“It would be easier to find Jimmy Hoffa's body than Kamala Harris. Where the hell is the vice president of the United States?
The emeritus professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago Charles Lipson asked this question, in a Newsweek column, in July 2021. Three months later, the FBI found new clues about the possible whereabouts of the body of the famous leader of the labor union. truckers whose disappearance in 1975, after a meeting with Mafia bosses, remains one of the country's great mysteries.
The FBI did not find Hoffa's body where it was told it might be, under an overpass near an old New Jersey airstrip. Harris, on the other hand, is reachable and in fact appears from time to time on a trip or meeting. But, in full political turmoil, Americans don't know much more about her than Hoffa.
After her stellar emergence as the first woman to reach the vice presidency, apart from dark skin and immigrant parents (he is Jamaican and she is Indian), Harris immediately disappeared, and almost completely, from the American public scene. Until the main media in the country began to comment on alleged and serious labor and environmental problems within her office.
First, in the fall of 2021, two early defections set off alarm bells around the White House: those of the vice president's communications director, Ashley Etienne, and the department's chief spokesperson, Symone Sanders.
Harris's team played down the departures and assured that both had been planned for a long time, arguments that did not convince the informants who had closely followed the matter. "What's going on in Harris's world?" they asked on CNN. And they responded with allusions to internal complaints about "dysfunctions, lack of focus" and an alleged disorientation of Harris herself because she was "leaving aside."
She denied everything. And as for her very limited role in the exercise of government tasks, her office suggested that it was a matter of a short time for that to change: the year 2022 would be the year of Kamala Harris, they came to say. In her environment and in the related media, she also insisted on how ungrateful and often necessarily silent her efforts were in areas as complicated as immigration management, abortion and the right to vote.
But in the spring of 2021, deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh and chief of staff Tina Flournoy also left. And in the fall, one of her longest-serving aides, Rohini Kosoglu, and her speechwriting director, Meghan Groob. These last outings were staged, however, among mutual praise between the unemployed and the vice president. And they were framed within much broader personnel movements with a view to preparing the mid-term elections.
In 2022, Harris has indeed made some somewhat flashy trips, to Poland and Romania, to Japan and South Korea, and to different states in the country itself. Last Saturday he met in Bangkok with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, after the summit between him and Joe Biden, and yesterday he visited the Philippines. Some visits with a much higher profile than usual in these two years of his career as the nation's second authority, but insufficient to begin to recover the relief lost in this time.
The vice president's approval ratings are also lower than those of Biden, who themselves have remained below 50% since the withdrawal of the troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. Today, support for Harris' work is around 40%, compared to 44% for the president.
All the vice presidents of recent times in the United States, with the notable exception of Dick Cheney, have had more or less long periods of shadow. The problem with the current number two is the contrast between its promising beginnings and its subsequent fall into oblivion.
Harris continues to feature in media pools for who could run for president if Biden resigns. But in his case, the projections seem less and less firm. “Many Democrats shudder at the thought of her as the candidate in 2024. They consider that as suicide for the party,” Franco wrote a few days ago in The NewYork Times, a professor of Public Policy and Journalism at Duke University in North Carolina. Bruni.
The good news for Kamala Harris is that that election is two years away.
