She’s ready to tap in at any moment, but she cannot indicate to anybody that she is ready to tap in at any moment. She’s the vice president, closer to assuming the presidency than perhaps any other woman in American history, but she’s also an erstwhile rising star who has had her wings clipped by the same office that anointed her. Everybody wants to know what Kamala Harris thinks about Joe Biden, candidate, but Harris must evade even the appearance of thinking about Joe Biden, candidate. She’s a socially awkward aunt to some, a crooked climber to others. She’s a cop; she’s a left-wing radical. She’s unelectable; she’s the only way that Democrats can defeat Trump in November. She’s the president’s closest ally; she’s, uh, Donald Trump. In these days of the embattled Joe Biden presidency, the vice president is everything, everywhere, all at once, and yet nowhere.
As more prominent Democrats and fundraisers line up to express concern over Biden’s fitness after the president whiffed a debate, an interview, and a solo press conference in the span of a few weeks, regular old Democrats are still scrambling to figure out what to think of Harris. And Harris, for her part, isn’t in a position to stand up and correct the record one way or the other. We should know her better by now, and the fact that we don’t is another failure of the few more powerful than she is.
Even my self-selective circle of politically similar acquaintances can’t agree. A married attorney and supporter of LGBTQ+ rights in Sacramento thinks she’d be a wonderful president. A Los Angeles screenwriter says that’s all a nonstarter if she can’t beat Donald Trump. A leftist in Washington state says she wishes she had more Barbara Lee energy. An Ohio mother who canvassed for the state’s abortion-rights amendment last year says she feels “contrived.” My mom—a Wisconsin voter—loves her, but she loves Amy Klobuchar more. The neighbor of a colleague recently put up a sign in their window that reads: KAMALA NOW.
For most of her tenure as vice president, it also seems as if the White House was trying to figure out what it thought of Harris, at times filling her portfolio with absolutely dreadful assignments (Messaging on border security! Mean!) and at other times appearing to shelve her in favor of other surrogates. She’s broken through speaking out about abortion rights— an issue that she should probably have been delivering messaging around since the writing was on the wall that the Supreme Court was to do away with Roe v. Wade. Some of her remit reads like light hazing, as though the primary responsibility of Vice President Harris is to demonstrate her loyalty to the president. (A little Trumpy, to be honest.) But perhaps most important: Because her primary White House–prescribed duty appears to be publicly demonstrating fealty to Joe Biden, she is, at this moment, unable to prevent voters from projecting their own hang-ups and -isms onto her.
The Right seems eager about the prospect of a candidate whose identity they can exploit as rage bait. A new Trump ad declares, “Vote Joe Biden today; get Kamala Harris tomorrow”— one of the only times I’ve seen a semicolon used properly in support of Donald Trump. The right-wing Daily Wire launched a Kamala-focused podcast the other day that it’s calling “Scamala.” (This is a dumb title because in order for it to work as a pun, you have to mispronounce Harris’s first name. It’s also stupid because another very successful podcast called “Scamanda” already exists, as does Scam Goddess. Perhaps the Daily Wire is relying on errant autocomplete to drive audiences to its new pod. And besides, Ben Shapiro isn’t exactly known for his astute cultural observations; last summer, he predicted that the Barbie movie would be a box office flop and the thing ended up making a billion dollars. Finger on the pulse, that one.)
It’s an oversimplification to claim that anybody who has an issue with Harris feels that way because they’re sexist or racist. It’s also naive to claim that nobody’s got a problem with Kamala Harris for racist or sexist reasons. Some people cannot fathom a female president. As we saw during the Obama era, some get existentially upset when Black people are more important than they are. In a country so hotly divided, only a few thousand votes in a few states separates the winner from the loser. Why wouldn’t the GOP wield its favorite cudgel?
But it’s not all bleak for Harris’s Q score. A Washington Post piece notes that the social-media consensus is that she’s fun—a “wine aunt,” a kooky figure young voters are coming around on, as evidenced by her loving presence in various memes. A piece in The New Yorker notes that the proliferation of goofy Kamala moments on the socials is an indicator that her star is on the rise.
Is it, though?
I’m currently at home with a newborn, which means that I spend a lot of time on phone-based diversions like TikTok, looking at the same Harris memes mentioned in the Post and The New Yorker. My algorithm serves up at least a dozen videos per day comparing the vice president with the vice president from Veep, warning that once she gets a too-long (“fuck-ass”) pixie cut, we’ll know she’s about to be president. Harris’s “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” quote has been reappropriated into so many videos of unrelated subject matter that I had to look up its original context before writing this, because I wasn’t sure if it was real or some kind of diabolically authentic deep fake.
It’s not clear to me that the Harris memes are affectionate. Other political soundbites that have been reappropriated to hell include former President Trump pretending to have just heard of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and President Biden ardently whispering, “It grows the economy!” I’m old enough to remember when President George W. Bush’s many awkward musings were turned into a Bushisms desk calendar that my Bush-hating uncle gave my dad for Christmas one year. If TikTok had been around in 2000, Dubya musing, “Is our children learning?” would almost certainly have been turned into a viral sound.
If I were Vice President Harris, I’d find it all very confusing. Maybe I’d have one of my staffers delete TikTok from my phone, or at least password-lock it.
Harris is popular among Black women, the backbone of the Democratic base. She’s less popular among just about everybody else. According to recent polling, she’s 16 points underwater. Is it because Americans don’t know her well enough? Is it because the Biden administration has squandered her? Is it because she simply doesn’t have the juice? America should know her better by now, and it doesn’t.
In the words of Al Sharpton, the vice presidency is an “awkward” job. But Harris has been uniquely hamstrung by its awkwardness. People thought they knew who Biden was when he was veep, thanks in part to The Onion’s characterization of him as a redneck-adjacent Trans Am enthusiast who was often seen shirtless in the White House driveway. On a more reality-based note, Vice President Biden and President Obama’s effective working relationship culminated in Obama awarding Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction days before leaving office. The Washington Post remembered him as “a most unusual—and effective—vice president.”
The Biden-Harris relationship does not give off bromance vibes. Their dynamic is more like the dynamic between a reality-show judge and a contestant desperate to prove that they’re there for noble reasons, to save their place on the island. Harris’s primary goal is to prove to the White House that she is in no way preparing or angling for the presidency because she’s so focused on supporting the presidency of Biden.
In addition to experiencing standard-issue vice-presidential awkwardness, Harris has to walk the same tightrope that other women in power who came before her walked–she needs to be prepared to assume power without acting like she wants to assume power, like Taylor Swift unleashing that same “surprised” face every time she wins an award everybody expected her to win. We don’t like women who want to be powerful, but we’ll tolerate women who are reluctantly handed power by men. What is the sound of one hand not being raised?
Despite these challenges—a Democratic voting base unsure of what to think of her, a right-wing establishment licking their chops at the opportunity to poke at some voters’ racism and sexism, suboptimal polling numbers—messaging this week from the Biden camp has been that the only path forward is through Biden, and if not Biden, through Harris, and any discussion otherwise is akin to an irresponsible gamble on America’s future. Because the way things are done is that the president gets to run for re-election, and if he chooses not to run, the next person in line is his vice president. The party of progress is once again completely immobilized in the immutable devotion to rule following.
Related Story
Democrats who are falling in line behind what Biden and his supporters are presenting as an inalienable case for Harris as successor are ignoring urgency in favor of preserving tradition. The GOP does not follow the rules; the fact that Democrats can be so strident about it has bound them to compete in a lopsided game. How do you win against somebody who doesn’t even acknowledge that the rules exist? Are Democrats “the adults in the room,” or are they the Washington Generals playing the Harlem Globetrotters?
Shouting down discussions of breaking with tradition narrows Democrats’ path to victory and ultimately undermines Harris’s strength as a candidate. Maybe the best path forward is to have Harris run in Biden’s place. Maybe it’s not.
Harris, like any other Democrat willing to step in for Biden in the event that he steps aside, should have the opportunity to present the best case for herself to voters—and she shouldn’t be the only candidate considered. Less than four months from Election Day, Biden’s camp is asking for voters to accept the worst of all worlds: to embrace an octogenarian incumbent who in recent public appearances has appeared only gently alive, or to accept a prescribed successor who has barely been given a chance to speak for herself.
Related Story
Erin Ryan is a writer and podcaster. She's the creator, cohost and executive producer of Crooked Media's Hysteria podcast and a frequent contributor to other Crooked Media podcasts and video series. She's written for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and other TV shows and publications. A native of the midwest, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, kid, dog, and incredibly old cat.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57zZ6urGWgpLmqwMicqmiZZmaCeXyWbmxoo5Girq2tjKGYq6qZqHquscyeqmaZp6DEor7Dp5ysq18%3D