The staff exodus from Kamala Harris never ends:
Vice President Harris is set to lose one of her closest and longest-serving aides in August with the departure of domestic policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu, whose planned exit follows a major shake-up of the office late last year and into the spring. . . . Kosoglu, 38, previously served as chief of staff in Harris’s Senate office and on her unsuccessful presidential campaign. . . . Kosoglu — who has three sons, ages 9, 6 and almost 3 — cited a desire to spend more time with her family. . . . Harris’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, deputy chief of staff Michael Fuchs and national security adviser Nancy McEldowney left in the spring. That followed the departure late last year of several top aides, including chief spokesperson Symone Sanders and communications chief Ashley Etienne. In all, at least 13 staffers have left Harris’s office since last summer.
Frankly, if you’ve watched Harris speak in public over the past year and a half, it is hard to believe she has speechwriters and advisers, or at least ones who do not hate her so much that they are deliberately sabotaging her. Harris as a senator was a demagogic attack dog, but she never seemed quite as hilariously vapid as she has in the vice presidency. I continue to think it was a mistake for Biden to pick Harris over Amy Klobuchar; while Klobuchar has her own hair-raising reputation for abusing her staff, at least she comes across as a professional who knows what she’s doing and talks like a traditional Democrat.
As I have noted previously (see here and here), there are two things suggested by the endless departures, and probably both are true. One is that the drumbeat of anonymously sourced stories is on target: Working for Harris is a nightmare, not just because she rides her staff hard, but also because she does so without the competence, decisiveness, and effectiveness that inspires people in politics to suffer under demanding bosses. The other is that her staff understands that Harris’s political future is grim. It shouldn’t be: She is vice president to the oldest man ever to hold the presidency, who might die or become incapacitated in office and might not run again. Combined with her political base in the nation’s largest state and her “historic” race-and-gender profile, that should make her an obvious heir apparent. Most staffers would kill to join a small team for someone so close to the ultimate prize. But with Biden visibly failing and Harris even more unpopular than her boss, the people closest to her can read the writing on the wall.