I woke up to yet another think piece about 'The Frustrations of Kamala Harris ' in The New York Times. It is an interesting piec...
I woke up to yet another think piece about 'The Frustrations of Kamala Harris' in The New York Times.
It is an interesting piece, worth your time, and it lays out a long list of examples of why our Vice President is failing to rise to the occasion and the opportunity of her office.
The report also explains why she is not 'the heir apparent' to the nomination for the Democratic ticket for president if President Biden decides he will not run again in 2024.
What is different about growing concerns and criticisms of Vice President Harris is that some of the harshest judgments of her shortcomings are being written most aggressively in mainstream liberal media outlets like this December 23rd edition of The New York Times.
It is no longer just commonplace for those of us on the right to find all the justifiable reasons why our Vice President is failing and seemingly embarrassing herself, and by default the administration, in the process.
Journalists and commentators on the left understand that putting 2024's eggs in the Vice President Harris basket is a recipe that will deliver Trump 2.0 (or DeSantis 1.0).
If I were Vice President Harris and was currently holding historically low approval ratings (as of December 22, the FiveThirtyEight average of polls showed 47% of the American public disapproving of the job she is doing) and had just come off a string of bad press appearances (including being spoken down to by Comedy Central host Charlamagne tha God) I would be doing some serious, aggressive and intense soul searching over my role in the Biden administration, before it is truly too late.
I would be spending my holiday season doing concentrated media prep with seasoned strategists, close confidantes and family.
Instead of any introspection on the responsibility of the actions of the Vice President and her office, the pushback from her camp is that the main reason she is getting so much criticism and has historically low approval ratings is simply because she is a woman of color.
I doubt she will be doing this from what can be gathered in the New York Times piece.
Instead of any introspection on the responsibility of the actions of the Vice President and her office, the pushback from her camp -- explaining why things have gone so badly for her so fast -- is that the main reason she is getting so much criticism and has historically low approval ratings is simply because she is a woman of color.
In fact, The New York Times reported that she explicitly stated this, 'Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, all of whom were white and male.'
I almost spit out my coffee when I read this line, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
This is a person who experienced a mass exodus of staff leaving her office after only one year serving.
For context, my father's chief of staff when he died, a wonderful man named Joe Donoghue, had worked for my dad for 31 years, starting as an intern at age eighteen.
Donoghue was so esteemed that The Washington Post wrote an article about how he was an institution in the Senate upon his retirement.
Many staffers who worked in my dad's office worked there for decades, many of them married fellow staffers. Many, many of them are considered family by my family and we still maintain close relationships.
It is not a foregone conclusion that staffers rotate in and out of the offices of politicians like a turnstile in a subway station.
In fact, most of the greats, including President Joe Biden, have long-time and loyal staff who stay because they are inspired by the principal, and can't imagine working anywhere else.
My sister-in-law is an advisor to Congressman Kevin McCarthy and many times we have had conversations about different politicians on Capitol Hill with a loyal staff or a huge turnover rate.
Most of the huge turnover rate people are known to have bad reputations and be lame duck politicians.
If I were Vice President Harris and was currently holding historically low approval ratings and had just come off a string of bad press appearances, I would be doing some serious, aggressive and intense soul searching over my role in the Biden administration (Above) Harris on December 17th appeared on Charlamagne Tha God's show on Comedy Central for an interview which became uncomfortably heated
Maybe it is more feasible that instead of sexism and racism, Vice President Harris simply just isn't inspiring loyalty among her staff.
As a traditional, old school, second-wave feminist, of course I want a woman to be president someday.
I don't make decisions in my life or pull the lever in the voting booth simply based on my anatomy, but, of course, I would love to see a woman in the Oval Office someday.
However, I am not willing to compromise my political ideals in a trade-off to elect a woman to higher office.
Any woman who has entered the workplace, on any level, in any field, has experienced some form of sexism or bias.
That's just the way the world works and hopefully things continue to change in many positive ways like they have in the past 17 years since I, myself, joined the workforce.
I have experienced more misogyny in corporate America than I could possibly write in a column, and all we can continue to do as women is keep pushing, moving forward, showing how valuable we are as equals and not victimize ourselves in the meantime.
That is why I find Vice President Harris' comments in the New York Times so ridiculous.
It is not that we all aren't aware of racism and sexism in the country. It is that Vice President Harris may not have been picked for Vice President if she wasn't a woman and a woman of color.
The very thing she is blaming all her problems on, is what got her invited to the party in the first place.
This is no secret. President Biden made it clear and public that he was looking for a woman to be his running mate and the Democratic Party made sure it was a woman of color.
Anyone with even the most cursory view of politics could see that Vice President Harris was not ready and lacked the raw political skills to be Vice President, and now the identity politics chickens are coming home to roost.
'He better pick a Black woman,' declared the chair of the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus, Virgie Rollins, in August 2020.
I, for one, still would like the most qualified person in positions of high elected office.
I did not believe a woman, who dropped out of the presidential race before the Iowa caucus, and got shellacked by then-Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in a debate for being an abject hypocrite on prison reform was that person.
Anyone with even the most cursory view of politics could see that Vice President Harris was not ready and lacked the raw political skills to be Vice President, and now the identity politics chickens are coming home to roost.
In closing, I interviewed former Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann many presidential cycles ago when she was a candidate for president and had recently won the Iowa straw poll.
I remember asking her about this subject, if she was angry that being a woman made running for president so much harder and that she had many more hurdles of sexism to cross.
I remember her saying (to paraphrase), 'Of course I would love an extra hour of sleep instead of getting up early to do my makeup while men simply have to roll out of bed before going on the campaign trail, but I'm in the arena because I am capable and I am up to the job.'
Whatever you think of Congresswoman Bachmann's politics, I have respected her ever since that answer.
We, as women, have to stop complaining and explaining when we reach positions of power.
Vice President Harris was given the job, in part, because she is a woman of color and now she is blaming all her problems on the very same thing that got her invited to the party.
It is a ridiculous catch-22, and one no one is buying it.
We can have conversations about double, even triple-standards as women but Vice President Harris is the second most powerful person on the planet, it might be productive for her to start leading from a place of power and strength instead of victimizing herself.
If she doesn't, maybe the first female president will take the lead in the future, but it won't be President Harris.
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