Does Joe Biden trust Kamala Harris?
Does Biden act like he trusts Harris?
In an op-ed in in the New York Times this morning, historian Jeffrey Frank lays out how Harris “hasn’t been given the sort of immersive experiences or sustained, high-profile tasks that would deepen and broaden her expertise in ways Americans could see and appreciate,” and points out how the disconnect is particularly odd, considering Biden’s age and health, and the expectation that he would eventually pass the torch to Harris.
In the nearly two years since Mr. Biden tapped Ms. Harris as his running mate in August 2020, we’ve learned that her bonds with Mr. Biden and key administration officials are relatively thin. It’s no small matter that she’s had only a handful of private lunches this year with Mr. Biden. And after her first lunch with Secretary of State Blinken, in February, 2021, she reportedly expected their lunches to continue, as they had for then-Vice President Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Such interaction had been customary; for instance, in the late 1950s, Vice President Nixon formed an almost filial relationship with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Regular Harris-Blinken lunches, though, didn’t happen (although the two have met, talked by phone, and have what one State Department official calls “regular engagements…regular interaction”).
A deeply reported new book by two Times reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, titled “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” paints an authoritative portrait of the Biden-Harris relationship — or absence of one. It describes how Mr. Biden’s advisers were willing to overlook Ms. Harris’s weaknesses in favor of Mr. Biden’s immediate political interests and saw that her chief value came from helping to win the 2020 election.
Republicans are not making Joe Biden or Tony Blinken ditch the expected regular schedule of lunches with Harris. The media isn’t making them do that. The president’s schedule is the one thing the White House can almost completely control. (One can’t help but wonder if the lack of in-person meetings with Harris reflects the nearly 80-year-old president’s generally light schedule, and the implication that Biden only has a limited number of functional hours in a day.)
Today Harris is meeting with Indiana “state legislators and leaders to discuss the fight to protect reproductive rights.” Frank characterizes events like this as “meant to whip up the Democratic base, a basic job of vice presidents. It’s not something that shows she is capable of assuming the presidency, and gives Americans reasons to view her as a viable leader for a country in dire need of leadership.”
No outside force is making Biden shove off the unpopular issues like the border and Central American migration onto Harris’s plate. No outside force is keeping Harris from doing more public events and media interviews. (The claim that the 50-50 Senate is keeping Harris in Washington doesn’t hold much water, although it may reflect irritation with Chuck Schumer’s scheduling decisions.)
If you’re a Kamala Harris fan who feels like she’s being snubbed, ignored, shunted aside or under-utilized . . . it’s not the GOP or Fox News or other media entities who are making this happen. This is all on Biden, or at least Biden’s senior staff. And as for the argument that Biden saw Harris as a tool to be used to win the 2020 election and then to be virtually discarded . . . if Biden felt that way, what would be different right now?