I’ve read the selections about Kamala Harris in all of the main books about the 2020 election as well as the three books on the Biden administration. I also skimmed through her biography.
Here are the key bits:
Chris Whipple writes in his 2023 book The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House:
* Biden needed a person of color on his ticket. He’d made justice for communities of color a central campaign promise.
* some of Harris’s wounds were self – inflicted. Part of the problem was her seeming inability to find her voice. As confident and effective as she’d been as a senator, skillfully interrogating witnesses in televised hearings, Harris seemed awkward and uncertain as vice president. She laughed inappropriately and chopped the air with her hands, which made her seem condescending.
* A week after her visit to El Paso, Politico published a long piece portraying the vice president’s office as a poisonous snake pit. The vice president’s shop, it reported, was suffering from “low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials.” Citing interviews with twenty – two current and former Harris aides, administration officials, and associates, the report described “ an abusive environment” where “people are thrown under the bus.” It all “starts at the top,” said an unnamed administration official. Plummeting office morale was supposedly causing an exodus of personnel. Two top advance staffers had already left, and others were eyeing the exits.
* Months after the Politico report, a similarly damning article appeared in The Washington Post , with the headline: “A Kamala Harris Staff Exodus Reignites Questions about Her Leadership Role — and Her Future Ambitions.”
* Gil Duran joined Harris’s staff as senior adviser and communications director when she was California’s attorney general in 2013. “There was nothing we seemed to be doing besides dealing with her dysfunction,” Duran told me. Harris, he said, failed to do her homework before events, refused to be prepped by her staff — and then blamed them when she was ill prepared. “The amount of stress she created by constantly being impossible to manage and taking out all her stresses on staff — usually women, or people who were not in great positions of authority — was just kind of unbearable.” The last straw for Duran was when Harris failed to show up for several scheduled prep meetings, and couldn’t be reached by phone, before a televised event in Los Angeles. When the attorney general finally arrived, Duran says she gave him a profane tongue – lashing and reduced a female staffer to tears. After only five months on the job, he resigned.
Duran could be dismissed as a disgruntled aide who’d served Harris only briefly. But he had company. Another staffer who’d worked for her for years, and insisted on anonymity, told me that Harris engaged in “really unnecessary gamesmanship” driven by “deep, deep insecurities.” Harris, she said, “refused to do the kind of preparation that you need to do before going public on hard – core policy matters. And then she became incensed and outraged when things wouldn’t go the way she thought they were supposed to. There was a lot of magical thinking.” This staffer said that current reports of dysfunction from the vice president’s office were all too familiar. “Now there’s a generation of staff people who simply won’t put up with this stuff. They leave. They tweet. They leak.”
This former staffer rejected the idea that Harris’s critics were racists or misogynists. “When somebody raises an issue about Kamala, everybody’s like, ‘you don’t want to see Black women succeed.’ That’s completely backward. Everybody who goes to work for Kamala by definition wants to see her succeed. That’s why you take these jobs.” Harris’s past behavior was relevant, she insisted, because the stakes were higher now that she was vice president. “I think it’s helpful for people to know that this is not new, and it will inhibit any administration that she is the leader of.”* Harris’s staff seemed to be in a state of constant upheaval. Her ill – fated 2020 presidential campaign had dissolved in a storm of acrimony, with operatives blaming one another. “She was leading the race at one point,” said a senior White House adviser, with a dose of schadenfreude. “She had a ton of money and as soon as they got in trouble, they blew all the money. The thing just fell apart. And she didn’t even make it to Iowa. Her inner circle didn’t serve her well in the presidential campaign — and they are ill – serving her now.” Harris’s campaign staffers were gone, but the dysfunction persisted.
* “The liberals’ fear stems from the assumption Biden’s not going to run,” a prominent Democratic strategist told me. “And so they’re in a panic — afraid she’s going to be the nominee and Trump’s going to run and crush her.”
* In public she remained a work in progress, and was still taking a beating in the polls. But behind the scenes Harris was more assertive and confident. Not only had she carried off successful diplomatic forays in Paris and Munich, but she’d also shown a growing command of national security issues.
* As the midterm elections approached, many Democrats wondered: Where was Kamala Harris? Since her appearance at the EMILY’s List dinner, where she’d blasted the Supreme Court’s imminent overturning of Roe v Wade , the vice president seemed to have gone radio silent. Democrats who expected her to lead the charge publicly against the GOP’s assault on women’s rights were perplexed.
When Harris did get noticed, it was often for the wrong reason. At the DNC’s Women’s Leadership Forum in late September, a statement by the VP about the importance of equity in addressing climate change was pounced upon by Republicans as evidence that she was proposing to dole out hurricane relief on the basis of race rather than need. She’d said no such thing, but it became another Republican cudgel.
Politico reported June 30, 2021:
The handling of the border visit was the latest chaotic moment for a staff that’s quickly become mired in them. Harris’ team is experiencing low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials. Much of the frustration internally is directed at Tina Flournoy, Harris’ chief of staff, a veteran of Democratic politics who began working for her earlier this year.
In interviews, 22 current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden described a tense and at times dour office atmosphere. Aides and allies said Flournoy, in an apparent effort to protect Harris, has instead created an insular environment where ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out. Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.
While much of the ire is aimed at Harris’ chief, two administration officials said the VP herself also bears responsibility for the way her office is run. “It all starts at the top,” said one of the administration officials…
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said another person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”
The dysfunction in the VP’s ranks threatens to complicate the White House’s carefully crafted image as a place staffed by a close-knit group of professionals working in concert to advance the president’s agenda. It’s pronounced enough that members of the president’s own team have taken notice and are concerned about the way Harris’ staffers are treated.
…But for some of the people who know Harris best, it’s become an all-too-familiar pattern for a politician who has churned through several iterations of staff on her rise and took office with a team almost entirely new to her…
People who have worked for her in the past describe days as “managed chaos.” “The boss’ expectations won’t always be predictable,” said one former Harris Senate aide.
Her presidential campaign operation imploded in a painful maze of finger-pointing and leaks. Harris jettisoned nearly everyone from that campaign and returned to the Senate in 2020 with her government staff and a small outside political operation in tow. When she was put on the presidential ticket, she was given a staff of mostly handpicked, trusted aides from Bidenworld. It did the job. The team avoided the spiral of internal backbiting.
The pressure-packed VP’s office has been a different story, and it hasn’t helped that few of her aides had any familiarity with their boss or her chief of staff when they started their jobs.
The morale level for current Harris staffers is “rough” and in many ways similar to the failed presidential campaign and her Senate office, according to the former Senate aide, who is in touch with current Harris staffers…
What’s more concerning for people inside and out of Harris’ orbit is staunching the bleeding among frustrated staff and meaningfully improving the low morale in the office, which could cause damage to her relationship with Biden and his team. Harris, these people said, excels when those around her project calm and order, creating a sense of confidence and certainty.
“When people feed her anxieties, all of that goes away,” said another Harris friend, “exacerbating the bad tendencies.”
Dec. 4, 2021, the Washington Post reported:
A Kamala Harris staff exodus reignites questions about her leadership style — and her future ambitions
The rumors started circulating in July: Vice President Harris’s staff was wilting in a dysfunctional and frustrated office, burned out just a few months after her historic swearing-in and pondering exit strategies…
But the quartet of soon-to-be-empty desks reignited questions about why Harris churns through top-level Democratic staff, an issue that has colored her nearly 18 years in public service, including her historic but uneven first year as vice president. Now, those questions about her management extend to whether it will hamper her ability to seek and manage the presidency.
Critics scattered over two decades point to an inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions. People used to putting aside missteps, sacrificing sleep and enduring the occasional tirade from an irate boss say doing so under Harris can be particularly difficult, as she has struggled to make progress on her vice-presidential portfolio or measure up to the potential that has many pegging her as the future of the Democratic Party.
“One of the things we’ve said in our little text groups among each other is what is the common denominator through all this and it’s her,” said Gil Duran, a former Democratic strategist and aide to Harris who quit after five months working for her in 2013. In a recent column, he said she’s repeating “the same old destructive patterns.”
“Who are the next talented people you’re going to bring in and burn through and then have (them) pretend they’re retiring for positive reasons,” he told The Post..
Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
For both critics and supporters, the question is not simply where Harris falls on the line between demanding and demeaning. Many worry that her inability to keep and retain staff will hobble her future ambitions.
The vice president entered the White House with few longtime staffers. Among the senior staff in her vice-presidential office, only two had worked for her before last year: Rohini Kosoglu, Harris’s top domestic policy adviser and her former Senate chief of staff, and Josh Hsu, counsel to the vice president and former Senate deputy chief of staff.
The WSJ book review of Dan Morain’s biography: “Ms. Harris has led a life that is as impressively documented as it is impressive.”
The Washington Post reviewed Dan Morain’s biography of Kamala Harris Jan. 15, 2021:
Harris sometimes comes across as a Jezebel who callously exploited intimacies, even one with a married public figure; a Mammy who, though she had no children, readily mothered others; an angry Black woman wielding a sharp tongue and sharper wit; or an ambitiously talented professional who knew that to get ahead she had “to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have,” as Olivia Pope’s father told her in the television show “Scandal.”
Feb. 1, 2021, the New York Times reviewed Morain’s book:
Morain paints Bay Area Democratic politics as a swampy world where schmoozing with potential billionaire funders and sitting on the right boards were essential to climbing the rungs. He details Harris’s liaison with the self-described “Ayatollah of the Assembly” and former San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown. Harris dated Brown in 1994 and 1995, splitting with him after his election as mayor…
Harris’s ambition and national sights led her to “be both innovative and cautious,” sometimes acting as a trailblazer and other times holding her fire: “She took strong stands or she stood mute on the important criminal justice issues of her day.” Though balancing both sides, he seems to agree with the critics he cites who viewed her as “overly cautious.”
Morain paints Harris as a pragmatic, ambitious politician who “took positions when she needed to and when those stands might help her politically,” but who was also “adept at not taking stands when doing so was not politically necessary.”
Dan Morain writes in this biography:
Harris could be tough on her staff, abrasive and brusque. She also could be slow to make policy calls.
* In September 2012, Kamala Harris was given the honor of a prime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina…
The speech was a humdinger and might have left the audience cheering and on its feet. But it was never given.
Harris deferred to the Democratic National Convention managers, who provided her with a speech that was filled with talking points, none of them her own and none of them inspired. Shortly after beginning, her aides noticed that vast numbers of delegates at the Spectrum Center stopped paying attention and started talking among themselves. At one point, she stumbled over the words that had been given to her.
What was supposed to have been her big moment in the spotlight went unnoticed. Her aides knew it was terrible. If Kamala Harris brought it up with anyone, her staff was not aware of it. However, Maya, in front of others, rebuked some of her sister’s staffers, as if they were responsible for the speech foisted on Attorney General Harris by Democratic National Convention staff. They weren’t.
Kamala Harris’s tight – knit family is made up of exceptionally high achievers. Maya, two years younger than Kamala, is her sister’s confidante and political adviser. Aides to Harris know never to get between her sister and her. If Kamala Harris has to choose, she’ll always choose Maya.
During campaigns, Kamala and Maya would talk several times a day. Often, a call with Maya was the first of the day and the last at night. Their sense of humor is similar and the sound of their laugh is all but identical. They’re brilliant, detail oriented, tough, and competitive, sometimes with each other in the ways big and little sisters can be.* She also was irritating some of her fellow Democrats and career Homeland Security officials who had no political ax to grind but felt insulted by her.
In private, some Democrats believed her pugilistic tone was mostly for show. Others suspected her thirst for the spotlight was part of a long – range plan to “pull an Obama” by staying just long enough in the Senate to get the credentials needed to run for president.Some senators and committee staff believed Harris was shirking her share of the tedious work that made up the vast majority of committee business, a galling transgression for a first – year senator. Worse, some officials came to believe that her brusque and antagonistic style was jeopardizing bipartisan efforts on critical security matters that had been years in the making.
“The impression that I am left with is that she’s not well liked by the majority of people that had to interact with her on the Homeland Security Committee,” said the former senior Department of Homeland Security official, who dealt with senators and committee staff.
Harris could be disrespectful to top – level Department of Homeland Security officials undergoing Senate confirmation, no matter what issues they would be overseeing. That might have been understandable if they would be enforcing Trump’s immigration policies, which affected Californians directly. But Homeland Security has 240,000 employees who deal with many apolitical issues and are devoted to trying to keep Americans safe.
The resentment about that ran so deep at the Department of Homeland Security that when current and former senior officials were coming out publicly in support of Joe Biden, at least four of them decided not to after he named Harris as his running mate, said the former Homeland Security official, who had worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and left in order to come out publicly against Trump. “They were like, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it.’ ” The former official added, “Something about the way that she operated really bothered these individuals. For them, it seemed like she was always about the politics and not about the mission.”
An issue that rubbed some officials wrong was that Harris declined to meet with many people Trump nominated for the highest positions in Homeland Security. Instead, she chose to grill them in public confirmation hearings with yes – or – no questions about complex topics that could not be answered in simple ways. The Trump nominees’ inability or refusal to answer questions might make for good sound bites, but it did little to provide the public with answers to some of the most important policy issues of the day. It also didn’t help promote the kind of good governance that’s needed for the Senate to succeed at its oversight role. Perhaps most important, it didn’t help foster productive relationships between top department officials and one of the senators, Harris, who oversaw them.* “I know I’m not the only one she didn’t want to meet with,” said [Elaine] Duke, who is widely seen as an apolitical moderate. “My understanding is that in general she did not meet with any of the Republican nominees.”
Duke said Harris’s prosecutor – like questions seemed more geared to making headlines than collectively figuring out the best way forward, leaving her wondering: “Are you trying to glean information for oversight or are you trying to indict?”
Duke was confirmed on an 85 – 14 vote in 2017, with Harris voting against her confirmation and Feinstein for it. She served until April 2018, including five months as acting Homeland Security secretary. She had no comment when asked whether Biden’s choice of Harris as his running mate influenced her decision to not publicly support the Democratic nominee.
“When you look at her public record, the hearings and the campaign, is there an underlying anger there?” Duke asked. “And will that help, or further divide the country in terms of moving away from compassion and more toward anger?”* Harris was one of a few Democrats to play Trump’s own game. She was becoming an easy – to – identify character herself. She did so in Trump’s way, too, by grabbing the spotlight to get her message out and change the narrative.
Under normal circumstances, lawmakers are criticized for acting like politicians and seeking the limelight. Perhaps because of jealousy or competition, blatant self – promotion is seen as a vice, not a virtue. But as Trump took over Washington, Harris rose above the din. Her ability to come up with pithy sound bites, viral videos, and eye – catching headlines elevated her from being a bit player in the show to becoming a star. The more Republicans made the public face of the Democratic resistance, the more the Republicans made Harris’s star rise even higher. Reporters helped, too, seizing on the narrative that Harris was helping create that she was engaged in a David and Goliath battle with Trump and his administration.* In the campaign, competing factions soon developed. Setbacks, including some self – inflicted ones, caused rifts. Harris had a habit of ducking reporters and showing up late for events, and she had shifting stands on single – payer health care, and small messages on legalizing the commercial sale of marijuana and decriminalizing prostitution between consenting adults — an idea that appalled some of the people who applauded her when in 2016 she brought the first criminal case against the owners of Backpage.
Larry J. Sabato’s 2021 book A Return to Normalcy?: The 2020 Election that (Almost) Broke America notes:
If Biden does decide to run for reelection, it is inconceivable that he would be denied the Democratic presidential nomination given the power of incumbency in modern presidential politics. If Biden declines to run, Kamala Harris would be the clear front – runner for the nomination and would likely have a significant campaign fund – raising advantage over any potential Democratic challengers; indeed, every sitting vice president who has sought their party’s nomination over the last 60 years has won the nomination.
Jonathan Lemire writes in his 2022 book The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020:
…if Biden opted not to run, the Democratic field would not clear for Harris. The vice president had a series of political setbacks and little to show for her role leading the administration’s efforts on immigration and, of course, voting rights. It was an inherently thankless job and she had a tough portfolio. She had undeniable strengths but loads of Democrats would be expected to line up to run against her, including some familiar faces from 2020.
Harris experienced two moments of “discovery” — when she announced her candidacy and held her kickoff rally in Oakland, and when she criticized Biden at the June 27 candidate debate for having opposed a school busing program in Delaware. In both moments, news coverage of Harris spiked and her poll numbers increased. But in each case, discovery was followed by scrutiny. There was scrutiny of trivial things, like whether Harris had listened to the rappers Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg in college (their albums did not debut until after she graduated), as she apparently claimed. There was also scrutiny of substantive things, like whether her record as the district attorney of San Francisco and the state attorney general of California was out of step with some Democrats’ distrust of the criminal justice system. For example, a February 11 New York Times story said she faced “a chorus of skepticism, especially from the left.” In the weeks and months after the June debate, Harris garnered less and less coverage, and her poll numbers slid. A late – November New York Times story described her campaign as riven with tensions and quoted a senior staff member who said that she had never seen a presidential campaign “treat its staff so poorly.” Harris dropped out on December 3.
The New York Times published Nov. 29, 2019:
How Kamala Harris’s Campaign Unraveled
Some Harris aides sitting at the table could barely suppress their fury about what they saw as the undoing of a once-promising campaign. Their feelings were reflected days later by Kelly Mehlenbacher, the state operations director, in a blistering resignation letter obtained by The Times.
“This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” Ms. Mehlenbacher wrote, assailing Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Harris’s sister, Maya, the campaign chairwoman, for laying off aides with no notice. “With less than 90 days until Iowa we still do not have a real plan to win.”
The 2020 Democratic field has been defined by its turbulence, with some contenders rising, others dropping out and two more jumping in just this month. Yet there is only one candidate who rocketed to the top tier and then plummeted in early state polls to the low single digits: Ms. Harris…
Yet, even to some Harris allies, her decline is more predictable than surprising. In one instance after another, Ms. Harris and her closest advisers made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices to impose order on an unwieldy campaign, according to more than 50 current and former campaign staff members and allies, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations and assessments involving the candidate.
Many of her own advisers are now pointing a finger directly at Ms. Harris. In interviews several of them criticized her for going on the offensive against rivals, only to retreat, and for not firmly choosing a side in the party’s ideological feud between liberals and moderates. She also created an organization with a campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, who goes unchallenged in part because she is Ms. Harris’s sister, and a manager, Mr. Rodriguez, who could not be replaced without likely triggering the resignations of the candidate’s consulting team. Even at this late date, aides said it’s unclear who’s in charge of the campaign.
…her staff is now riven between competing factions eager to belittle one another, and the candidate’s relationship with Mr. Rodriguez has turned frosty…
It was her abundant political skills — strong on the stump, a warm manner with voters and ferocity with the opposition that seemed to spell trouble for Mr. Trump — that convinced many Democrats of Ms. Harris’s potential.
…Today, her aides are given to gallows humor about just how many slogans and one-liners she has cycled through, with one recalling how “‘speak truth’ spring” gave way to “‘3 a.m.’ summer” before the current, Trump-focused “‘justice’ winter.”
From the start, the campaign structure seemed ripe for conflict. Ms. Harris divided her campaign between two coasts, basing her operation in Baltimore but retaining some key advisers in the Bay Area. She bifurcated the leadership between two decidedly different loyalists: her sister, the chair, and Mr. Rodriguez, a trusted lieutenant who had managed her 2016 Senate campaign.
… she is a candidate who seeks input from a stable of advisers, but her personal political convictions can be unclear.
…she was knocked off kilter by criticism from progressives and spent months torn between embracing her prosecutor record and acknowledging some faults.
In his book The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, political scientist James Barber described Kamala Harris types as active-negatives:
The contradiction here is between relatively intense effort and relatively low emotional reward for that effort. The activity has a compulsive quality, as if the man were trying to make up for something or to escape from anxiety into hard work. He seems ambitious, striving upward and seeking power. His stance
toward the environment is aggressive and he has a persistent problem in managing his aggressive feelings. His self-image is vague and discontinuous. Life is a hard struggle to achieve and hold power, hampered by the condemnations of a perfectionistic conscience. Active-negative types pour energy into the political system, but it is an energy distorted from within…Different as they were in other ways, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Lyndon B. Johnson came to share in their Presidencies a common pattern: a process of rigidification, and a movement from political dexterity to narrow insistence on a failing course of action despite abundant evidence of the failure. Each of these three helped arrange his own defeat, and in the course of doing that, left the nation worse off than it might have been. Not by accident, these three are the prime twentieth-century examples of the activenegative type. Their political tragedies developed, I will argue, out of inner dramas in which themes of power and themes of conscience struggled for preeminence.
