A Vice Presidential learning curve: How Kamala Harris picked her shots

Washington: When a draft of a blockbuster Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked in 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris met with Ron Klain, then the White House chief of staff, in her West Wing office. He had an idea: She should lead a new task force on abortion rights.

She seemed uncertain. “Why?” she asked.

“We need a real leader, and you’re the leader,” Klain responded.

Harris asked for time to think about it. She did not want to just give a speech without substance. And she had spent much of the previous year and a half trying to avoid being typecast as the first female vice president. But as the White House began mapping out executive actions to defend access to abortion, she began to see the possibilities and accepted the role.

It was a moment that captured the essence of the Harris vice presidency. Deliberate and disciplined, cautious and at times risk averse, she saw trapdoors around her and wanted to avoid them. She considered herself a team player, but could not always be sure the team had her best interests at heart. She gravitated to issues on which she thought she could make a difference without upstaging President Joe Biden, but was rarely promoted as a critical player in the administration.

The court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision eliminating a constitutional right to abortion proved to be an issue on which Harris could take the lead, one that Biden, a churchgoing Catholic, did not feel as comfortable addressing. She found her voice as the administration’s champion of abortion rights, changing some minds among Democrats who had harbored doubts about her. And she paved the way to the moment when she will accept her party’s nomination for president this week.

Harris’ record as vice president is complex, as described in interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials and allies, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating her or the president. She has done the dutiful things she has been asked to do. She led a labor task force and a gun safety office. She traveled to places the president had no time to visit. She has been sent to deliver private messages to the leaders of Poland and Germany and to break key tie votes in the Senate.

She rarely took positions at odds with the president’s, at least not in meetings attended by others, but she made her mark quietly at times. She pushed him to pick Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court when he was getting advice to the contrary. Her candidate was selected for the head of the World Bank.

She developed arguments to make Biden comfortable with approving expansive student debt relief when he hesitated. She lobbied him to endorse an exception to the Senate filibuster rule to push forward voting rights legislation. And she advocated speaking out early on the impact of the Dobbs decision on in vitro fertilization despite resistance from some in the West Wing.

But she was also saddled with no-win assignments, most notably tackling the root causes of illegal immigration from Central America, exposing her to Republican criticism. Stung by an early television interview that went awry, she became skittish about mistakes, asking whether an appearance or a line in a speech might produce another vicious viral clip. And her allies believed the president’s staff often clipped her wings, appropriating her initiatives for him to announce without building up her own public profile.

“She would be very careful to make sure she was making a constructive contribution,” Klain said in an interview. “Most often when you’re vice president, that’s behind closed doors, so she did that. But I don’t think it’s a question of caution. I think it’s a question of loyalty and dedication and focus on the mission.”

At the same time, he acknowledged that she was not always well served by the White House. “We were all united behind the idea she should be successful. We just didn’t find the path to do it,” he said.

“People really liked her,” Klain added. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm for her. And I don’t think we did a good enough job of selling her.”

A learning curve

Being vice president is one of the trickiest jobs in Washington. It comes with a nice blue-and-white plane, a lovely mansion and a decent office in the West Wing, but nothing is guaranteed. The old saw is that there are only two job requirements for the vice president in the Constitution — presiding over the Senate and checking to see how the president is feeling each morning. As Walter Mondale famously put it, the vice president essentially is “standby equipment.”

The office’s only real power is derivative, depending entirely on the whim of the president and the skill of a vice president to find openings to make oneself relevant without crossing the boss. The challenge for Harris was especially pronounced because she was flowing against the historical tide.

Until she came along, every vice president but one going back to 1977 had more experience in Washington than the president they served and therefore could provide wisdom, guidance and connections. (Think Mondale for Jimmy Carter, Dick Cheney for George W. Bush and Biden for Barack Obama.)

After a half-century in Washington, Biden did not need Harris to explain the capital to him, or at least did not think he did. She came with scant experience in international affairs that the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair particularly valued. He did not assign her to lead major negotiations with lawmakers as Obama had him do.

“The main thing was you don’t get in the way of a sitting president,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian she consulted about her role. “Vice presidents need to stay somewhat second tier and in the shadows. You can’t have a Biden foreign policy and here’s the Harris one. I had a feeling she wanted to follow recent ones like how Barack Obama and Joe Biden collaborated or Bill Clinton and Al Gore — ones that were functional.”

Harris came into the role without a close relationship with her new president. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the two did not campaign together much in 2020, and there were sore feelings among some around Biden, including first lady Jill Biden, stemming from Harris’ attack on him during a Democratic primary debate over his position on busing to integrate schools in the 1970s.

Biden made a point of offering her the same access Obama had given him, including a weekly lunch when the two were both in town.

“When I started running the transition, the president’s first directive to me was the vice president must be involved in every decision that hits his desk, from start to finish,” said Jeff Zients, who was co-chair of the transition and succeeded Klain as chief of staff.

But she had limited time in Washington at that point. She had spent only a couple of years as a senator before starting her run for the presidency. “She had a learning curve as vice president like Joe Biden had a learning curve as vice president,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.

He noted that a lot of people assumed she was vice president only because she was a Black woman, a perception that was unfair but hard to shake. “They didn’t give her time to learn or room to grow,” Clyburn said. “That was the problem.”

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the assistant Democratic leader, said partnerships between presidents and vice presidents are inherently challenging. “This is a tough assignment, being vice president,” he said. “It’s fraught with tension and rivalry and history.” But for all that, he added, “I don’t see any of that in the relationship between Kamala and Joe Biden.”

Taking grief

As she settled into the West Wing, Harris set her style. Like the former prosecutor she was, she grilled staff members, stoking anxiety. Her team went through multiple shake-ups early in the administration.

Some former White House officials described her as a “tough boss” who would challenge aides she sensed were unprepared. “Are we ready to go?” she would say. “Let’s go.”

While Biden’s meetings could meander for hours, Harris insisted aides be concise, prepared and to the point. She regularly interjected, pushing for evidence or details. She demanded that staff members imagine themselves in the place of people affected by policies. If aides filibustered, she declared it was time to move on. Her team knew that briefings were not to stretch beyond 45 minutes.

“She wanted to keep things tight,” said Ricardo Zúñiga, who served as the State Department’s special envoy for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and worked with Harris on migration issues. “The meetings ended on time. She did not like people who just kind of went on. Which is good.”

Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, said she was disciplined about pushing for help for small businesses and community financial institutions. “She is both someone who calls on a regular basis to ask how things are going and then requests more information by paper,” he said.

Views vary on whether she was well prepared. Most current and former administration officials interviewed described her as a diligent consumer of background briefings, but there were some who said they found the opposite and were surprised that she would be unprepared before some meetings.

Some attributed that to Harris’ preference not to read at night, unlike many politicians, but instead read in the morning, meaning that she did not necessarily arrive at the office as ready as she would be later in the day.

Some outside the administration came to feel that she was not as interested in contradictory views. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, said he tried to reach out to her team to talk about border security but his requests were never answered.

“I don’t want to say I told you so, but it did happen the way I said it would happen,” Cuellar said of the record levels of illegal border crossings earlier in Biden’s presidency. “I think anyone that’s dealt with this issue knows that it’s a very difficult issue, and I do think she distanced herself.”

Harris’ interview with Lester Holt of NBC News in June 2021 proved an early turning point. When Holt asked why she had not visited the border if she was going to work on immigration issues, she snapped, “And I haven’t been to Europe.”

She was deeply bruised by the ensuing backlash. “She felt like that interview had set us back, and she felt bad about that,” Klain said.

He recalled trying to find photographs of her visiting the border when she was California attorney general in hopes of rebutting Republican critics. “We wanted to try to find proof that she’d been there during that, but never could find pictures or anything,” he said. “But look, I thought she did a very good job with her part of the assignment, and she was taking grief needlessly.”

She largely avoided major interviews for many months and second-guessed herself regularly. She asked aides whether she should laugh in public for fear that it would be used to ridicule her. While editing speech drafts, she would single out lines to ask if they would provide fodder for Fox News segments attacking her.

Overseas messenger

Harris spent much of her first two years on Capitol Hill, where her tiebreaking vote gave Democrats control of a Senate then divided 50-50. She has broken 33 ties, more than any vice president in American history.

While most of those were to confirm appointments, she also provided the decisive vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, a catchall measure that included the largest ever investment in clean energy, higher corporate taxes and provisions helping seniors pay for medicine, including a $35-a-month cap on insulin.

But there is little testimony that she played a significant role in brokering the deals leading up to such legislation. She was acutely deferential to Biden, who had spent 36 years in the Senate and considered himself a master legislator, even if his experience on Capitol Hill was dated.

When Democrats wanted Biden to come out in favor of eliminating the Senate filibuster for voting rights legislation, they recommended to Harris’ staff that she prod him into doing it by coming out publicly for such a move herself — doing to Biden what he once did to Obama on same-sex marriage. She refused, instead preferring to push the president privately until he did finally agree, although they still failed to muster enough support to change the rule.

Harris likewise was careful not to contradict Biden on foreign policy, another area of expertise for him. She supported his decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, which led to a chaotic withdrawal and a Taliban return to power. She backed his efforts to stand by Ukraine against Russia’s invasion and Israel against Hamas terrorism, although she publicly emphasized concern for Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip more than he did.

Where she privately differed from Biden on foreign policy was more on framing. She did not think much of his democracy versus autocracy theme, reasoning that a number of close U.S. allies are not democracies. Instead, aides said, she sees foreign affairs through the lens of her legal background, stressing America’s role in defending the international rules-based order. Their different approaches, however, generally led to the same conclusion.

Harris often served as Biden’s messenger overseas. She represented him for three years in a row at the Munich Security Conference. At the first, she met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine just five days before Russia’s invasion in February 2022 and tried to warn him about what was coming. At the second, she declared that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity.” At the third, she quietly talked with foreign leaders as part of an effort to broker what would become the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.

On another occasion, she was on Air Force Two flying to Warsaw, Poland, when she received a call from Biden telling her to warn Polish leaders against sending MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. In their private meeting, Harris told President Andrzej Duda of Poland that such a move would risk escalation. He agreed to work it out through NATO channels.

Outside the box

Much of Harris’ work in the Biden administration focused on issues that were important but did not often make headlines.

She was put in charge of or took interest in a variety of subjects, including child care and paid leave, maternal health, artificial intelligence, maritime security, housing, community banks, community health centers and the child tax credit. She helped raise billions of dollars in private and public funds to address poverty and corruption in Central America.

A particular interest was gun violence. Chiraag Bains, a policy adviser to the president, recalled walking into the dining room off the Oval Office in June 2021 to find Biden and Harris talking about the issue over salads. “I remember the vice president being energetically engaged and sort of advising the president to be as aggressive as possible to take federal action to reduce gun violence,” Bains said.

When Biden created the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention last year, he put Harris in charge of it.

She visited Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the site of a 2018 mass shooting, to announce the creation of a center to help states enforce red flag laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.

Gregory Jackson, deputy director of the office and a gun violence survivor, said more than 420 gun stores had been shut down for violations. “We have a vice president that pushes and pushes our team to always think outside the box,” he said.

The vice president has played a role in significant personnel choices as well. When Biden was considering a new president of the World Bank, Harris successfully proposed Ajay Banga, a former Mastercard CEO.

She was also deeply involved in Biden’s only Supreme Court appointment, interviewing all three finalists and studying their legal records. While she considered Leondra R. Kruger, a California Supreme Court justice, a “very sharp lawyer,” she concluded that the justice might be too cautious for the moment, according to a former White House official.

J. Michelle Childs, a district judge, had the support of both Clyburn and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, making her the choice of least resistance. But Harris concluded that Jackson, a federal appeals judge, would be the boldest option, the former official and Klain said. “Joe, you may only get one chance to do this as president, and you want to be proud of your legacy here,” she told Biden, according to Klain.

She found other moments to influence Biden. When he was reluctant to use executive authority to provide extensive student debt relief, she had a memo drafted addressing his concerns. To his worry about benefiting “private elite schools,” the memo said she could counter by saying that “only 0.3% of federal loan borrowers attended Ivy League schools.” In response to his preference for legislation rather than executive action, the memo noted that he was already relying on his own authority to pause loan payments.

Former Labor Secretary Martin Walsh, who led a task force on worker empowerment with Harris while in the administration, said that she was strikingly detail-oriented. “Staff gets into the weeds on this stuff, but you wouldn’t think a principal would,” he said. “And she really, really got into the weeds — in a good way.”

Mitch Landrieu, who oversaw the administration’s implementation of the bipartisan infrastructure program, said Harris has “really got good policy chops” and was “integrally involved” in how to structure initiatives including expanding broadband internet service and replacing lead pipes.

At first, he said, “people did not give her a benefit of the doubt, and I think they tried to caricature her and they were harsh.” But he added, “everybody grows into the job.”

A historic decision

Air Force Two was just taking off when the Supreme Court issued its decision overturning Roe v. Wade, several weeks after Klain first walked into her office.

Harris was heading to Chicago to talk about maternal health, but scrapped the speech. The first woman elected to national office, Harris knew that all eyes would be on her. “She got very focused, very fast,” recalled Durbin, who was accompanying her that day.

While her plane cruised west, her legal team in Washington went over the ruling line by line and sent her takeaways. “Are they actually going this far on this?” she asked, according to a former aide. Harris was particularly focused on Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence suggesting that same-sex marriage or contraceptive rights could be next.

When she landed, Harris headed to the YMCA in Plainfield, Illinois, where she was scheduled to visit, but skipped the tour to huddle in a room with her staff to craft a new speech.

Three hours later, she finally took the microphone, denouncing what she said was “the first time in the history of our nation that a constitutional right has been taken from the people of America.”

Whether she realized it at the time or not, it was the start of a new chapter in her vice presidency. It may have taken her a few hours to decide how to say it, but in the end, she knew what she wanted to say. “She knew this was a historic decision,” Durbin said, “and she wanted to get it right.”