This Thanksgiving, the knives are out for Kamala Harris. This week, she became the first woman to serve as acting president, when power briefly transferred to her while Joe Biden was under anesthesia. Nevertheless, rumors are swirling that Biden won’t seek re-election (he and his team vehemently insist he will), and there’s growing concern that Harris—who has had more than her fair share of gaffes and missteps—lacks the political instincts to lead Democrats into the promised land.
Biden’s selection of Harris to be his running mate in 2020 made some political sense. She helped unite the party and balance the ticket. Indeed, they won. But in late 2021, Biden’s needs have shifted. The Virginia gubernatorial election, coupled with subsequent polling, suggests that many suburbanites are turning against a Democratic Party they perceive to be too progressive. At the same time, Biden faces serious challenges, including rising inflation, a border crisis, supply chain troubles, violent crime rates, and more.
The things he has tried to get help from Harris on, starting with immigration, have not panned out. In general, Harris’s performance has only contributed to the sense that this is an administration that isn’t quite ready for primetime. If Harris is the bridge to the future, that bridge isn’t holding its weight.
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But is the criticism fair? During a recent discussion for Bloggingheads.TV, my friend Bill Scher, a liberal columnist for Washington Monthly and Real Clear Politics, reminded me that being vice president is a tough gig. As John Nance Garner famously quipped, the job isn’t worth a “warm bucket of spit.” You don’t want to overshadow the president, and you can’t really differ with him, so it’s almost, by definition impossible to look like a strong leader. You go to funerals. You get handed thankless projects. This is why, although veeps often ascend to the presidency (think LBJ or Gerald Ford), they generally aren’t elected to immediately succeed their boss.
The most recent exception was George H.W. Bush, who basically just won Ronald Reagan’s third term. But is he a helpful model? Sitting at a less than 40 percent approval rating (and Harris’s is lower than that), Biden doesn’t look to be in the same league as the Gipper. But if somehow things turn around the way they did for Reagan after coming through a recession and having a rough midterm election in 1982, Harris might be in a good position to try and replicate Bush’s feat in 2028.
But even in the highly unlikely event history were to repeat itself, it’s worth noting that Bush still had to fight for the Republican nomination in a fairly crowded 1988 primary, still had to overcome the “wimp” factor the media labeled him with, and still had to run an aggressively negative campaign against a less-than-charismatic Democratic opponent, all in order to defy history.
But that’s not Harris’s only challenge. Scher points out that there are basically two models for veeps. The first is an old D.C. hand who provides “insider” cred and experience to the ticket. The second is the inverse situation, where the president is the insider and the running mate balances the ticket by virtue of some other qualities, such as age, identity, or charisma.
In recent history, the former model has been much more common. Walter Mondale, Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Biden himself, and Mike Pence all had more D.C. experience than their respective principals.
This model also seems to be the better model, in terms of boosting the image of the vice president. In this scenario, the veep generally has built up lots of friends and contacts in the media and the bureaucracy. When the president slips up, other elites can fantasize about how much more competent and sane things would be if (fill in the blank) was running the show.
