According to Vice President Kamala Harris, all her problems can be summed up in two words: race and gender. In her telling, the only reason for the widespread perception that she’s gone from historic role model to much-ridiculed failure in less than a year is that she’s the only veep who wasn’t a white male.
But deploying that excuse to answer questions about both her insignificance within the administration and the notion that she is a deeply unserious figure won’t cut it.
First of all, Dan Quayle — who was both white and male — was given just as bad a time during his bumpy ride as President George H. W. Bush’s veep 30 years ago (not to mention that Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s vice president, was Native American, meaning she isn’t the first person of color in that post by today’s definition).
But even when she plays the veep’s traditional role of partisan enforcer, Harris embarrasses herself, as with her weekend claim on “Face the Nation” that the country’s “biggest national-security problem” is the effort to defend “our democracy” — by which she meant some state legislatures’ efforts to pass laws ensuring that the guardrails around voter integrity dropped during the pandemic-plagued 2020 election are restored. That she invoked the passage of popular voter-ID laws ahead of liberal talking points about climate change and rather than genuine threats like China speaks volumes about her incompetence and foolishness.
Most of the damage being done to her in the media also comes from Democrats — the party whose leadership, her poor poll numbers notwithstanding, she still might inherit once President Joe Biden is done.
White House sources told The New York Times that Biden instructed Harris to make herself scarce during the failed negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin to pass the multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better boondoggle, lest she worsen an already-bad situation with her toxic personality. And it was former Harris loyalists who jumped ship and dished to The Washington Post that she wasn’t only a mean boss who bullied staffers but also a dumb one who refused to read the position papers prepared for her and then raged at underlings when she appeared unprepared in public.
Nor was it her critics who orchestrated her supposed supervision of the border crisis by having her avoid visits to it or forced her to answer questions about the problem with the same nervous guffaw that escapes her lips whenever she’s caught without a coherent answer to a query.
Harris has done this all by herself — and has, in effect, revived the vice presidency’s 19th-century version, when it was regarded as the most insignificant job in Washington.
In the last few decades, vice presidents like Walter Mondale, the elder George Bush, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and even Joe Biden and Mike Pence were given real responsibilities and, for the most part, were regarded by their White House bosses as reliable advisers and serious policy players. Even Quayle, whom the media consistently treated like an idiot, surrounded himself with what even critics understood was a strong staff that helped him craft stands — like his “Murphy Brown” speech about children being raised without two parents — that put him on the cutting edge of important debates. Harris can’t even do that much.
Unlike most vice presidents, Harris came to her job bereft of policy expertise or experience. She’s a veteran hack who has repeatedly shifted her ideology to match changing political moods, and her sense of entitlement, inauthenticity and energetic willingness to invoke her status as a woman of color are her defining characteristics.
Though still only a heartbeat from being commander-in-chief, Harris in just a few months has returned the office to its status as a position that in the words of John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, isn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit.” But contrary to the disingenuous narrative about racism and misogyny, it is nobody’s fault but her own.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org.
Twitter: @jonathans_tobin