Vice President Kamala Harris

From the New Republic:

Amid an ongoing spate of stories challenging Kamala Harris’s capabilities as vice president and possibly president sometime relatively soon, the vice president’s response is to dig down into the substance and brush off the criticism.

Monday, the vice president will announce more than $1.2 billion in new funding to address migration to the United States through fostering more economic opportunity....

The announcement was previewed by senior White House officials to reporters on Sunday. “We’ve brought resources, we’ve brought political focus, we’ve raised the international profile, and the vice president—with her leadership, her vision—has caused all of that to happen,” a senior White House official said.

The announcement itself is a clear statement about Harris’s approach to the difficult portfolio she’s been handed as vice president: dealing with immigration issues in Central America and voting rights. She’s doubling down here—highlighting her interest in maternal health and generally trying to ignore data points that have been taken as signs she’s unprepared for at least her current job and most definitely being president....

Democrats argue that the flak Harris is getting is actually part of a larger problem: that Biden’s approval ratings are in the low 40s, inflation is on the rise, and Democrats are still neck-deep in the legislative sausage-making on their expansive social spending package. These efforts, in other words, don’t have an easy or quick fix.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chair and outspoken Harris ally, stressed that most of the attention on Harris is not on the substance of her tenure as vice president.

“Look, I think the difficulty, and what I’m seeing some days, is that you have a White House press corps that covers the substance and you have a group of political reporters and others that covers the superficial,” Brazile said. “There’s no way to bring the substance and the superficial in the same room of conversation.”

Former Harris aides and Brazile stressed to me that what is doable in the immediate future is to let Harris be Harris—that is, let her fly free and publicly on topics that she’s very interested and comfortable with, like maternal health or the African American community.

“Where those windows of opportunity present themselves, I would script her less and put her out there,” a former top Harris aide said. The former aide also said, “I think this administration has tried to get her out there a lot, not necessarily on the world’s best topics all the time. But when you’re governing, you don’t get to decide what’s the most pressing issue all the time”....