In a profile of Vice President Kamala Harris for The Atlantic’s November issue, staff writer Elaina Plott Calabro writes that few people seem to think Harris is ready to be president – but why.
For the profile, Elaina traveled extensively with Harris to U.S. cities and on a trip to Africa, as well as holding a rare sitdown interview with Harris at the VP’s residence in D.C. She conducted many additional interviews with longtime associates of Harris’s, as well as Hillary Clinton, Ron Klain, Jeff Zients, and David Axelrod. As Elaina writes, those closest to Harris have tried to make sense of why Harris’s positive qualities––her intelligence, her diligence, her integrity––have simply failed to register with so many American voters. A June 2023 NBC News poll found the percentage of those who disapprove of Harris’s performance to be higher than any other vice president in the history of the poll.
In her article, Elaina assesses prevailing theories behind Harris’s poor approval ratings. Ron Klain points to Harris becoming risk averse following a series of early missteps, telling Elaina: “She’s always nervous that if she does something that doesn’t go well, she’s setting us back.” David Axelrod says of her performance during her brief presidential run: “It looked as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” He adds, “People can read that. When you’re playing at that level, people can read that.”
On Harris’s inability to connect with audiences, Elaina writes: “Harris may understand intellectually the imperative to seem ‘relatable’ to a broad audience…but she hasn’t made a habit of doing so.” In one telling example, aides highlighted a formative and compelling experience from Harris’s adolescence that would go on to define her career path to the district attorney’s office. Elaina writes: “I understood why her aides wanted me to hear that story, which is not widely known. I wondered why–when I’d asked about her decision to become a prosecutor–Harris hadn’t mentioned it herself. When we spoke at the residence, she did acknowledge the ‘request, sometimes the demand,’ for personal revelation. ‘I guess it’s a bit outside of my comfort level,’ Harris said, ‘because for me, it really is about the work. You know, I am who I am. I am who I am.”
Elaina writes that, for the first time in her career, Harris holds a job devoid of any clear benchmarks of success. Neither Biden nor Harris arrived in Washington with a particular vision for her vice presidency; moreover, in their case, the typical relationship between the President and VP (the vice president as a creature of the capital, the president a relative outsider) has been inverted. When Elaina asked Harris what aspects of her skill set Biden depends on, Harris said: “You’ll have to ask him.”
Yet as questions around Biden’s age continue, with leading GOP presidential candidates explicitly raising the specter of a President Harris, the Biden administration has avoided discussing this possibility altogether. Elaina writes: “Harris is an uncomfortable fit in the vice president’s role, whatever that is, and she cannot speak or act independently; the job makes every occupant a cipher.” But as Elaina points out, Harris has been a successful public servant for more than three decades; ran the second-largest justice system in America, in a state that is the world’s fifth-largest economy; and is among those who represent the future of her party, representing its mainstream, not its fringe. Elaina writes: “Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready. This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation–by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd. And yet the topic is treated as a trip wire.”
“The Kamala Harris Problem” is online today at TheAtlantic.com.