When President Joe Biden named Kamala Harris as his running mate, he promised his former campaign rival would be one of the most influential voices in the White House.
But Harris quickly discovered the limits of Biden’s pledge when she waded into a sensitive negotiation over infrastructure spending, according to a forthcoming book by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns of the New York Times.
In a meeting last May, Biden was attempting to persuade Republican lawmakers to back $1 trillion in new spending.
“Harris thought that there was something missing from the conversation,” namely the family and social spending programs that Democrats were eager to sign into law, Martin and Burns wrote in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future. Harris wanted this to be a part of the discussion “and began to make the case for a larger package than the one Republicans seemed to have in mind.”
“Biden dismissed her comment immediately,” the authors reported. So harsh was the response “that even the Republican senators were taken aback.”
KAMALA HARRIS’S CHIEF OF STAFF QUITTING CAPS TUMULTUOUS PERIOD FOR HER OFFICE
While Biden was ordinarily “scrupulously respectful” of Harris, the episode reveals the president’s sensitivity around the deal and a moment he felt could compromise it.
Other meetings played out with less friction.
The book details a meeting at the White House with governors to discuss coronavirus relief soon after Biden and Harris took office.
According to Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, Biden was his usual self — eager to work with the assembled leaders. But Hogan described Harris’s role as “very strange.”
“Harris did not say a word,” Hogan told Martin and Burns, leaving the governor to question whether she was “just being deferential to the president — didn’t want to step on him.”
When Harris’s team did try to claim a portfolio assignment, floating a proposal for the vice president to manage ties with the Nordic countries, “White House aides rejected the idea and privately mocked it,” according to the book.
“More irritating to Biden aides was when they learned the vice president wanted to plan a major speech to outline her view of foreign policy,” the authors wrote. “Biden aides vetoed the idea. Why should a vice president have their own independently articulated view of global affairs?”
The president would later hand Harris a major assignment dealing with Central American migration — an intractable issue that immediately seemed to frustrate her team.
After a bruising trip to Guatemala and Mexico, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, a usually stalwart advocate, “reminded her she was hardly the first vice president to endure tough coverage,” the book recounts.
A senator close to Harris alleged that the vice president’s frustration level was “up in the stratosphere” as she stared down a political trajectory that appeared to be a “slow rolling Greek tragedy.”
Biden and Harris said little about the portfolio the two had in mind for her leading up to Inauguration Day. Still, even before the election, Harris seemed keenly aware of the challenges she might face.
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If the Democrats won, Harris would be the first female, black, and South Asian vice president. But she was “determined to be known for more than breaking identity barriers,” she told Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry in an interview relayed by Martin and Burns.
Once in office and running into roadblocks, Harris began reaching out to Washington insiders outside of her close network, including Rahm Emanuel, now Biden’s ambassador to Japan, and MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough.
