What stands out to me about Kamala Harris is her insecurity. I know something about this feeling. When I came to the United States in 1977 at age 11, I was frequently called “insecure.” I didn’t get this tag in Australia. I suppose Australians were not as psychologically aware as Americans. I think this insecure label of me was accurate, and it remained so until about 2016, the year I turned 50. By this time, I was less likely to panic when people important to me distanced themselves, and I was more able to hold on to myself and to less need external validation of my choices. By age 50, I had changed from a person who was primarily externally validated to a bloke internally validated.
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 of what I’ve read:
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.
Ron Klain assumed the role of Harris’s guide. He thought of himself as the building’s resident expert on the vice presidency, having worked for both Al Gore and Joe Biden as they sat in the second chair. But he struggled to productively help her. He felt Harris kept making life excessively difficult by imposing all sorts of constraints on herself. She told him that she didn’t want to work on women’s issues or anything to do with race. She wanted her office to be majority female — and to have a Black woman as chief of staff. To Klain’s ear, she was creating too many rules, and they made it hard for her to find her footing. He told her, “This is baseball, you need to start getting out of the dugout and scoring some runs. You can’t score runs if you’re not on the field.”
Constantly in search of a portfolio but reluctant to accept them when they were suggested to her, she asked to be placed in charge of relations with Scandinavia — away from the spotlight. But then when she finally asked for a meaty assignment, to be placed in charge of the administration’s response to the assault on voting rights, Klain initially balked — hardly the vote of confidence she needed.
Instead of carving out an independent role, she stuck by the president’s side — an omnipresence at nearly every Oval Office meeting. In part, that was just life in the time of COVID, which limited her ability to travel the world. In part, she needed to cultivate a relationship with a boss she didn’t know especially well.
In meetings, Biden and Harris adopted uncannily similar styles. What they craved from aides was deeply practical. They wanted to know how everyday folks out there would interact with a policy. How would they find out about it? Would they have an easy time accessing a program? These were earthy questions, but also usually neglected by high officials.
Harris’s contributions in meetings were regarded as incisive. As a former prosecutor, she took pride in asking piercing questions. Even as she didn’t want to be defined by race, she asked questions about equity that tended to be neglected, inquiring about how policies might resonate with, say, Native Americans or people with disabilities. She impressed Mark Milley with how she sharply interjected herself into national security discussions.
But she was being guided by staff whom she didn’t know and didn’t especially trust. And given the circumstances, Biden didn’t feel especially obliged to coach her along. At the beginning, he said that they would have weekly lunches. But those began to fall off the schedule.
Harris prided herself on her discipline: how she ate carefully, how she exercised regularly, how she consumed her daily intelligence briefing the night before, how she left herself time for a full night’s sleep.
Her disciplined quest for mastery of policy often struck advisers as a bit much. Harris didn’t want to just master the details; she was always in the mode of cross – examination. For those sitting with her, it could be an inspiring experience, but also a profoundly exhausting one. When she brought in her top national security aides, Nancy McEldowney and Phil Gordon, she would encourage them to take opposing sides and stage debates for her. She enjoyed watching staff engage in intellectual combat. Getting dragged into a briefing with Harris meant that the day’s schedule was about to unwind. In her disciplined desire to prepare, she would become undisciplined about her own calendar.
Harris’s obsession with prep was the product of both intellectual fascination and understandable insecurity. She explained to aides that she understood her place in history as the first Black woman to hold her job. And she felt as if she would be unfairly punished by the press corps if she ever faltered — and that her slipups might make it difficult for every Black woman who followed in her path. So the ultimate goal of all that intensive preparation was to move through her public appearances without any missteps.
She was surely right about how large parts of Washington relished her screwups, never extending her any grace. Still, she was holding herself to an impossible standard. And in her obsessive desire to avoid making mistakes, the pressure she applied in her internal monologue almost doomed her to make them.
HARRIS POSSESSED what one of her colleagues described as “rabbit ears.” Whenever there was a hint of criticism of her — either in the West Wing or in the press — she seemed instantly aware of it. Rather than brushing it aside, she wanted to know who was speaking ill of her and what they were saying. When she read a devastating story on CNN’s website about her mismanagement of her team, she responded by briefly freezing out an aide whom she suspected of cooperating with reporters.
She let the criticism guide her. Instead of diligently sticking to the Central America assignment, she seemed to accept the conventional wisdom about it. It was a futile gig, so she let it fall to the side, missing an opportunity to grind her way to a meaningful
achievement.* ALL AFTERNOON, the senior staff of the White House worked the phones, rounding up votes [for the infrastructure bill], checking in with members. They gathered in the residence for what they assumed would be a triumphant moment. Everyone was there, except for Kamala Harris. She had packed up her bag and left for the day. And when her adviser Symone Sanders learned about the gathering in the residence, she knew that she needed to get Harris back to the office. Having traveled to the vice presidential mansion, Harris returned to work. It was the humiliation of the vice presidency in microcosm.
Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns published their book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future in 2022:
IT WAS EARLY in the summer of 2020 and Jill Biden was frustrated. Speaking in confidence with a close adviser to her husband’s campaign, the future first lady posed a pointed question.
There are millions of people in the United States, she began.
Why, she asked, do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?
The person she meant was Kamala Harris, and the looming choice was her husband’s decision on a running mate.
Jill Biden was not the only person in Biden’s inner circle to be annoyed, even angry, at Harris’s prominence in the search for a running mate. The California senator’s presidential campaign the previous year had been a stumbling disappointment, marred by infighting among her staff, indecision about her message, and an unsteady performance by the candidate herself. Its high point had come in the very first debate of the Democratic primary process, when Harris had delivered a finely scripted, theatrical smackdown of Biden for reminiscing fondly about his past work with segregationists.
That moment had wounded Joe Biden and enraged his family. They had regarded Harris as a personal friend, owing to her political relationship with Beau Biden during their overlapping terms as the attorneys general of California and Delaware. Before announcing his own campaign, Biden had fretted to his advisers about the possibility of a nasty primary race that could turn personal: In one conversation, he had mentioned Harris’s past romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor who had appointed Harris to a pair of minor political positions, as the kind of thing that should be off – limits.
Biden had not been prepared to compete with Harris as a combative adversary, and it had showed on that Miami debate stage. The former vice president had looked gobsmacked and offered only a halting, stilted defense of his own long record.
Now, a year later, the author of that humiliation was the leading candidate to be Biden’s running mate and one of his closest partners in government.
And his wife wanted to know why.
The answer was at once complicated and simple: For most of Biden’s advisers, the selection of a running mate was a supremely tactical decision, all about doing whatever Biden needed to keep his advantage over Donald Trump and win the election. Kamala Harris was neither the candidate who most greatly impressed Biden’s vice – presidential search committee, nor the person his advisers saw as most immediately prepared for the presidency. Yet she was the one they concluded would do the most to help secure victory in an election Biden and his party viewed as having near – apocalyptic stakes.
That conclusion, however, was not easy in coming, least of all to the Biden family…
To some of Biden’s advisers, Harris was the obvious choice from the start, a happy – enough medium between all the conflicting imperatives in the choice. She was decades younger than Biden, but not young enough to risk appearing underqualified. She would make history by virtue of her gender and race, but she was otherwise a conventional politician who had risen in California by touting her experience as a prosecutor and working comfortably within the established system. She had tacked far to Biden’s left as a presidential candidate, but it had not been a convincing display of ideological fervor. Biden’s advisers believed she would just as readily move back to the center if called upon to do so.
Ron Klain, who was tasked with vetting vice – presidential candidates, told Biden early on he believed Harris was the best choice for the job. His reasoning had little to do with Harris’s distinctive political strengths and vulnerabilities. Klain’s calculus was more elementary and pragmatic: As things stood in the spring of 2020, Biden was on track to win the election, and he could not afford to do anything that would put that at risk. In Klain’s view, recent history showed that the safest choices for the vice presidency were people who had run for president themselves. Even an unsuccessful past presidential candidate, like Harris, was more prepared for the rigors of a general election than a talented newcomer.
That filter alone sharply narrowed the list of potential running mates. Only three people under consideration had run for president themselves: Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar. Harris was the only person of color on that short list, a consideration that would come to dominate the Biden campaign’s thinking after George Floyd’s murder.
But Klain offered another argument to Biden, too. Yes, Harris had attacked Biden more harshly than any other major candidate in the Democratic primaries. Yes, the Biden family had seen it as a smear and a betrayal. In Klain’s assessment, that would work to Biden’s advantage.
Choosing Harris will show people that you are magnanimous and forgiving, Klain told Biden. It will show the country just what a unifying leader you can be.* If Biden seemed to be grappling with the implications of choosing Harris, he was still far from making up his mind. Race had become a prime qualification in the search, and several other Black women were major contenders, including Demings and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser.
Most significant and unexpected among them was Karen Bass.* When Bass’s name leaked to the press, a groundswell of support for her rose on the left. Perhaps more importantly, leading Democrats in California reached out to the Biden campaign to vouch for Bass’s credentials. Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor leader, endorsed her for the ticket, alarming supporters of Harris. In some cases, California Democrats explicitly pressed for Bass as an alternative to Harris. Biden was startled by the ferocity of some of the intra – state factional attacks on Harris by her fellow Democrats, including members of the state’s large congressional delegation.
David Crane, a California Democrat who had been one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s closest advisers while Bass was a powerful legislative leader in the state, was among the voices lobbying for her over Harris. “In contrast to Kamala Harris,” Crane told Biden’s advisers, “Karen cares about something greater than herself.”* Even Joe Biden wondered aloud: Was Harris’s team driving this? Her campaign had been notorious during the Democratic primary for circulating scorching opposition research on other candidates — “oppo” files — to the press. Were they doing the same thing now?
When Biden voiced that concern to a close adviser, he was urged not to count it against Harris. After all, even if her former campaign consultants were operating that way, that did not necessarily mean Harris herself was involved.
Former Harris competitors, like Bass, seemed to reach a similar, wary but equivocal conclusion.
“I wasn’t surprised by the arrows, that’s part of the process,” Bass says, adding of Harris: “Look, she gets nine hundred arrows thrown at her every day.”
Bass’s friends told her that veterans of the Harris campaign were behind the onslaught, pointing to a San Francisco – based consulting firm, SCRB Partners, that had shepherded Harris’s career for a decade. The journalist Edward – Isaac Dovere, in a narrative of the 2020 election, reported later that Rice called Harris personally during this time to tell her to call off her hatchet men.
But in the absence of hard proof, Bass says she opted not to blame the future vice president.
“I know the firm that she’s worked with,” Bass says. “I did hear that, too, but I never saw any evidence of it.”
ButtonText_image Did that leave Harris as the safest choice? If Duckworth and Bass and Demings were all compromised or risky in some way, was Biden’s last, best choice the woman who dealt him the most humiliating setback of his primary campaign?
Biden’s search committee believed she was. The group of four — Dodd, Blunt Rochester, Garcetti, and Hogan — had not been instructed to report back with a single name as their recommendation. But when Garcetti laid out their conclusions to Biden, he voiced the consensus view of the group: Harris was not necessarily the strongest option on every score, but she was clearly the option who served Biden’s near – term political interests most comprehensively.* There was a question, too, of Harris’s political skills. She had entered the presidential race in 2019 as perhaps the most heralded candidate besides Biden himself, kicking off her candidacy with a huge rally in Oakland that served as a show of force. Even before she entered the race, Harris was perceived by political professionals, in America and abroad, as a warhorse contender. About a month before entering the race on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 2019, she was approached in a New York City restaurant by Israel’s former premier, Ehud Olmert, who half – jokingly offered — in full view of two people he did not realize were reporters — to serve as a surrogate campaigner with Jewish voters.
A compelling candidate in certain contexts, Harris had seemed adrift for much of the Democratic presidential race, rotating through a series of slogans and carefully prepped sound bites that never amounted to a coherent message. Her campaign team was divided against itself from the start, torn between California – based consultants, who wanted her to embrace her record as a tough – on – crime prosecutor, and more progressive advisers — including her sister, Maya — who urged Harris to shift leftward with the times.
Having spent most of her career in the law, Harris found it disorienting to have her deep expertise suddenly treated as a matter of embarrassment by some members of her own campaign. In less – familiar areas, like the progressive litmus – test subject of socialized medicine, she often seemed to be guessing at the answers her party’s activist class wanted to hear.
Even her admirers saw her presentation in the primary as self – defeating. Lori Lightfoot, the Chicago mayor, says she got to know Harris during the Democratic race and they bonded over their shared background as prosecutors. Harris, Lightfoot says, had been an empathetic but “tough” officer of the law: “She was for the people and locking up bad guys.” That was not the message Harris conveyed as a presidential candidate.
“She ran in a really tough primary, where at that time the fervor to be as far left as possible was real,” Lightfoot says. “I don’t think that’s really who she is in her heart of hearts.”
Harris’s future running mate had the same intuition. During the primary, Biden privately and repeatedly shared versions of a common observation about Harris: She doesn’t seem to know who she wants to be.
Harris’s tortured relationship with her past record as a prosecutor had fatal political consequences in a primary debate in July of 2019, when Tulsi Gabbard, a far – left candidate, lambasted her for her tangled position on the death penalty and her record of locking people up for minor drug crimes. Harris floundered in response.
Few relished that moment as thoroughly as Joe Biden’s political advisers.
Yet the legacy of Harris’s presidential campaign had been more than a feud with the Biden family and the disorder of her political operation. For the first time in history, a Black and South Asian woman had been a viable candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination. Alone among the Black women on Biden’s vice – presidential short list, Harris had a large national constituency who saw her as a path – breaking figure. When Harris marched in street demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd, she had been received as a political celebrity.* The rollout was as smooth as they come, and while Republicans used Harris’s primary – season support for left – wing policies as fodder for their attacks, they did not seem to do much damage at the outset. Determined to cast her as an ideological radical, Republicans all but totally overlooked the most damaging arguments Hoffman’s pollsters had tried out against Harris: that far from being a committed radical, she was a political chameleon who had changed her positions on a range of issues and had guffawed on the radio about smoking pot after spending years prosecuting drug crimes.
* a ruthless political maneuver by Biden’s palace guard — senior advisers who believed Harris was the right choice for practical reasons, but who were simply incapable of forgetting either the pain she had inflicted on Biden in the primaries or the shambolic disorder of her own campaign. Harris would be the running mate, but she would not be allowed to bring along the dysfunctional entourage that had defined her candidacy.
Her California – based advisers were not going to come with her. Neither, Biden’s advisers agreed, would her sister. The Biden campaign appointed Harris’s staff for her in the general election, naming them before she was announced as the vice – presidential nominee. Should they win, Harris was told, her personnel choices would run through the same process Biden had endured as vice president: Her hiring would be subject to approval by the West Wing.
But Harris, too, would prove soon enough that she was capable of maneuvering — quietly, deliberately, and to crushing effect — to protect her personal political interests. She would show in her own way that she could hold a grudge as readily as the Biden team.
Months later, after winning election to the vice presidency, Harris spoke on the phone with her home – state governor, Gavin Newsom, about the matter of filling her Senate seat. It was up to Newsom to name someone who could serve out the final two years of Harris’s unexpired term, and Newsom was being lobbied by a throng of ambitious politicians. (He ultimately chose Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, to become its first Latino senator.)
Harris was too careful a politician to endorse someone for the job. She had too many friends vying to succeed her. But when the call was over, Newsom had the distinct impression there was one applicant Harris did not want to see in the upper chamber.
That candidate, the governor told people, was Karen Bass.* The Harris team’s initial attempt to claim a policy portfolio for her ran into skepticism in the White House, further stoking hard feelings between the vice president and some of Biden’s closest aides. Hoping to carve out an international portfolio for Harris, her staff floated the possibility of the vice president overseeing relations with the Nordic countries — a low – risk diplomatic assignment that might have helped Harris get adjusted to the international stage in welcoming venues like Oslo and Copenhagen. White House aides rejected the idea and privately mocked it. More irritating to Biden aides was when they learned the vice president wanted to plan a major speech to outline her view of foreign policy.
Biden aides vetoed the idea. Why should a vice president have their own independently articulated view of global affairs?* She had built few close relationships in Congress; like Barack Obama before her, she was off and running for president just two years after entering the body. Harris had not designed her Senate career the way other lawmakers did, carefully building friendships with an eye toward eventually becoming a committee chair or caucus leader.
* Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, came away perplexed after a meeting with Biden and Harris about the relief package. Biden had been typically expressive in the meeting, buttering up Hogan and several other governors with talk of wanting to work together. The vice president’s role, Hogan says, was “very strange.”
“Harris did not say a word,” he recalls, speculating that perhaps Harris was “just being deferential to the president — didn’t want to step on him.”* Harris was resigned to the assignment, but she and her team wanted to make sure her role was depicted in the narrowest possible way. She would take on the Northern Triangle, traveling to Central America and negotiating with governments there, but under no circumstances did she want to be branded Biden’s “border czar.”
Harris did not hesitate to chide Biden for characterizing her assignment in those terms.
When the two of them met in mid – April with leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, Biden poured out praise for Harris, crediting her in particular for her passionate advocacy for Black maternal health. But the president also made the mistake of saying that he had given Harris the important assignment of handling immigration. Harris, he said, was going to do “a hell of a job.”
The vice president corrected him at once.
Excuse me, she said, it’s the Northern Triangle — not immigration.
Harris’s concern about being depicted as Biden’s border cop proved well founded. She came under immediate pressure to visit the border and struggled with media questions about when she would do so.* Within weeks of Harris’s trip, stories began popping up about dysfunction in the vice president’s office. Politico reported that several aides had already quietly quit the Harris team and that some on the inside were blaming Flournoy for the internal friction. Some stories faulted Flournoy for hiccups in the operation, but the truth was that Biden’s team regarded Harris’s chief of staff as an indispensable steadying influence.
Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s communications director, had grown weary of fielding questions about Harris’s team and whether the White House was mismanaging her role in the vice presidency. In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky – high expectations: Her Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco.
Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff.* West Wing aides had been annoyed for months about having to tend to Harris and what they saw as gaps in her operation, some of which generated bitter gripes from congressional Democrats. When Klain met in April with the New Democrats, one lawmaker, Kathy Manning, had complained about being left out of parts of Harris’s recent visit to her North Carolina district. Klain had not concealed his displeasure.
“That makes me want to vomit,” he said, according to one person’s account of the meeting.
Remarkably, comments like that had stayed private at the time. It was only after Harris’s trip to Central America that a trickle of leaks began to accelerate.
No one was more frustrated by the leaks than Joe Biden. The president had known many of Harris’s shortcomings when he chose her to be his running mate, but he was defensive of her and irritated by the unsightly drama spilling into view.
Calling his senior staff into the Oval Office, Biden gave them a warning.
If he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice president, Biden said, they would quickly be former staff.* Amid the legitimate critiques of Harris there had always been cruel mockery and demonization of a kind male politicians seldom faced, most recently from snickering Fox News and talk – radio personalities who ridiculed her in grotesque language.
Perhaps just as grating to Harris, though, was the criticism that she knew circulated inside the building — from a White House full of people who had taken a negative view of Harris’s political instincts and abilities since the Democratic primaries. Some of Harris’s advisers believed the president’s almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved.
Harris worried that Biden’s staff looked down on her; she fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious. At one point she dispatched Flournoy, her top aide, to speak with Anita Dunn about a subject of concern to the vice president.
When Harris walked into a room, the White House staff did not stand up the way they did for Biden, Flournoy told Dunn. The vice president took it as a sign of disrespect.* If Biden was not that person, then who was?
Few Democrats had confidence that it was Kamala Harris.
The first woman ever to be a heartbeat away from the presidency ended the year as politically isolated as she had ever been.
Harris’s voting rights portfolio had become another dead end.* Aware of her own unsettled place in the administration, Harris grew impatient with her own aides, blaming the latest configuration of staff around her for letting her down. She told an ally in the fall that she had initiated an audit of her office to make it function better.
* Harris knew well enough that she had a political problem. One senator close to her, describing Harris’s frustration level as “up in the stratosphere,” lamented that Harris’s political decline was a “slow – rolling Greek tragedy.” Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run. And Harris had done almost nothing to gird herself for such a contest: Far from the right – wing caricature of her as a hidden hand already plotting a takeover, Harris had built no independent political operation for herself and had yet to make courtesy calls to some of the most powerful Democrats in early primary states.
* In several candid conversations, Harris admitted to confidants that she simply did not know Washington all that well. She had only arrived there after the 2016 election, and the insular nature of the White House had made it difficult for her to make new friends and figure out how the nation’s capital really worked.
It was a sobering acknowledgment of her own limitations from a politician not overly given to self – criticism. If Harris had a path to recovery, then perhaps admitting she had a problem was a useful first step.
Politico reported June 30, 2021:
‘Not a healthy environment’: Kamala Harris’ office rife with dissent
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 most well – known aspect of Barber’s analysis is his argument that active – negative presidents experience a common pattern of rigidification resulting from the relationship of a situation they face to their innermost feelings. In other words, these presidents, who are fundamentally insecure, persevere in disastrous policies when opponents threaten their self – esteem, especially their power and rectitude. Always in pursuit of inner phantoms, active – negative presidents respond to threats in ways that Barber finds inappropriate for the objective political situation.
* 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.
* Colonel House had found Wilson “strangely” lacking in self-confidence. That lack seems confirmed as we review Wilson’s character. His very frequent depression and discouragement, his self-punishing working habits, his inability to laugh at himself as President, his continual defensive denial that his own preferences were involved in his decisions, and particularly the extremely high standards he set for his own performance-standards which never let him be satisfied with success-all reveal a person gripped by an extraordinary need to bolster his self-esteem. Suspended in a kind of purgatory between God and the people, Wilson everlastingly sought to justify his choices on “principle,” thus adding to the force of purpose the highest of callings. He experienced in severe form the fight against the temptation to quit, to give in and leave the field to enemies who would subvert all he believed in. Instead, Wilson found a way to fight off despair and to express anger by trying to force his attention away from himself and by devoting all his talent and energy to political leadership. The instrument for that purpose was his impressive oratorical skill. Through his voice Wilson could express his bottled-up anger, could appeal for love and power, and could bring to heel the evil men who opposed him. For that to work there always had to be an issue which he could invest with moral fervor and to which he could devote his “single-track mind.” In short, Wilson attempted to compensate for low self-esteem by dominating his social environment with moralistic
rhetoric.At the core of that formula was his character with its intense demands for power and perfection. The pattern revealed when we scan Wilson’s character and see how that fed into-and on-his world view and style was the psychological context for his stubborn, self-defeating behavior in the League fight. That final battle brought together all these themes in one integrated package. To have given up on the League-his League-would have represented for Wilson a breakdown in his peculiar integrity, a profound disturbance of an inner arrangement which had come to mean so ‘much to him.
* [Hoover’s] style was to use his primary political skill and immense capacity of detailed planning to dominate others, to gain their acceptance, not their counsel. Although the men and the situations were different, the similarity to Wilson’s use of discussion sessions is striking.
Of course, Hoover’s demeanor affected his political relations. His inability to enter into genuinely cooperative relations with others-relations involving compromise, an appreciation for the irrational in politics, a sense of the other man’s position-meant that his endeavors to induce an enthusiastic response were doomed to failure. He could lead an organization of committed subordinates-as in the Belgian relief work-but he could not create that commitment among leaders with their own bases of power and their own overriding purposes.
* [Hoover] too, struggled against an inner sense of inadequacy, that his power-seeking reflected a strong compensatory need for power, and that his self lacerating labor was a sacrifice before the altar of an extraordinarily demanding conscience. Even on the surface, Hoover’s fight to restrain aggression is evident, as is his humorlessness. Like Wilson, he appears as a President trying to make up for something, to salvage through leadership some lost or damaged part of himself.
* the crux of Johnson’s interpersonal style was his habit of turning occasions for mutuality into occasions for domination. His rhetoric was too much an extension of his interpersonal style to be wholly effective. Clearly he never quite grasped the art of dealing with the press, never really understood the difference between a reporter and a politician. The press would be subjected to flattery and the ebullience of high table at the Johnson ranch, fed hamburgers molded to the shape of Texas-and threatened with excommunication when they misbehaved. To a reporter who asked him a trivial question, Johnson said, “Why do you come and ask me, the leader of the Western world, a chicken-shit question like that?” Another remembers an interview in which Johnson “sat with his knees pressed against mine, a hand clutching my lapel, and his nose only a few inches away from my nose. When he leaned forward, I leaned backward at an uncomfortable angle. ‘Hell,’ Johnson asked loudly, ‘why don’t you write a whole big article on just me alone?'”
* President Johnson’s manipulative maneuvering, his penchant for secrecy, his lying, his avid interest in himself, his sense of being surrounded by hostile forces, and his immense anger all indicate, I think, a profound insecurity-not so much about his “intelligence and ability” (he knew he had those), but precisely about his “heart” and “guts.” His heart symbolizes his conscience bound need to be loving and generous, to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” His gut symbolizes toughness, the press for power, the need to do it to the other guy before he can do it to you. Caught between those forces, Johnson thrashed about for some ground in the middle, loosing the tremendous tension he felt in a flood of talk.
Activity provided him with distraction; he found the Presidency “a hell of a whirl” with himself at the center, cool in crisis: “When the bullets start whizzing around my head, that’s when I’m calmest.” Especially when he was in the direst straits, those times when he felt “like a jackrabbit hunkered up in a storm,” Johnson could-had to-keep his mind on the threatening situation out there, away from the nagging doubts inside. Then he could take action-“Let’s go, let’s go” -and pretend to himself that he would really rather be lying quietly under a tree.
In the end, Vietnam trapped him. Projecting his inner struggle onto the environment, he sought by resigning to escape from the intolerable tension.
* His attention keeps returning to himself, his problems, how he is doing, as if he were forever watching himself. The character of that attention is primarily evaluative with respect to power. Am I winning or losing, gaining or falling behind? It is, secondarily, evaluative with respect to virtue. In the struggle, am I being a good person or a bad person?
The active-negative’s perfectionistic conscience lends to his feelings about himself an all-or-nothing quality. He wavers between grandiosity and despair. Similarly there is little incorporation of a sense of the self as developing in time, progressively growing through experience; rather, there is a now-or-never quality. Similarly, the perfectionism imposes unclear guidelines for achievement; one is supposed to be good at everything all the time. Therefore there is a resistance to self-definition, a lack of clarity in the person’s commitment to shared loyalties and to particular sequences of achievement building toward special goals.
The demands of conscience also impose a felt necessity for the denial of self-gratification. The active-negative not only behaves so as to suffer in fact-by working to exhaustion, for example-but also insists on explaining his behavior, to himself and to others, as self-sacrificing rather than self-rewarding.
The power emphasis is reflected in the active-negative’s concern with controlling his aggression. He will tend to view himself as restrained, holding back, reining in his anger, patient despite much provocation, and so on. By building up a view of his anger as monumental, he strives for approval from conscience as a reward for the effort and suffering it costs him to hold it in.
These two themes-the denial of self-gratification and the struggle to control aggressive impulses-come together in the active-negative’s perennial temptation to fight or quit. Images of breaking out, attacking, releasing free anger compete with fantasies of abandoning effort for quiet, relaxation, ease-even death. These are experienced as temptations in a double sense: one might get at others by striking at them or by abandoning them, and one might give in to self gratification by removing the falling barriers to aggression or by wallowing in weakness. These tempting fantasies help the person bolster his feelings of strength and virtue as he resists them.
The active-negative lives in a dangerous world-a world not only threatening in definite ways but also highly uncertain, a world one can cope with only by maintaining a tense, wary readiness for danger. The prime threat is other people; he tends to divide humanity into the weak and the grasping, although he may also, with no feeling of inconsistency, idealize “the people” in a romantic way. In struggling to understand social causality, he restricts the explanations to conspiracy or chaos, fluctuating between images of tight, secret control and images of utter disorder. He strives to resolve decisional conflicts by invoking abstract principles in order to render manageable a too complex reality.
The active-negative’s political style is persistent and emphatic. That is, he shows a stylistic specialization more markedly than other Presidents do (as in Wilson’s oratory, Hoover’s homework, Johnson’s interpersonal relations), and he tends to inflexibility in shifting his stylistic repertoire. Furthermore, he is likely to extend his primary stylistic emphasis into his total style, to treat all occasions as if they were amenable to mastery by means of his main political habit pattern.
While the active-negative’s character is taken up with his own performance, he continually seeks confirmation of his self-esteem from other people; in this sense he is highly dependent upon positive response from the environment. He feels confirmed in his expectations by vigorous opposition, but is disconcerted by and strongly threatened by ridicule, contempt, or personal denigration. His tendency over time is to focus anger on a personal enemy, usually an opponent who treats him, he feels, with condescension.
But the most pervasive feeling in the active-negative’s makeup is “I must.” He is a man under orders, required to concentrate, to produce, to follow out his destiny as he sees it. At any given moment, he feels bound by what he has already undertaken, already promised, already committed. The central conflict between virtuousness and power-seeking is never resolved, but is massively denied in the feeling that whatever one does, one has no choice. The tragic sacrifice in such a personality is the sacrifice of will. Not only others, but the man himself is reduced to an instrument. He finds it hard even to see alternatives to the course he “must” follow, much less to change that course when it proves unproductive.
From the inside, then, the active-negative type generates tremendous energies for political domination. From the outside, he seems at first extraordinarily capable and then extraordinarily rigid, becoming more and more closed to experience, including the advice of his ardent allies. Over time, he has a powerfully disillusioning effect, because so much was expected from him when he started but these expectations have been disappointed continually as the man stubbornly adheres to his course and waxes so moralistic in its defense.
This temporal process as seen from the outside is matched, I think, by a regular development in the active-negative’s own character. He sees himself as having begun with a high purpose, but as being continually forced to compromise in order to achieve the end state he vaguely envisions. Battered from all sides with demands that he yield yard after yard of his territory, that he conform to ignorant and selfish demands, he begins to feel his integrity slipping away from him. In doubt about his personal strength, he experiences compromise as a steady diminution of “the most powerful man in the world” to a mere clerk, ordered about by his supposed subordinates. At the same time, he is being
harrassed by critics who, unaware of the problems he faces, attribute his actions to low motives, adding insult to injury. At long last, after enduring all this for longer than any mortal should, he rebels and stands his ground. Masking his decision in whatever rhetoric is necessary, he rides the tiger to the end.At the core of their peculiar way of approaching the Presidency was an image of the self. In each case, self-esteem was only tentatively established, continually threatened by doubt. The thrust behind their heroic efforts was the search for confirmation that they really were both strong and good. Each found within the loose boundaries of the Presidency vast opportunities to play out the drama in his own special fashion. Each failed, but in the failing found proofs that he had been right all along in seeing the world as he saw it and in acting as he had to act.
Each discovered in political life a place to make up for what had happened to him and to give scope to esteem-boosting practices he had learned long ago.
* The affectionate side of politics (much neglected in research) appeals to a people broken apart less by conflict and rivalry than by isolation and anxiety. Most men and women lead lives of quiet desperation; the scattering of families, the anonymity of work life, the sudden shifts between generations and neighborhoods, the accidents caused by a wavering economy, all contribute to the lonesome vulnerability people feel and hide, supposing they are exceptions to the general rule of serenity. Politics offers some opportunities for expressing that directly, as when brokenhearted people line up to tell their Congressman whatever it is they have to tell. But for many who never tell anybody, politics offers a scene for reassurance, a medium for the vicarious experience of fellowship.
* The personal need for such pseudo – love is fundamentally insatiable — the applause pours into a bottomless pit. The larger political danger is that such a man will convince himself and others that he has untapped talents, only to discover later that he does not, and to reveal that to all who inquire.
Wikipedia notes: “Traits of an active-negative president include: lack of deriving joy after expending much effort on tasks, aggressive, highly rigid, and having a general view of power as a means to self-realization. Examples of active-negative presidents include Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon.”
George C. Edwards writes in his preface: “The most memorable aspect of The Presidential Character is Barber’s claim that the interaction between character and a particular situation may produce tragedy for active-negative presidents as a result of their rigid response.”
In September of 2020, psychologists Anne Marie Griebie, Aubrey Immelman, and Yitao Zhang released this personality profile of Kamala Harris:
* Harris’s personality composite can be characterized as high-dominance charismatic — charismatic by virtue of the elevated Ambitious–Outgoing amalgam. Dominant individuals enjoy the power to direct others and to evoke obedience and respect; they are tough and unsentimental and often make effective leaders. Ambitious individuals are bold, competitive, and self-assured; they easily assume leadership roles, expect others to recognize their special qualities, and sometimes act as though entitled. Outgoing individuals are dramatic attention-getters who thrive on being the center of social events, go out of their way to be popular with others, and have confidence in their social abilities. Harris’s major personality strengths in a political role are her confident assertiveness and personal charisma. Her major personality-based shortcoming is likely to be a predisposition to occasional lapses in emotional restraint or self-discipline.
Interpersonal conduct
* The core diagnostic feature of the interpersonal conduct of Dominant individuals is their commanding presence; they are powerful, authoritative, directive, and persuasive. More exaggerated variants of the Dominant pattern are characteristically intimidating; they tend to be abrasive, contentious, coercive, and combative, often dictate to others, and are willing and able to humiliate others to evoke compliance. Their strategy of assertion and dominance has an important instrumental purpose in interpersonal relations, as most people are intimidated by hostility, sarcasm, criticism, and threats. Thus, these personalities are adept at having their way by browbeating others into respect and submission. (Millon, 1996, p. 484; Millon & Everly, 1985, p. 32)
Sample observation: “[Kamala Harris] impressed Californians with her commanding presence — offering a preview of the senator the country would see pointedly questioning Republican nominees during confirmation hearings.” (Zernike, 2019)
Cognitive Style
The core diagnostic feature of the cognitive style of Dominant individuals is its opinionated nature; they are outspoken, emphatic, and adamant, holding strong beliefs that they vigorously defend. More exaggerated variants of the Dominant pattern tend to be dogmatic; they are inflexible and closed-minded, lacking objectivity and clinging obstinately to preconceived ideas, beliefs, and values. All variants of this pattern are finely attuned to the subtle elements of human interaction, keenly aware of the moods and feelings of others, and skilled at using others’ foibles and sensitivities to manipulate them for their own purposes. (Millon, 1996, pp. 484–485)
Sample observation: “Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), an outspoken progressive in the Senate who is increasingly whispered about as a potential 2020 presidential candidate, joined a growing cadre of Democrats willing to discuss major alterations to the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agency.” (Resnick, 2018)
Mood/Temperament
The core diagnostic feature of the characteristic mood and temperament of Dominant individuals is irritability; they have an excitable temper that they may at times find difficult to control. More exaggerated variants of the Dominant pattern tend to be cold and unfriendly; they are disinclined to experience and express tender feelings and have a volatile temper that readily flares into contentious argument and physical belligerence. All variants of this pattern are prone to anger and to a greater or lesser extent deficient in the capacity to share warm or tender feelings, to experience genuine affection and love for another, or to empathize with the needs of others. (Millon, 1996, p. 486; Millon & Everly, 1985, p. 32)
Sample observation: “Harris quickly grows impatient with those who demand she claim one piece of her heritage over another.” (Schouten, 2020)
Self-Image
The core diagnostic feature of the self-image of Dominant individuals is that they view themselves as assertive; they perceive themselves as forthright, unsentimental, and bold. More exaggerated variants of the Dominant pattern recognize their fundamentally competitive nature; they are strong-willed, energetic, and commanding, and may take pride in describing themselves as tough and realistically hardheaded. Though more extreme variants may enhance their sense of self by overvaluing aspects of themselves that present a pugnacious, domineering, and power oriented image, it is rare for these personalities to acknowledge malicious or vindictive motives. Thus, hostile behavior on their part is typically framed in prosocial terms, which enhances their sense of self. (Millon, 1996, p. 485; Millon & Everly, 1985, p. 32)
Sample observation: “And I’ll tell you [Kamala Harris said], I come from fighters. My parents met when they were active in the civil rights movement.” (Democratic debate transcript, 2019)
Expressive Behavior
The core diagnostic feature of the expressive acts of Ambitious individuals is their confidence; they are socially poised, self-assured, and self-confident, conveying an air of calm, untroubled self-assurance. All variants of this pattern are to some degree self-centered and lacking in generosity and social reciprocity. (Millon, 1996, p. 405; Millon & Everly, 1985, pp. 32, 39) Sample observation: “Alumni boast about a Howard swagger. They see it in Harris now — in her impatient questioning as a senator, in her tone of voice as a candidate that can read as confident, cocky and condescending all at once.” (Givhan, 2019) Interpersonal Conduct The core diagnostic feature of the interpersonal conduct of Ambitious individuals is their assertiveness; they stand their ground and are tough, competitive, persuasive, hardnosed, and shrewd. (Millon, 1996, pp. 405–406; Millon & Everly, 1985, pp. 32, 39)
Sample observation: “Several people attending Harris’s book event at George Washington University on Wednesday night said they knew very little about her until her hard-nosed performance at Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings seized their attention.” (Janes, 2019)
* Cognitive Style
The core diagnostic feature of the cognitive style of Ambitious individuals is their imaginativeness; they are inventive, innovative, and resourceful, ardently believing in their own efficacy. All variants of this pattern to some degree harbor fantasies of success, rationalize their failures, or exaggerate their achievements. (Millon, 1996, p. 406; Millon & Everly, 1985, pp. 32, 39)
Sample observation: “Thus far, Harris has stayed inside the bounds of Washington politics while still pushing innovative ideas that have a chance of realization.” (Smith, 2019)
Mood/Temperament
The core diagnostic feature of the characteristic mood and temperament of Ambitious individuals is their social poise; they are self-composed, serene, and optimistic, and are typically imperturbable, unruffled, and cool and levelheaded under pressure. (Millon, 1996, p. 408; Millon & Everly, 1985, pp. 32, 39)
Sample observation: “On a crowded stage, she emerged poised, smart, and ready to fight.” (King, 2019)
Self-Image
The core diagnostic feature of the self-perception of Ambitious individuals is their certitude; they have strong self-efficacy beliefs and considerable courage of conviction. (Millon, 1996, p. 406)
Sample observation: “So far, Harris’ poll numbers in Iowa haven’t shown much improvement. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Friday showed her mired in the low single-digits, a world away from the upper echelon of candidates: Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and former Vice President Joe Biden. When a reporter noted that Harris had said in the past she considered herself a top-tier candidate, the California senator interrupted to firmly insist: ‘I still do.’” (Mason, 2019)
Expressive Behavior
The core diagnostic feature of the expressive acts of Outgoing individuals is sociability; they are typically friendly, engaging, lively, extraverted, and gregarious. As leaders, Outgoing personalities may be somewhat lacking in “gravitas,” inclined to make spur-of-the-moment decisions without carefully considering alternatives, predisposed to reckless or imprudent behaviors, and prone to scandal. (Millon, 1996, pp. 366–367, 371; Millon & Everly, 1985, p. 33)
Sample observation: “Harris remained unflaggingly engaged, asking each child a question, paying a compliment, nodding exaggeratedly. ‘That’s her real personality,’ Emhoff said, shaking his head, starstruck, at his wife. ‘She smiles and laughs and has a good time.’” (Goodyear, 2019)
Interpersonal Conduct
The core diagnostic feature of the interpersonal conduct of Outgoing individuals is demonstrativeness; they are amiable and display their feelings openly. (Millon, 1996, pp. 367368, 371; Millon & Everly, 1985, p. 33)
Sample observation: “But she’s magnetic, authoritative, warm — leaning in, nodding, gesturing with both hands, moving those hands from a voter’s biceps or shoulder to a position of deep appreciation over her heart.” (Weil, 2019)
Cognitive Style
The core diagnostic feature of the cognitive style of Outgoing individuals is unreflectiveness; they avoid introspective thought and focus on practical, concrete matters. (Millon, 1996, pp. 368369, 371; Millon & Davis, 2000, p. 236)
Sample observation: “But in her early state debuts, Harris has at times compensated for her lack of precision and detailed policy prescriptions by lapsing into prepared remarks, turning to legislation she supports — even when it indirectly relates to the question — and leaning on anecdotes to connect with audiences.” (Cadelago, 2019b)
Mood/Temperament
The core diagnostic feature of the temperamental disposition and prevailing mood of Outgoing individuals is emotional expressiveness; they are animated, uninhibited, and affectively responsive. (Millon, 1996, pp. 370–371)
Sample observation: “Finally, let’s face it, she has some of that ‘it’ — the smile, the joyous laugh, the ability to intersperse inspiration with policy responses. … She doesn’t get lost in airy platitudes or in the weeds of policy; she paces her appearances with some of each. She can read a room. Call it connectivity or empathy, but the best politicians have it, and those who don’t cannot fake it.” (Rubin, 2019)
Self-Image The core diagnostic feature of the self-image of Outgoing individuals is their view of themselves as being socially desirable, well liked, and charming. (Millon, 1996, pp. 369, 371; Millon & Everly, 1985, p. 33)
Sample observation: “‘Having had the life experience I’ve had, having had the professional experiences I’ve had, people know that I have the ability to fight — and fight on behalf of them,’” Harris continued. ‘And that’s what they want.’” (Cadelago, 2019a)
* The core diagnostic feature of the regulatory (i.e., ego-defense) mechanisms of highly21 Outgoing individuals is self-distraction; their preferred stress-management strategy is to engage in relatively mindless activities — for example, games, physical diversions, or other forms of amusement or recreation. (Millon, 1996, p. 370)
The core diagnostic feature of the internalized object representations of highly22 Outgoing individuals is their shallow nature. Outgoing personalities characteristically seek stimulation, attention, and excitement, presumably to fill an inner void. (Millon, 1996, p. 369)
The core diagnostic feature of the morphologic organization of highly23 Outgoing individuals is exteroceptiveness; they tend to focus on external matters and the here-and-now, being neither introspective nor dwelling excessively on the past, presumably to blot out awareness of a relatively insubstantial inner self. (Millon, 1996, p. 370)
Summary: Kamala Harris…is somewhat reminiscent of Donald Trump’s Composite Type 2-1A-3-1B (Immelman & Griebie, 2020), though in much attenuated form.
* Harris’s relatively weak loadings on the Conscientious scale…As a more nondeliberative leader, Harris would be inclined “to force decisions to be made prematurely,” lose sight of her limitations, and place “political success over effective policy”… Based on her personality profile, those qualities could hamper a prospective President Harris. It is noteworthy, however, that this portrait is at variance with Harris’s own view of conscientiousness as her central trait:
In her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris describes her leadership style as “sweating the small stuff” and “embracing the mundane” to create big change. While good leadership requires “vision and aspiration” and bold ideas to move people to action, “it is often the mastery of the seemingly unimportant details, the careful execution of the tedious tasks [emphasis added], and the dedicated work done outside of the public eye that make the changes we seek possible,” she writes. It “means making sure that our solutions actually work for the people who need them,” Harris says. Such attention to detail [emphasis added] is especially needed in politics to tackle big issues, she says. “Politics is a realm where the grand pronouncement often takes the place of the painstaking and detail-oriented work [emphasis added] of getting meaningful things done,” she writes.
* Harris, by dint of her extraversion, self-confidence, and dominance appears most skilled in mobilization, which makes her well-equipped to rally, energize, and motivate her supporters. In the sphere of orchestration, Harris’s relative dearth of personality traits related to conscientiousness (i.e., having insufficient attention to detail and diminished capacity for sustained focus), exacerbated by the relatively superficial cognitive style characteristic of outgoing personalities, may hamper her leadership performance; indeed, this shortcoming may well have been a critical variable in her unsuccessful campaign for president. Finally, Harris’s outgoing nature will likely stand her in good stead with respect to consolidation, enabling her to foster the supportive relationships necessary for consummating her policy objectives.
* In terms of presidential temperament, Harris seems most similar to Barber’s (1972/1992) active–positive presidential character — leaders like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump: self-confident, optimistic, and deriving pleasure from the exercise of power in pursuit of political objectives.
* President Harris’s foreign policy role orientation would most likely be that of a high-dominance extrovert. Etheredge contends that high-dominance extraverts (such as Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson) share high-dominance introverts’ tendency “to use military force”…
* By dint of her dominant, ambitious, and outgoing qualities, Kamala Harris’s major personality strengths in a political role are her confident assertiveness and personal charisma. Her major personality-based shortcoming, rooted in a distinctive outgoing tendency, is likely to be a predisposition to occasional lapses in emotional restraint or self-discipline.
A 2020 personality profile of Joe Biden said:
[Biden] promised that he would choose a woman of colour for the position of the Vice president. When that became real, even “…Harris herself called Biden’s choice “audacious” and said it could spur advances for women and women of colour that could otherwise have taken decades” (Aljazeera). however, keeping in mind Biden’s famous statement: “I’m going to pick someone who is simpatico with me philosophically” (Glueck), one might doubt that by choosing Harris, Biden will get someone who thinks the way he does and shares his beliefs. having said that, it is important to acknowledge that the choice, which Biden has made, shows that he belongs to a small group of American candidates for presidents, who are not afraid to choose a running mate, who can be considered a rival as well as who also participated in the presidential race. … one might say that Biden’s decision to pick Harris is not an extraordinary sign of bravery or some kind of well-executed leadership, but rather a simple symbol of political calculation, based on what is more effective for the candidate in his presidential run.
Oct. 23, 2023, Readers Digest posted an article about the characteristics of insecure people. I find the following apply to Kamala Harris:
* [P]eople with narcissistic personality disorder tend to be insecure individuals, who present a ‘false self,’” neuropsychologist Rhonda Q. Freeman, PhD tells Reader’s Digest. “People with this disorder also have a hypersensitivity to any criticism, even if it’s benign,”…
* Your desire to sleep with someone shortly after meeting them may have more to do with insecurity than libido. “Some insecure people trade on their sexuality. They feel that offering sex, or sexual favors will make people want them. By creating that desire, they feel favored, and accepted, which offsets their insecurity,” says relationship advice expert April Masini. Having sex with someone before you get to know them may eliminate the opportunity to communicate honestly (or at all). For someone who is insecure, this can be a form of hiding out. If you don’t spend time talking or sharing experiences outside of the bedroom, you don’t have to worry about being rejected for who you really are.
* Someone who is insecure may constantly try to show they are smart by pointing out flaws in other people’s opinions. If someone says the sky is blue, the insecure person will not only state that it is green but will reference scientific data to prove they are right and everyone else is wrong. “An insecure person may have the inability to accept another person’s point of view,” says Remi Alli, JD, MS, a legal scholar, who is certified in alternative dispute management. This desire to always be right diminishes others, making them feel insignificant and stupid. The insecure person can only feel safe if they put others down, elevating themselves, in contrast.
* Someone who is insecure may literally shrink down a size if they are in a social situation they are uncomfortable in or can’t control. “People who are insecure get small. Under stress and tension, people go into ‘freeze, flight, fall, or faint’ response. In the freeze response, people who lack confidence are more likely to ‘get small,’ keeping their legs, and feet closer together, and their arms close to their sides, with their palms hidden. They get tense, so you may see their hands or arms stiffen and tense up, as well as become tightly close to the body,”…
* You’re haughty, put on airs, and act like you’re superior to everyone else in the room (or company, or campus). You’re also panicking deep down inside because you fear that someone will find you out and blow your cover. According to PsychMechanics, your arrogant behavior is a cover designed to protect your ego and feelings of self-worth. In other words, you’re insecure and doing everything in your power to hide it from the world.
* You can’t stand losing an argument and refuse to—especially if it’s about something integral to your sense of self. “Insecure people may display unnecessary defensive responses to comments that threaten their core beliefs,” …
Stats professor Andrew Gelman writes July 23, 2024:
People should definitely care about Harris’s past and future political ideology, but recently a big concern on both sides of the contest is her electability.
And that was what my post from 2011 was all about: How much can we predict a candidate’s vote share from her past electoral outings? And that’s where the answer is, not much at all….
What we’re left with is that her legislative voting record is far from the center, and so, yeah, I’d expect this would hurt her chances a bit. Not a lot, but something.
The other thing is Harris’s low approval-disapproval rating, which by Fivethirtyeight’s calculations is at -13.1, roughly in that same negative zone as Trump (-11.8) and Biden (-17.6)
Given Joe Biden’s obvious senility, it is notable that nobody suggests that Kamala Harris has been the power inside the Biden presidency…
The takeaway is that, in general elections for president, votes are determined by party much more than by candidate, and not enough data are available to say much about politicians’ individual vote-getting skills. Harris being far from the center and relatively unpopular is a minus—maybe we’re talking a hit of one or two percentage points in the national vote relative to a popular centrist? The Republican party is also running a candidate who is unpopular and associated with policy positions that are far from the center. The election is expected to be close, so small things could make a difference in the outcome. I don’t think personal electability is much of a predictable factor here.
