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Since taking office, Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to communicate her vision and the nature of her role to both the press and the public. As President Joe Biden, the country’s oldest-ever president, eyes reelection, questions about Harris’s readiness to step in as president if needed are urgent, if also seemingly taboo among Democrats. My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro profiled Harris for the November issue of The Atlantic, following her to Africa and around the U.S.—and even, in a first for a reporter during this administration, to the vice president’s residence. I called Elaina to discuss Harris’s public persona, why she’s had trouble communicating her success, and what she’s like outside Washington, D.C.

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Trouble Breaking Through

Lora Kelley: You write in your profile that, at earlier points in Harris’s career, “communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.” Now she’s in an arena where compelling rhetoric counts. Why has that transition been difficult for her?

Elaina Plott Calabro: Earlier in her career, Kamala Harris was a prosecutor in Alameda County and a district attorney in San Francisco. You are not looking to your DA for sweeping, inspiring speeches in the way you might, say, your U.S. senator. Communication as DA is so much more technical and fact-based. As Harris has gotten further away from that level of politics and moved onto a national stage, she’s found it more difficult to frame her communication in a way that captures the tangible nature of her success.

It’s not just Harris who is having trouble breaking through to voters right now. This is something that President Biden is struggling with as well. One prominent Democratic pollster recently told me that they’re mystified about what it takes to reach Americans at a communications level. In this post-2016 era, a lot of politicians, not just Harris, are struggling with how to achieve visibility in a time when Donald Trump can say one thing and it seems to dominate the airwaves for days.

Lora: In what contexts does Harris thrive?

Elaina: When Harris can talk one-on-one with people, hear their concerns and stress the ways in which her administration is working for them, and then bring what she’s learned back to Washington, that’s where she feels most effective and comes into her own as a politician. We’ve seen her do a lot more of that lately.

In one of the most telling conversations I had with her, she told me about a commencement speech that she once gave at the law school at UC Berkeley. She urged the students there to “embrace the mundane.” One reason that she doesn’t have a public presentation that immediately captivates people is that she sees her job as something that takes more than theatrics to do right. She takes seriously—and prefers to spend her time on—the slower-burn, day-to-day work she feels is needed to actually effect change.

Lora: You observed that Harris tends to play especially well outside of Washington. Why is that?

Elaina: In Washington, we tend to have a pretty static idea of what it means for a vice president to be successful. It’s obviously a very nebulous role, but if you look back at old headlines from past administrations, news outlets would often frame vice presidents as sort of the liaison to Capitol Hill for the White House.

Kamala Harris was never going to be Joe Biden’s anchor to Washington. President Biden started his first Senate term before she was even 10 years old. So her first several months on the job, she was also trying to figure out what role she could play. Once she was able to start getting out into the rest of the country, she came into her own. On the trail, she connects very visibly with regular people. She’s very warm and personable. When she’s actually on the ground with voters, she comes across as an entirely different politician from the existing caricature of her as someone unsure of herself who speaks in word-salad locutions.

Lora: You wrote that “perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021.” Do you think there’s anything she can or will do to change the way that people perceive her ahead of 2024?

Elaina: Kamala Harris had not been on the national stage for that long when she entered the White House. The Lester Holt interview she did in 2021 was very defining for her simply because it was one of the first major yardsticks by which people could measure her. The narrative that came out of that interview, in which she was viewed as unprepared and flippant, became really hard for her to get out from under. As one of her former aides told me, narrative is a very difficult thing to change.

Her willingness to talk with me, and to invite me to the residence, was emblematic of a desire on the part of her team to get her out there and engage more with the press as the campaign gets under way. They’re putting her in a position where more Americans are seeing her, and trying to create moments that can define the shape of her vice presidency, two and a half years after the one moment that has otherwise largely defined it.

Today’s News

In a landmark move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Unity leader Benny Gantz have agreed to establish an emergency wartime government. Republicans have narrowly nominated Representative Steve Scalise as speaker of the House; a full vote on the House floor has been delayed. Hurricane Lidia made landfall in Mexico as a Category 4 storm yesterday evening.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The Mississippi is losing its fight with the ocean, Nancy Walecki writes. A combination of drought and sea-level rise has sent a wedge of salt water moving up the river.

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Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

Cancel Amazon Prime

(From 2021)

By Ellen Cushing

Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. I hope you are spending it with your loved ones.

Prime Day is a singular and strange artifact, but then again, so is Prime, Amazon’s $119-a-year membership service, which buys subscribers free one-day shipping, plus access to streaming media, discounts at the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods, and a host of other perks. Prime is Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products.

Read the full article.