Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 5/22/2021
This long and mostly friendly Edward-Isaac Dovere piece on Kamala Harris is pretty revealing once you shear the piece of the requisite “first black woman VP” rah rah fluff bits:
Air Force Two is a smaller plane than Air Force One. The exterior is the same light-blue and white, but unlike the commander in chief’s plane, the vice president’s aircraft is open plan—from the back, you can see all the way to the front, where a small office doubles as a bedroom. Kamala Harris spends most of her Air Force Two flights in that office, with the door closed. She doesn’t work the plane, the way Joe Biden or even Mike Pence did.
Snip.
For a political world in palace-intrigue withdrawal post-Trump, the Biden-Harris dynamic drips with promise. Harris tried to propel her own presidential campaign by calling Biden a relic and pointedly not a racist in their first debate. But he rolled on to victory while her campaign fell apart, and now her political existence is in limbo while everyone waits to see how long he wants to remain in charge.
Snip.
The woman who launched her presidential campaign to 22,000 people packing the streets of Oakland—about three times more people than showed up for Biden’s launch—has had to adjust to a smaller role than the one she once campaigned for. A few weeks ago, in Chicago, she made awkward small talk with a window washer at a vaccination site. She asked what the tallest building he’d ever worked on was. “Trump Tower,” down by the river, he told her.
Zing!
The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression. And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience. (She often mentions an episode in which a Washington Post reporter mistook the cheer of the historic Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha for “screeches,” I was told.) She particularly doesn’t like the word cautious, and aides look out for synonyms too. Careful, guarded, and hesitant don’t go over well. But she continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public, and declines many interview requests and opportunities to speak for herself (including for this article). At times, she comes off as so uninteresting that television producers have started to wonder whether spending thousands of dollars to send people on trips with her is worthwhile, given how little usable material they get out of it.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=48168
