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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
78 July 2021
of the United States Senate to pass the American
Rescue Plan Act. With the Senate evenly
balanced, at least until the mid-terms in 2022,
Harris’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate makes her
indispensable in implementing the now-fraught
President’s legislative agenda.
That role will elevate her standing as Vice
President, but it will also bind her inextricably to
Biden’s record as President. Ideologically, this
will be a comfortable position for her to be in:
both she and the President occupy a place on the
American political spectrum just far left enough
to be acceptable to committed Democrats, but
not so far left as to frighten o independent
voters.
As the recognised standard bearer of the
Democratic Party’s “electable” moderates, she
will be opposed by her party’s progressive wing
represented by Sanders, Warren, and AOC.
Elizabeth Warren’s representation of Harris’s
record as a Californian prosecutor eectively
brought her surge in the opinion polls to an
abrupt stop in 2019; and, already, as Vice
President, she has drawn pre-emptive fire from
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, for telling Guatemalan
refugees not to come to the US during her first
foreign trip.
Harris’s future is welded to the success or
failure of the Biden Presidency, as she always
knew it would be. She will be going nowhere.
Director of Communications); Symone Sanders
(Press Secretary); and Vincent Evans (Director of
Public Engagement and Intergovernmental
Aairs).
The Vice Presidency is always defined by the
role each incumbent is able to carve out. In
describing his duties as Vice President to Nixon,
Nelson Rockefeller lamented: “I go to funerals; I
go to earthquakes”. At the opposite extreme is
the prime ministerial role delegated to Dick
Cheney by President George W Bush. Having
hankered for the top job for so long, Biden is
unlikely to cede swathes of executive authority to
his Vice-President so Harris would be well
advised to follow Al Gore’s example of
concentrating on a single distinctive policy area
- the environment in Gore’s case). JFK famously
did not rate his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson.
As yet the Harris Vice Presidency looks
disjointed and she has yet to make a recognisable
impact. Former colleagues in the Senate from
both parties (Lindsey Graham (R) and Bob
Casey(D)) struggle to identify her role in the Biden
administration. The Whitehouse Press Secretary,
Jan Psaki, acknowledged that Harris is not the
consigliere to Biden that he was to Obama,
describing how they typically work as: “more of
a discussion with others who are leading and
running point on these issues”. It doesn’t sound
great.
In Washington, political power is measured by
how much face-time you have with the President.
Like her predecessors, Harris maintains a
ceremonial oce in the Eisenhower Executive
Oce Building and a working oce in the West
Wing. It remains to be seen if Harris will be a
ceremonial or working Vice President.
But she can already claim to have been
instrumental in tying down Biden’s biggest
success in her first one hundred days. On 5
February, and again, on 4 March, the Vice
President was called upon to exercise the power
of one of her only two constitutionally defined
roles by casting a tie-breaking vote as President
V
ice President Kamala Harris is the
presumptive nominee of the
Democratic Party for the 2024
Presidential Election. At 7/4 her odds
are lower even than Joe Biden’s which
are 9/4. Even though 14 former vice presidents
went on to become President, Harris’s path to her
party’s nomination, still less the White House, is
far from certain. Her chances will depend on the
dynamic she establishes with her boss.
As Senator, President Biden delighted in
forging friendships in the clubbable atmosphere
of the US’s highest legislative chamber. However,
he never had an opportunity to work with Harris,
having departed from the Senate before Harris
was first elected to it in 2016.
The Biden/Harris partnership got o to a rocky
start in the 2019 Democratic primary debates
where Harris established herself as Biden’s
leading challenger by repeatedly questioning his
record, and commitment, to opposing racism. Her
assertion during the first that “Vice President
Biden, I do not believe you are a racist” was
followed up in the 31 July debate by the lethally
pointed: “...the vice president has still failed to
acknowledge that it was wrong to take the
position (in opposing federally mandated school
busing to desegregate public schools) that he
took at that time”.
Offering her the Vice Presidency shortly
afterwar probably shows that Biden has forgiven
her but has he forgotten. Even if their closeness
has been exaggerated, the lack of familiarity and
similarly racially-charged televised clashes
during the 2016 primary campaign did not
prevent Biden from developing an eective
working relationship with President Obama, even
if, somewhat miserably, Biden only visited the
White House residence once when the Obamas
were in residence .
Harris has helped to bridge any gaps by
appointing to her team former senior Biden
advisors such as Ashley Etinne (Director of
Communications); Herbie Ziskend (Deputy
Harris and Biden relate
“more of a discussion with
others who are leading
and running point on these
issues”.
The US Vice President will stick
fast to her boss.
By J Vivian Cooke
Kamala is
going nowhere
OPINION
