarks, “When Fox News attacked me on
everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice,
to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a
‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back
with my actual resume: two terms elected D.A.,
top cop in the second-largest department of
justice in the United States, [and a] senator
representing one in eight Americans.” In
Harris’s telling, her husband, former second
gentleman Doug Emhoff, made his displeasure at
what he perceived to be the shabby treatment of
his wife well known. As Emhoff saw it, Joe
Biden’s staff
sidelined his wife and handed her “impossible,
shit jobs.” One passage recounts a particularly
harrowing episode on July 4, 2024, as calls for
Biden to withdraw from the election were
increasingly mounting. First Lady Jill Biden
pulled Emhoff aside and demanded: “Are you
supporting us?” The question provoked a furious
outburst from Emhoff later in private. “They
hide you away for four years,” he vented. “And
still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?”
To her
credit, Harris concedes to making mistakes of
her own, particularly a damaging appearance
on The View talk
show. When one of the hosts asked what she would
have done differently than Biden during the
previous four years, Harris blanked on the
talking points she had prepared and simply said,
“There is not a thing that comes to mind. I had
no idea I’d just pulled the pin on a hand
grenade.” Around the studio, “my staff were
besides themselves” about how she had just given
a “gift to the Trump campaign.”
Summary
The most
revelatory and disturbing parts of the book
excerpt are Harris’s recollections of being part
of an administration that too often viewed her
as a burden, as opposed to a valuable addition.
Like many things in life, being the first is often
challenging and burdensome. Kamala Harris
was the first woman, Black person, and Asian
American to be selected vice president. Weeks
after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance
against Trump, Harris became the first woman of
color to be a major American political party’s
presumptive nominee for president. If we are
being honest, much of the derision, dismissive,
aloofness, and other less than cordial behavior
directed toward the former vice president was
indeed rooted in the dual demons of racism and
sexism, the devious duo that the late, esteemed
legal scholar Pauli Murray referred to as Jim
and Jane Crow.
Many people, including White
liberals, resented the fact that a woman of
color had obtained the position of vice
president, let alone garnered the nomination of
her party for president. As many of them saw it,
a White woman should have been first choice for
such an opportunity.
Vice president
is a paradoxical position. It is one heartbeat
from the presidency (a scandal, death,
assassination, and so on results in their
elevation) yet a seeming considerable distance
from much of the vital action. They linger in
obscure shadows, feelings as if they are a voice
in the wilderness. In fact, up until the early
1960s, the phone number of the vice president
was printed in the phone book. Throughout his
presidency, Biden often said that choosing
Harris as his running mate was “the best
decision I made in
my whole career.” That sounded like Biden’s
endorsement of Harris as the natural successor
to the oldest president in American history.
Whether she decides to make another run for
public office remains to be seen. Nonetheless,
future plans aside, Kamala Harris has served as:
· District attorney of San
Francisco
· Attorney general of California
· Senator from California
· Vice president of the United
States
Very few of us will ever be able
to lay
claim to such a stunning CV. She
has
accomplished more than most
people will
ever do.
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