What Was Kamala Harris Thinking? By Jim Geraghty
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-was-kamala-harris-thinking/
Vice President Kamala Harris “clearly thinks she’s ‘winning’ something by refusing to [visit the border],” I noted at the end of today’s Morning Jolt. “What she thinks she’s winning is anybody’s guess.”
This afternoon brings word that Harris will indeed travel to the border, 91 days after President Biden appointed Harris to “lead efforts to stem migration across the U.S.–Mexico border.” Many Democrats have disputed the characterization of Harris as the “border czar.” But Biden himself said this, referring to her role on this issue: “I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”
Would Harris have gotten some bad press by visiting the border three months ago? Sure, but it would have been one bad news cycle. White Houses get those all the time, and they survive them all the time. By waiting, Harris ensured that Republicans could bring it up over and over again, while also ensuring she would get asked about it and have awkward moments like her giggling, “I haven’t been to Europe, either. I don’t know what you’re getting at,” in response to NBC News’s Lester Holt. Now, when Harris visits, Republicans will point out, accurately, that U.S. Customs and Border Protection have had three straight months of border captures that are the worst in 20 years. With four months to go, it’s already the worst year since 2006.
To avoid one bad news cycle, Harris accepted three months of bad press.
And we’re left wondering: Just why the heck was Harris so reluctant to visit the border? It certainly isn’t a blanket administration opposition to photo opportunities, or else the president wouldn’t visit an Alexandria rock-climbing facility and joke about scaling a 60-foot wall. It’s become almost cliché in conservative media to say that Harris has bad political instincts, but I think that understates just how much she chooses to make avoidable mistakes.
It’s possible that for three straight months, Harris assumed that the following week or month would bring better news and signs that the waves of migrants are abating. If that’s the case, it’s not encouraging, because it suggests the administration’s policies and messaging will work any day now, despite all the counter-evidence.
Or maybe Harris assumed that the border would never become a serious messaging problem. She learned the hard way that this assumption was wrong when CNN offered a surprisingly brutal assessment of her Central American trip:
The vice president has never been particularly adept when confronted with questions that she doesn’t like or doesn’t want to answer — as she demonstrated during 2020 primaries, when she repeatedly dodged and fumbled questions about her health care plan. . . . It was a clumsy answer that came off as tone-deaf given that the situation at the US-Mexico border is one of the most troubling issues facing the administration.
From where I sit, the answer is that it’s California’s fault — or more specifically, Harris’s career as a San Francisco prosecutor, California state attorney general, and California senator. As district attorney, Harris was a technically nonpartisan elected official who needed to appeal to the city’s legendarily liberal voters. Harris actually won a competitive general election race in her first bid for state attorney general in 2010. But her 2014 and 2016 races were pretty much easy wins. Thriving in California statewide politics requires placating powerful interest groups and constituencies well enough to be the top choice of the state’s Democrats. The Republican Party didn’t even have a candidate who qualified for the runoff election in 2016.
California’s media institutions aren’t all pushovers, but they’re generally not known for their tough, skeptical, career-threatening coverage of Democratic officials. And when Harris is confronted with the tougher glare of the national press corps, as in her 2020 presidential campaign, she wilts. Harris has brought a skill set optimized for placating California interest groups to her new home in the U.S. Naval Observatory — and unsurprisingly, it’s not translating well in the new job.
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