In January, Kamala Harris was sworn in as US vice president amid high expectations, which are in part being dashed. First woman and first black person to take office in the country’s history, her prominence in the government of Joe Biden is less than expected.
Added to this is a series of reports of disagreements between her and the president’s teams, published by the American press in recent weeks.
The biggest achievement of the Biden administration so far, the approval of a $1.2 trillion package in infrastructure investments, is an example that illustrates the situation in Kamala. According to American CNN, she missed several important meetings with lawmakers. On one of the days when the conversations progressed into the night, the deputy preferred to keep her schedule and visit a NASA center. This would have caused discomfort in advisors to the Presidency.
To implement the plan, sanctioned on Monday (15), the White House created a task force to define the destination of billions of dollars in works, but left Kamala out. The group is made up of officials from the Presidency and seven secretaries of State, from areas such as energy, trade, agriculture and labor. Pete Buttigieg, from the Transports portfolio, became the main face of the advertisements about the package
The first openly gay man to hold a high-ranking US government office, Buttigieg was one of the top contenders in the Democratic primaries last year. Like Kamala, he is tipped as a candidate to succeed Biden if the president does not seek re-election in 2024 due to old age — he will be 81 years old.
However, statistics paint an unfavorable future for Kamala. His fall in popularity came faster than Biden’s: his disapproval rate surpassed his approval in June, two months before the president did.
Currently, it is highly rated by 40.2% of the electorate, and rejected by 50.8%, according to a survey by the website Real Clear Politics, which adds data from several polls. The percentage is close to that of Biden, well rated by 41.5% and rejected by 53.2%.
In recent months, the vice has appeared little in publications on social networks Biden, which seeks to star in events on infrastructure. Despite this, Kamala has given a few speeches before the president at official events, and the “Biden-Harris administration” tag continues to be used in official government communications.
When she took office in January, the deputy was given the task of dealing with the migration crisis on the border with Mexico — a task that Biden himself received when he was deputy to Barack Obama. Kamala’s allies, however, complain that the mission was assigned to her without her having the authority to act decisively.
As the daughter of immigrants herself, Kamala was questioned for taking months to personally go to the border and expressed annoyance at being charged for doing so. He also seemed uncomfortable saying, in Guatemala, that interested in immigrating should give up on the idea.
For Republicans, who are harshly critical of Democrats on immigration-related issues, this provided yet another chance to attack Kamala. And his allies complain that the White House has done little to respond to attacks on the vice president, according to CNN.
The report by the American broadcaster, as well as others published by the websites Axios and Politico, pointed out several frictions between the teams of Biden and his running mate. According to reports, the two groups have communication gaps between them that date back to the electoral campaign, and Kamala’s subordinates complain that there is not enough space in the government for her to play a leading role.
The Democrat would also have complained to people close to her that she was little consulted about the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, an act that is considered the main failure of the Biden administration so far. The chaotic exit was marked by scenes of Afghans trying to cling to moving planes to flee the country, soon taken up by the Taliban Islamic fundamentalist group.
There are also reports of raids among Kamala’s own advisers. Several of her employees were replaced, and names that helped her to cement her political career are no longer on her ranks. This Thursday (18th), for example, the Vice President’s Communication Director, Ashley Etienne, left her post.
The White House rejected the content of the reports. “The vice president is not only a vital partner for the president, but a strong leader who has tackled key challenges facing the country, from the right to vote to addressing the root causes of migration and expanding broadband” , wrote Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, on a social network.
Symone Sanders, a spokesman for Kamala, said some of the media “is focused on gossip, not the results the president and vice have delivered” such as the approval of the infrastructure package. He also said that Kamala participated in dozens of meetings with congressmen and events in the states to help advance the proposal — which was stuck for months due to internal disagreements within the party.
According to Joel Goldstein, a researcher on the role of US vice presidents and a professor at the University of Saint Louis, Missouri, disagreements between the president and vice teams are not rare and become more frequent in times of difficulty, such as the current crash. of popularity between them.
He considers, however, that many critics of Kamala do not fully understand the functions of her position and believes that there is no point in demanding – many of them come from supporters – for her to have a broad portfolio of achievements.
“The main role of a deputy is to advise the president and help advance the government’s agenda; it just has to be done privately. The deputy can’t go public and say something like, ‘look, the president was close to make a huge mistake, but I made him change his mind and everything worked out.’ Something like that would destroy the relationship between the two,” explains the professor.
Goldstein believes that the Democrat can help the government to better communicate the achievements it has made, and that its success will depend on the quality of its advice. There is still, according to the expert, some level of sexism in the criticism of the vice president.
“Many of the expectations that were created about it are artificial, but it can still be successful if the administration as a whole moves forward”, he projects. “She is already a historical figure, being the first woman in the position, which attracts more attention. Other vices didn’t arouse as much interest from the public.”
Kamala faces additional difficulties because he is in an unusual situation at the White House: generally, the deputy has more political experience in Washington than the president, and serves as a guide when dealing with Congress — another mission Biden was helping Obama on. But the current agent has a 48-year career in the capital, while the vice has worked at the federal level for less than five years.
Born in California to a father of Jamaican origin and mother of Indian origin, Kamala, 57, was state attorney general from 2010 to 2017, at the same time that Beau Biden, son of the current president, held a similar position in Delaware. The two became friends, which brought her closer to the Biden family, especially after Beau’s death in 2015.
This proximity was one of the factors that led the Democrat to ask her to be his candidate for runner-up; another was the attempt to attract more votes from women, blacks and Latinos.
Kamala still scores well in polls from these snippets of voters, but rejection among independent voters is a cause for concern. According to a YouGov poll, 63 percent of non-party Americans disapprove of it.
“Independent voters showed their displeasure with Biden in the election [para o governo da] Virginia. If that trend continues, it could cause Democrats bigger problems in midterm elections,” says David Paleologos, director of the political research center at Suffolk University in Boston, referring to the statewide election won by Republicans earlier this month.
The defeat in the state, which is considered a thermometer of America’s political future, has sparked a wake-up call among Democrats because of the high risk that they will lose control of Congress, as Obama did in 2010.
On important fronts for the Biden government, Kamala was the White House’s sender on international travel. The deputy went to Southeast Asia on an unstated mission to bolster the US image on the continent in the face of China’s rise.
More recently, he went to France and met with President Emmanuel Macron, sealing the end of a diplomatic crisis between Washington and Paris over the controversial nuclear submarine manufacturing deal — and has come under fire for allegedly “forcing” a French accent into public meetings .
To try to reverse the party’s fall in popularity, Kamala has also traveled across the country to promote the infrastructure package and the Build Back Better plan, of nearly $2 trillion in social and environmental investments, still under debate in the Chamber.
By directing her focus to packages, however, she ends up leaving in the background themes that she defended throughout her life, such as the expansion of the right to vote and the reform of the judicial system — which could distance her from her electoral base.
Goldstein, however, points out that the government still has three more years, and a lot can happen. He says that Republican George Bush, Ronald Reagan’s deputy in the 1980s, had a rough start in the role, but later managed to get a candidacy and win the 1988 presidential election. And that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s deputy in the years 2000, had great power at the beginning of the government, but later lost strength for having given bad advice, especially in the military area.
“There is no natural path between being deputy and then reaching the presidency. Other Democratic names are not going to set their ambitions aside and make way for it. Biden himself had to wait four years [para disputar a Presidência, após ser vice] and faced difficulties in the primaries,” he points out. “But even if a vice president never makes it to the top, he or she will have been in the decision room many times, with more power to make a difference than governors, senators and ministers usually have.”
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