How do you solve a problem like Kamala Harris? Don’t cry ‘victim’

SARAH BAXTER
COLUMNIST, THE TIMES

The most powerful woman in America is turning into a “victim” before our very eyes.

News that top female political operatives recently held a crisis dinner to shore up Kamala Harris’s faltering career was leaked to the online publication Axios last week. They did the US Vice-President no favours by comparing her bad press to the treatment meted out to Hillary Clinton.

If there is one thing that terrifies Democrats, it is that the future of their party is in the hands of another Hillary — entitled, unpopular and destined to fail if she runs for president in 2024. It is no good blaming the media when Harris herself is responsible.

“Many of us lived through the Clinton campaign and want to help curb some of the gendered dynamics in press coverage,” a source said. “It was like: ‘We’ve seen this before. It’s subtle’.”

****If they had really wanted to help, they wouldn’t have leaked the news. The not-so-subtle truth is that what they were really discussing was: “What is to be done about Kamala?” How do I know? Because panicky conversations like this are taking place among Democrats all over the country.

I’m told the “trouble with Harris” was one of the main dinner party topics at another recent gathering of party elites in Martha’s Vineyard.

The kindest view of the participants at the “crisis dinner” was put to me by a veteran of political campaigns: “All I can say in their defence is that you learn something by f..king up and they are older and wiser now.”

I am less charitable. If they think Harris’s problems are with the press, then they are about to make the same mistakes all over again. The recent leaks about chaos and dysfunction at the heart of Harris’s team came from inside the White House.

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” a source with direct knowledge of Harris’s office told the website Politico a few weeks ago. “It is not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like shit.”

Similar accusations dogged Harris’s short-lived presidential campaign, which collapsed in acrimony. Behind her loss of nerve lay the fear that she might not even win her party’s nomination in California, her home state — let alone the presidency — after flip-flopping on universal healthcare and making an ill-judged attack on Biden for racism.

The diners want to shift the narrative to her record as a prosecutor and as attorney-general in California — but back then she U-turned over opposition to the death penalty and has never known whether to hide or trumpet her record of prosecuting black people. In a strongly Democrat state, she never had to win over Republican voters.

More recently, she has not bothered to disguise her irritation about being asked by Biden to address the “root causes” of the immigration crisis — an issue that is doing more than anything to sink her popularity (and his). Another task, expanding voting rights, is proving equally intractable.

An ally of Harris told The Hill newspaper: “No one is coming out and saying she’s doing an amazing job because the first question would be ‘On what?’ She’s made a bunch of mistakes and she’s made herself a story for good and bad.”

The Atlantic magazine put her problem starkly last week: “The Vice-President needs to win over the voters who approve of Biden, but not of her performance.” The author noted that she tried to dodge all controversial questions (just like Hillary used to). But is she getting the right advice?

Several of the diners mentioned by Axios are members of Hillary and Bill Clinton’s circle, who have morphed into Harris’s “kitchen cabinet”. The dinner was hosted by Kiki McLean, a former adviser to both Clintons. Jennifer Palmieri was Hillary’s director of communications in 2016. Donna Brazile worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.

The purpose of their gathering was to defend Tina Flournoy, Harris’s chief of staff, as much as Harris. Flournoy also worked in Bill’s post-White House team.

My advice to Harris would be to ditch the victim status and start developing her own political philosophy. Her story must reach beyond the narrative that she is the first woman and person of colour to become US vice-president — and impress floating voters. Hillaryland can’t help her. She has to dig herself out.

The Sunday Times