By Noah Rothman
Thursday, July 25, 2024
Since Joe Biden announced his intention to withdraw
from American public life at the end of his term, the Trump campaign and its
Republican allies have focused on their new opponent’s subpar performance
handling border security. The GOP’s strategy makes sense. For all the media’s
efforts to revise or even erase history, Harris was, in function if not title, the
Biden administration’s “border czar.” And yet, the Republican Party’s approach to
this messaging campaign has so far been to frame Harris as a fully empowered
functionary who nevertheless bungled her charge. In reality, the Biden
administration set Harris up to fail, as a way of providing the president cover
for his own dismal mishandling of the border.
It was only two months after Biden’s inauguration, with
all Trump’s Covid-era restrictions still in place, that encounters between
migrants and patrol agents exploded at the U.S.–Mexico border, soon to eclipse
even their pre-pandemic highs. That same month, the president tapped
his vice president not to bring the crisis under control but to take the blame
for it.
Harris was not empowered to oversee the administration’s
policing efforts on the border, spearhead negotiations on the Hill to reform
U.S. asylum law, or negotiate deportation regimes with the nations beyond
Mexico’s borders from which most migrants were coming. She was charged with
“talking” to the leaders of Mexico and the nations that make up Central
America’s “Northern Triangle” to address the “root causes” of migration. You
know, “gang violence and trafficking and cartels,” the president said at the time, but also “natural
disasters, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes.” If the vice president had the
power to mitigate phenomena like that, she’d be overqualified to merely preside
over the Senate.
In fact, Harris wasn’t granted any power at all, and she
treated the role with which she’d been saddled like the burden it was. Within
weeks, her conspicuous failure to even visit the border she’d been
tasked to oversee became a political liability — one her lack of political talent only made worse. But within a
few months of her accession to the role, Harris started producing the only
results she could: A commitment from twelve private companies to “invest” in the region, the
deployment of a USAID disaster team to provide “food assistance” and
“poverty reduction,” and roughly $300 million in humanitarian assistance.
All this was supposed to mitigate the “push” factors
driving migrants north, but its effects soon proved negligible. The
initiative’s failure came as no surprise to Kamala Harris or her staff.
By June 2021, Harris’s aides were telling reporters that
they had begun to “panic” over the torment to which Biden had consigned them.
As CNN reported at the time, “her assignment was being
mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the
border.” Indeed, “potentially opening her up to criticism for the handling of
the seemingly intractable problem” was why Harris was tapped to be the face of
the administration’s failures on the border in the first place.
The president’s staff never missed an opportunity to undermine Harris’s conduct in her new role, promulgating
the subtle implication that the horrors at the border were an outgrowth of her
mismanagement of the crisis. The exercise in misdirection was so effective for
the Biden administration that it went back to the same well on several
subsequent occasions. Harris was soon given the task of combating state-level Republican efforts to reform
voting systems, over which she had zero authority. The White House even
dispatched her to Europe to stop Russia from invading Ukraine just three days before Russian forces cascaded over the
Ukrainian border. All the while, White House staff scoffed at Harris’s failures
in on-background conversations with the press.
“Her portfolio is trash,” Harris ally Bakari Sellers complained in October 2021. Those sentiments
were likely reflective of Harris’s own consternation. “Maybe I don’t say ‘no’
enough,” she
half-joked in an interview with BET that year. But the reported tensions
between Harris’s office and Biden’s staff and the lingering hostility toward
Harris nursed by Jill Biden, who was said to have not forgiven the vice president for sandbagging her husband
in the Democratic Party’s 2019 primary debates, are indicative of why she was
treated like a receptacle into which the most thankless and insurmountable
tasks were dumped.
The president’s staffers routinely retailed the notion that Harris was unelectable to the presidency, in part because
of how poorly she managed the roles with which they had burdened her.
Engineering this self-fulfilling prophecy served the president’s purpose at the
time, which was to neutralize his most viable Democratic rival. In the end,
even his methodical effort to undermine his own likely successor could not save
Biden from the ravages of time.
Republicans may not want to make too much of this history
in the fear that it somehow renders Harris a sympathetic figure, but that is
misguided. Harris is indelibly tainted by her association with the Biden
administration’s failures. The GOP should not shy away from Harris’s record,
which is a story both of incompetence and of how little faith her own allies
have in her political acumen and capabilities as an executive. If Harris’s own
boss could not trust her with some of the awesome duties and powers of his
office, why should we?
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