Ron Klain, former White House Chief of Staff to President Joe Biden, admitted during a recent interview that, although everyone in the Biden administration was “united” in their belief that Vice President Kamala Harris should “succeed,” they struggled mightily in finding a way to make that actually happen.
Klain spoke to The New York Times about Harris — who was catapulted to the top of the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket just a month ago despite three years of decidedly poor approval ratings and the fact that she’s never won a single primary vote on her own merits — and explained that it took the Biden White House some time to find any issue on which Harris could lead with any real success.
The NYT framed the piece very differently, running the headline, “A Vice Presidential Learning Curve: How Kamala Harris Picked Her Shots.”
Most of the article centered on Harris really coming into her own when she took charge of an abortion rights task force after the Supreme Court struck down the 1973 abortion law Roe v. Wade — and claimed she had been careful about that because “she had spent much of the previous year and a half trying to avoid being typecast as the first female vice president.”
It wasn’t until 11 paragraphs in that the outlet added Klain’s concern that the White House may not have done enough to make Harris and her contributions more visible.
“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. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for her. And I don’t think we did a good enough job of selling her.”
Jeffrey Zients, who became Biden’s chief of staff after Klain left the job, agreed that Harris had been much more involved in the president’s decisions than people often saw. “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.”
Zients’ comments may also prove an obstacle for Harris as she pushes ahead with her own presidential campaign, given her apparent desire to put as much distance as possible between herself and the disastrous policies implemented by the Biden-Harris administration.
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