Kamala Harris: Heir apparent or afterthought?

New York

The US President needed the senator from West Virginia on his side, but he wasn’t sure he needed his vice president to get him there. 

It was summertime, and President Joe Biden was under immense pressure to win the support of Senator Joe Manchin III, whose decisive vote in a 50-50 chamber made him the president’s most delicate negotiating partner. Biden had invited Manchin to the Oval Office to privately make the case for his marquee domestic policy legislation. Just before Manchin arrived, he turned to Vice President Kamala Harris.

What he needed from her was not strategy or advice. He needed her to only say a quick hello, which she did before turning on her heel and leaving the room for another meeting.

The moment, described as an exchange of “brief pleasantries” by a senior White House official and confirmed by two other people who were briefed on it, was a vivid reminder of the complexity of the job held by Harris: While most presidents promise their vice presidents access and influence, at the end of the day, power and responsibility are not shared equally, and Biden does not always feel a need for input from Harris as he navigates some of his most important relationships.

In Harris’s case, she came to the job without strong ties to key senators; one person briefed on the Oval Office meeting said it would be more productive if the discussion between Biden and Manchin remained private. It is unclear that the president had much sway on his own, either, given the senator’s decision this week to break with the White House over the domestic policy bill.

But without a headlining role in some of the most critical decisions facing the White House, the vice president is caught between criticism that she is falling short and resentment among supporters who feel she is being undercut by the administration she serves. And her allies increasingly are concerned that while Biden relied on her to help him win the White House, he does not need her to govern.

“I think she was an enormous help to the ticket during the campaign,” said Mark Buell, one of Harris’s earliest fund-raisers since her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. “I would like to see her employed in the same way, now that they’re implementing their objectives or goals.”

The urgency surrounding her position is tied to whether the president, who at 79 is the oldest person to hold the office, will run for re-election in 2024. He told ABC News on Wednesday that he would run again if he was in good health. But questions about Harris’s readiness for the top job are starting far earlier than is usual for an administration in its first year.

Harris declined requests for an interview, but White House officials said that her relationship with Biden is a partnership. “The vice president has diligently worked alongside the president coordinating with partners, allies and Democratic members of the House and Senate to advance the goals of this administration,” said Sabrina Singh, Harris’s deputy press secretary.

According to interviews with more than two dozen White House officials, political allies, elected officials and former aides, Harris is still struggling to define herself in the Biden White House or meaningfully correct what she and her aides feel is an unfair perception that she is adrift in the job.

Even in the best of times, the constraints of the job often make the vice president an afterthought, and not everyone asked to serve accepts it. (“I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin,” Daniel Webster, a former secretary of state, said in the 1840s about declining the job.)