A top White House communications staffer is reportedly pointing the finger at Vice President Kamala Harris for perceived failures to meet “sky-high expectations.”
According to Politico’s Playbook, part of a forthcoming book by The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns examines President Joe Biden’s first year in office and details “frustrations at the highest echelons of the White House between the Biden and Harris camp.”
While Biden reportedly warned staff about stoking negative stories about his vice president, one senator told Martin and Burns that Harris’ “frustration level” about her “predicament” is “up in the stratosphere” and said her “political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy.'”
As the outlet notes, “Harris allies complained throughout the first year of the administration that she was handed an impossible portfolio.”
In one example of a source of friction, Harris reportedly blamed Biden in part for the stalled voting rights push — one of the issues she was tapped to head up — because he was reluctant to call for changes to the Senate filibuster.
Politico reports, “Harris told Biden aides that she couldn’t be as forceful publicly as she wanted to be. She told him she couldn’t go all out until ‘voters knew that Biden himself was willing to back the procedural steps required to’ pass legislation.””
According to Martin and Burns’ account, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield pushed back on claims that the White House was “mismanaging” the vice president.
“In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations: Her Senate office had been messy, and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff,” the book reads.
Bedingfield shot back at the reporting in the book, telling Politico, “The fact that no one working on this book bothered to call to fact check this unattributed claim tells you what you need to know.”
“Vice President Harris is a force in this administration, and I have the utmost respect for the work she does every day to move the country forward,” she added.
Harris’ office has been plagued by stories about disfunction and a toxic work environment.