Vice President Kamala Harris, who was once seen as the obvious choice to succeed President Joe Biden, key aides are freezing her out of major decisions and consider her ability to help the president’s agenda “a joke.”
According to a new biography, Amateur Hour, the president and first lady have been so stand off that they have yet to host a family dinner for Harris and second husband Doug Emhoff, and the president has reneged on his promise to have weekly lunches with his No. 2.
According to author and political journalist Charlie Spiering, top White House aides including press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre felt Harris’s office management style so abrasive that they initially took less important jobs inside the administration.
In his book, Spiering recalls Harris’s early days in politics, her relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and her elections to state attorney general and the U.S. Senate.
But it’s her relationship with the first family and her failure to elbow into their inner circle that gets the spotlight.
Spiering, for example, notes that first lady Jill Biden wanted former Obama national security aide Susan Rice to be Biden’s vice presidential pick.
But the Biden team had other ideas for the first woman of color to be vice president. “Harris was essentially frozen out from the president’s inner circle. Biden and his team had already achieved their goal of winning, using Harris’s identity to ‘make history’ and inspire voters to pull the aging presidential hopeful across the finish line. But when they took office, Harris was sidelined. Despite Biden’s promise to make Harris a full partner in everything, Harris began the job literally standing behind Biden,” Spiering said.
