If this is what constitutes ‘success’ for the vice president, one shudders to contemplate what failure would look like.
If this is what constitutes ‘success’ for the vice president, one shudders to contemplate what failure would look like.
K amala Harris was not happy about being publicly associated with the Mexican border, and after her disastrous interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and her flailing trip to Mexico and Guatemala, we can see why she would be generally leery of public-facing responsibilities. The entire excursion was a fiasco in just about every possible way, even down to her plane having to turn around and return to Andrews Air Force Base half an hour into its flight. Harris may be comfortable as a partisan attack dog and a historic symbol, but everyone involved will likely think twice before giving her another real job.
Harris has never handled criticism or probing questions well, even by the prickly standards of politicians. She tends to react with a combination of scorn and bizarrely out-of-place laughter when asked questions that she does not want to answer. It has never been clear if the laughter is an involuntary, nervous defense mechanism, a gesture of contempt, or some sort of deliberate strategy to soften the blow of a non-answer, but it invariably backfires.
The Holt interview showcased Harris at her worst. Asked by Holt when she was going to actually visit the border, which her foreign trip studiously avoided, she first tried to shift responsibility away from herself personally, then dissolved into non sequiturs and that laughter:
I — at some point — you know — we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole — this whole — this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border. . . .
I — and I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t — I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.
This was roundly mocked, as even border-district Democrats in Congress have been pressing her to visit, but she did it again in Mexico City, laughing and rolling her eyes when asked to commit to such a visit:
Kamala Harris rolls her eyes when asked about visiting the border pic.twitter.com/VB5ztNs0VN
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 9, 2021
She also tried snippily brushing off the questions as something she shouldn’t have to talk about:
Listen, I’ve been to the border before. I will go again. But when I’m in Guatemala dealing with root causes, I think we should have a conversation about what’s going on in Guatemala.
Then, she accused the press of not caring enough about the issue:
I think it is short-sighted for any of us who are in the business of problem solving to suggest that we are only going to respond to the reaction as opposed to addressing the cause. And that’s just a fact if we want to — we all know that in our lives, in our personal lives, if you want to deal with the effects of a problem, then you have to go to the core of what is causing it.
Even beyond the issue of actually visiting the border, Harris’s trip took her into politically uncomfortable territory. Tuesday, in Guatemala, she tried to talk tough to potential migrants:
I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States–Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come. . . . The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border. . . . We, as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal migration. . . . And I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.
It was not so long ago that this sort of talk would have been branded as xenophobia and nativism, and would have had Jim Acosta near tears in the White House briefing room. In 2016, Harris was singing a very different tune:
This issue of how we are treating our immigrants, and in particular our undocumented immigrants, is one of the most critical issues facing our country. We are not going to be achieving who we say we are as a country if we attack our community members, our neighbors, our friends and our colleagues.
She was even blunter in 2017:
An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) April 21, 2017
To say nothing of how she talked as a presidential candidate:
This should not be who we are. These are not our values. And this will not happen when I am president.https://t.co/hJvh3U5IMy
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) May 17, 2019
Mass deportations are cruel and violate our values. As this president rips more families apart, let's remember that history has already shown us what happens when governments begin rounding people up by ethnic group. This would be a shameful stain on our country. https://t.co/habT23JayV
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 18, 2019
Rounding up immigrants, and potentially entire families, is despicable and an assault on our nation's values. Know your rights. https://t.co/cc4lp5RVw1 https://t.co/gHv371Btmg
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 11, 2019
Harris’s tough talk is not just at odds with her and her party’s rhetoric; it is also completely disconnected from what the administration is actually doing, which is to de-emphasize border enforcement and instead try to address the “root causes” of migration from Central America. Conservatives were not the only ones feeling a sense of whiplash at Harris’s attempted change in tune; even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted her:
This is disappointing to see.
First, seeking asylum at any US border is a 100% legal method of arrival.
Second, 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. https://t.co/vADyh5H0bw
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 7, 2021
It’s also not just domestic critics who are unconvinced by Harris. In April, Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei told MSNBC:
I believe that in the first few weeks of the Biden administration, messages were confusing. They were compassionate messages that were understood by people in our country, especially the coyotes, to tell families, “We’ll take the children.”
He did not back off that view ahead of Harris’s visit:
“We are not on the same side of the coin. It is obvious,” he added, explaining later that “we are in agreement on the ‘what’” of the immigration crisis, “which is something. We are not in agreement on the ‘how.’” During a bilingual interview with CBS News conducted Friday at the nation’s presidential house, he was asked if Guatemalans are leaving his country now that Mr. Biden is president and Donald Trump is out of office. He said the change in government led to a change in message: “The message changed to, ‘We are going to reunite families and we are going to reunite children.’”
As Cleve Wootson of the Washington Post observed, “Giammattei reiterated some of those claims during a news conference with Harris, who has spent both days of her trip contending with similar questions about policies at the southern border, despite her repeated efforts to steer the conversation toward the difficult conditions in countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.”
Harris was also compelled to concede that the trip was not going to produce visible results at the border any time soon: “The issue of root causes is not going to be solved in one trip that took two days.” She said repeatedly during these appearances that she was working on long-term solutions, which is good news for her — nobody can measure whether she has met any goals any time in the near future — but not so good for the Biden administration’s urgent political objective of demonstrating that it has some sort of plan to deal with an immediate crisis that is largely of its own creation.
That has not gone unnoticed within the administration. Even CNN, in a story bylined by five reporters with reporting by three more — undoubtedly reflecting how many knowledgeable sources were eager to talk — ended up airing leaked criticism of Harris as well as more buck-passing from Harris’s team:
Vice President Kamala Harris endured a rocky first foreign trip since taking office, with sources telling CNN her two-day swing through Mexico and Guatemala left some administration officials quietly perplexed about what they perceive as her bumpy answers to questions about whether she will go to the US-Mexico border. Several sources say there was a real hope inside the White House that Harris’ first trip abroad would be a success, and worry that what looked like ill-prepared answers to that inevitable question would overshadow it. . . .
The vice president’s team, for their part, were frustrated by what they perceive to be questioning driven by Republican attacks falsely painting her as the administration’s border czar, rather than focused on the root causes of migration.
Ouch. But never fear, there is one person who will defend Kamala Harris: the vice president herself. “Do I declare this trip a success?” she asked near the end of the debacle. “Yes, I do.”
As King Pyrrhus once said, “Another such victory, and we are undone!”