Vice President Kamala Harris has been the invisible woman in the mainstream media when it comes to reporting on her accomplishments. Her occasional gaffes, however, have received more attention, while on social media she has been barraged with toxic, racist, and sexist comments by right-wing detractors.
But Harris is now increasingly taking on all the naysayers as evidenced by both last Sunday’s interview with Bill Whitaker on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and an in-depth profile by Elaina Plott Calabro in the current issue of The Atlantic. And as both pieces make clear, Harris is not hiding in the wings; she’s taking on a more visible role in the 2024 presidential campaign to shore up support among the Democratic base, especially among young voters.
RELATED STORY: Not waiting for October 2024, Kamala Harris begins youth mobilization tour
One issue that Harris has had to confront is the fact that President Joe Biden is already the oldest sitting president and, if reelected, would be beginning his second term at age 82. Republican front-runner Donald Trump is 77 and appears to be in worse physical and mental health than Biden if Trump’s recent gaffes on the campaign trail reveal anything.
But as The Atlantic profile mentions, Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, and Ron DeSantis have all “explicitly raised the specter of a `President Harris.’” Republicans see Harris as “a more inviting target as a woman of color … whose outspoken advocacy on social issues makes her easier to paint as an ideologue lying in wait,” Calabro wrote.
Trump, in his misogynistic manner, has constantly belittled Harris, as The Atlantic profile noted:
He has referred to Harris as “this monster” and has questioned her citizenship. On one occasion, he made fun of her name—“Kamala, Kamala, Kamala,” repeating it slowly with various pronunciations. Harris called him childish for that, but has largely declined to take the bait. Perhaps not surprisingly for a former prosecutor, she has become more publicly outspoken than anyone else in the White House about the indictments that Trump faces and the need to hold lawbreakers accountable.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, Whitaker asked about concerns expressed by some Democratic donors about what might happen if health issues left Biden unable to run next year. Harris refused to engage in such a hypothetical question, responding: “Joe Biden is very much alive and running for reelection.”
And when pressed further by Whitaker, the vice president said: “I hear from a lot of different people a lot of different things. But let me just tell you, I'm focused on the job. I truly am. Our democracy is on the line, Bill. And I frankly, in my head, do not have time for parlor games, when we have a president who is running for reelection. … Joe Biden.”
Both “60 Minutes” and The Atlantic mentioned that Harris is already quite well prepared to deal with tough foreign policy issues. Both reports mentioned that she has visited 19 countries and met with more than 100 world leaders.
Whitaker began the “60 Minutes” interview by asking Harris about the Israel-Hamas war and its impact on support for Ukraine. Harris ably reiterated how the Biden administration is handling both conflicts. But more importantly Whitaker described how much Harris is involved in the administration’s foreign policy discussions. He reported that Harris has spoken with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and joined Biden on calls with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Whitaker added:
President Joe Biden told us in a statement, “this is as high-stakes and complex a situation as it gets and Kamala is my partner in all of it.” He told us Harris' advice and counsel are invaluable.
He then pointed out that when Biden was vice president, he said that he wanted to be the last person in the room with President Barack Obama when key decisions are made. He asked Harris whether she had the same relationship with Biden. She simply replied: “I do. And I take that responsibility quite seriously.”
She said she spoke with the president “multiple times a day” unless either one of them was traveling. And during a flight on Air Force Two with Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff to a speaking engagement in Las Vegas five days after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Harris was filmed (without any audio) on a secure video call speaking with Biden and their national security team to discuss measures to keep things safe.
In the Atlantic piece, Calabro wrote that Vice President Harris has been quite effective in an arena “that to the public is hardly visible at all,” namely diplomacy. Foreign leaders “have tended to appreciate, as more than one White House official told me, how fact-based and direct she is.”
Calabro mentioned how Biden delegated Harris to represent the administration at the high-visibility Munich Security Conference just days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine where she was tasked with “helping press allies and partners to develop a coordinated response.” She also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to convey to him that a Russian invasion was going to happen and the plans for U.S. military support. She told the Ukrainian leader that he should not waste any time preparing for an invasion, an official on the trip told Calabro. At the 2023 Munich Security Conference, speaking for the Biden administration, Harris declared the U.S. view that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.
Calabro also accompanied Harris last spring on her weeklong tour to three African countries—Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia. She wrote:
China’s deepening presence on the continent provided the geopolitical backdrop. But Harris was bringing with her more than $7 billion in commitments, largely from the private sector, to promote climate-resilience initiatives, money she had raised herself through months of tree-shaking phone calls to companies and individuals. ...
Harris’s allies touted the Africa trip as a historic effort to deepen ties with the fast-growing continent. But it hardly registered back home.
In Cape Coast, Ghana, Harris walked through the Door of No Return, where enslaved Africans took their final steps before being packed onto ships en route to North America. She discarded her prepared speech, Calabro wrote, to speak emotionally about the legacy of the African diaspora. In Zambia, Harris visited Panuka Farm near Lusaka, powered entirely by renewable energy. As a child, Harris had spent time on a farm in Zambia while visiting her maternal grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, who had been sent by India to advise Zambia’s first independent government in the 1960s.
But, as Whitaker pointed out, Harris’ main role lately has been as “the administration’s point person on domestic priorities—traveling the country talking up the Democrats' key issues before the 2024 election … issues she hopes will fire up the base but are bound to inflame the GOP.”
Whitaker spoke to Harris as she was concluding her monthlong “Fight for Our Freedoms” college tour during which she visited about 12 campuses in seven states. A White House statement said: “[T]he Vice President will bring thousands of students together around the fight for reproductive freedom, common sense gun safety laws. climate action, voting rights, LGBTQ+ equality and teaching America’s full history.”
Harris received enthusiastic receptions at her tour stops. But Whitaker pointed out that a recent CBS poll had found that at the beginning of Biden's term, 70% of people under 30 said he was doing a good job, but now it’s less than 50%. Harris responded:
“If you poll how young people feel about the climate, and the warming of our planet it polls as one of their top concerns. When we talk about what we are doing with student loan debt, polls very high. The challenge that we have as an administration is we gotta let people know who brung it to 'em. (laugh) That's our challenge. But it is not that the work we are doing is not very, very popular with a lot of people.”
Harris blamed the disconnect in part on the lack of media coverage the Biden administration is receiving for its accomplishments. And Harris herself is not polling well. The “60 Minutes” report found that just 41% of adults told CBS News they approve of the job she's doing, with about the same approval for Biden.
Both Whitaker and Calabro noted that Harris had been handed a portfolio that includes some of the most intractable domestic policy issues, such as immigration and gun violence. She told “60 Minutes,” in an interview a day before the Lewiston, Maine, mass shooting, that the administration had secured passage of “some of the most significant gun safety laws in 30 years,” but there was still a need for an assault weapons ban. The U.S. once had an assault weapons ban that was passed in 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, but it was allowed to expire by President George W. Bush in 2004.
RELATED STORY: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way’: In Atlanta, Harris discusses toll of gun violence
Whitaker also pointed out growing frustrations among Americans about the situation at the border, with the number of people trying to cross into the U.S. at the southern border over the past year at an all-time high.
"It's no secret that we have a broken immigration system," Harris said. "Short term, we need a safe, orderly and humane border policy. And long term, we need to invest in the root causes of migration. But the bottom line? Congress needs to act. 'Come on. Participate in the solution instead of political gamesmanship.'"
Throughout her career, Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, has achieved a number of firsts—the first female district attorney for San Francisco, the first woman to serve as California’s attorney general, and the first woman of color elected senator from California. And of course, she’s the first woman and woman of color to be elected vice president of the U.S.
On “60 Minutes,” Harris recalled something that her mother, a cancer researcher, once told her: “‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things. Make sure you're not the last.’ And among the responsibilities that I carry and maybe impose on myself, that is one of them.”
But Calabro pointed out that from the start of her vice presidency, Harris, despite her talents, has faced “a series of brutal headlines” and not just from the right-wing media. She listed some of them:
The low point came in June 2021, at the end of a two-day trip to Guatemala, when Harris sat down with the NBC anchor Lester Holt to discuss Biden’s immigration policy, Calabro wrote. She gave a word salad and defensive response to a question about whether she had any plans to visit the border itself. That resulted in negative headlines and jokes in late-night TV talk show monologues. And that early gaffe led to a negative first impression and the positive talents she brought to the office—“her intelligence, her diligence, her integrity”—failing to register with many Americans, Calabro wrote. She added that as a result Harris became “highly risk averse.”
But Calabro wrote that after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, “Harris understood the mood of the country better than most people in Washington” when it came to protecting abortion rights. Calabro wrote:
Amid a crush of headlines predicting a so-called red wave in the upcoming midterm elections—with the economy as the central issue—Harris was steadfast in her view that abortion rights would shape the contest. She spent much of 2022 on the road, hosting conversations on reproductive rights in red and blue states alike. Women, she told me, “won’t necessarily talk loudly” about an issue like abortion. “But they will vote on it.” … In the midterms, the Democrats did far better than expected ... there was no red wave. ...
Harris’s engagement with abortion rights has broken through to voters more than anything else in her vice presidency, according to the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.
The Atlantic profile mentioned another problem that Harris has faced in defining her role as vice president. With the exception of George H.W. Bush, incoming presidents in recent decades have come in as political outsiders—Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump. They generally chose vice presidents who were experienced Washington insiders, a role Biden served for Obama. But since 1980, Biden was the most qualified and experienced candidate to enter the Oval Office. And the roles were reversed with Harris as the relative Washington newcomer.
The Atlantic piece also noted that Harris was reluctant to boast about her achievements and was less gifted as a public speaker than others. Interestingly, Hillary Clinton told The Atlantic that she has met Harris frequently and talked with her numerous times by phone. Calabro wrote:
“I’ve tried to be as helpful and available to her as possible,” Clinton said, adding, “It’s a tough role.” She noted that Harris isn’t a “performance” politician, a comment she intended not as a criticism but as an acknowledgment that Harris’s skills mainly lie elsewhere. (Clinton isn’t a performance politician either.) Harris doesn’t dispute the point: “My career was not measured by giving lovely speeches,” she told me.
And now the Biden campaign is getting Harris off the sidelines to champion the administration’s most significant achievements, such as the infrastructure package. But there remains a disconnect between the Biden administration’s economic achievements and voters’ perceptions.
Whitaker brought up that disconnect on “60 Minutes.” He pointed out that while inflation has been going down, prices for basics, like food and shelter, remain quite high. Harris responded:
“We came into office during the height of a pandemic, record unemployment, and because of our economic policies we now are reducing inflation. We have created over 14 million new jobs. We've created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. Wages are up. And so, we've seen great progress.”
Whitaker then asked that considering the administration’s achievements, why is Trump, who is facing 91 criminal charges, running neck and neck with Biden? He said that given the circumstances the Biden-Harris team should be 30 points ahead. Harris she wouldn’t speak about the poll numbers, but did say with conviction:
“When the American people are able to take a close look at election time on their options, I think the choice is gonna be clear. Bill, we're gonna win. Let me just tell you that. We're gonna win. And I'm not saying it's gonna be easy. But we will win.”
RELATED STORY: VP Harris says Trump shouldn't be an exception for Jan. 6 accountability
Campaign Action