Some Goofy Former Harris Staffers Put Out By VP Daring To Ask ‘Why?’
She acted like they worked for her or something!
People seem to like Vice President Kamala Harris. Her approval rating as the Democratic nominee is impressive, considering the current hyper-partisan climate. She’s also very good at interacting with voters like a normal mammal. (Watch the clip above.)
However, the Washington Post decided to revisit the narrative that Harris is not a “joyful warrior” in this article from Friday: “Kamala Harris ran her office like a prosecutor. Not everyone liked that.”
She is a prosecutor, so it’s unclear why this would surprise any reasonable staffer. If she’d last worked as an ice cream truck driver, I could understand if they expected daily Nutty Buddies. Maybe the Post means Harris ran her office as if everyone was a criminal suspect on trial for their very life, which is a great reality TV series format but probably not an ideal working environment.
Post reporters Dan Diamond and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. write, “Some of Harris’s early staff was also discomfited by her prosecutorial leadership style, former staffers said, which included pointed questions from Harris about footnotes in their reports or the reasons behind why certain items had been added to her schedule.”
“Discomfited” means to feel “embarrassed” or “uneasy.” Those aren’t emotions I’d expect from people staffing the vice president of the United States. This isn’t Fisher Price’s My First Job.
“It’s stressful to brief her, because she’s read all the materials, has annotated it and is prepared to talk through it,” said one former aide.
“You can’t come to the vice president and just ask her to do something,” said another staffer. “You need to have a why.”
This might’ve confused some of her staff considering she’s a Black woman and all, but she is their boss. You can’t just “ask her to do something” and expect her to comply without question. White House interns probably aren’t so blindly obedient.
That behavior manifests in other encounters, the staffer continued, such as when someone pays her compliments. “She’ll turn to them and say ‘why?,’ and that throws them off,” the staffer said.
Apparently, Harris asking her staff “why?” caused some of them to completely break down like that super computer in The Prisoner TV show. They weren’t equipped for such existential thought.
I’ve worked in management and something I’ve noticed is that young white employees, even from the most liberal backgrounds, chafe at taking orders from people of color, especially women. It also doesn’t help if these young people attended those fancy private schools where teachers “discovered the curriculum” along with the students.
Let Harris Be Harris
As the first woman vice president, Kamala Harris is often compared to fictional VP Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) from the HBO comedy Veep. Meyer is difficult but she’s not in any way an inspiring leader. She is vacuous and holds no sincere beliefs. Personal ambition is only animating principle. An entire episode’s plot could’ve revolved around the “why?” debacle and not in a good way.
Miranda Priestly is the demanding boss in Lauren Weisberger’s book The Devil Wears Prada, and as the title suggests, she’s inclined to wear Prada. Perhaps more to the point, she’s abusive and dismissive to her staff. Meryl Streep gives the character more depth and nuance in the 2006 movie, but she’s still ultimately an antagonistic force who betrays others to protect her own interests.
Harris is nothing like these fictional woman bosses, and it’s a little surprising that some political staff members would react so poorly to alleged behavior that idealized fictional President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) demonstrated regularly on The West Wing.
Bartlet isn’t cuddly. He’s overly analytical at times and challenging personally. He doesn’t tolerate fools. During his first presidential campaign, he does far more than just ask “why?” when some soon-to-be former advisers suggest that he refer to his primary opponent as “the other guy.”
“You’re not afraid it’s gonna make me look like I can’t remember his name?” Bartlet asks, and when someone is dumb enough to say “no,” he lays into him:
“I think it’s going to make me look like I can’t remember his name. I think it’s going to make me look addled. I think it’s going to make me look dotty. And even if it didn’t make me look like those things, it would remain a stupid idea. What’s next? Nothing? Excellent!”
Bartlet has a habit of saying, “What’s next?” to signal that he wants to move on from a subject, and he has little patience for belaboring the point. He gets it. So “what’s next?”
His staff idolizes him, though, even when he’s difficult or keeps them in the dark on major issues. They consider it an honor to serve this great man.
Of course, the great man narrative is rarely extended to women leaders. I think it’s because we’re all conditioned to see male leaders as father figures who we must please and women leaders as maternal figures whose sole duty is to make us feel good about ourselves. (Selina Meyer and Miranda Priestly are specifically written as terrible mother figures.) Harris’s aides talk about how she “stresses” them out, but there’s no indication in these leaks that they feel any professional obligation to Harris.
In a fourth season West Wing episode, President Bartlet calls out Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), who’s gotten himself in a tight spot because he doesn’t want to disappoint Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) — a man who Josh doesn’t just see as a boss but a second father. “The difference between you and me,” Bartlet tells him, “is that I want to be the guy. You want to be the guy the guy counts on.”
I do think Harris is the “guy,” so she can damn well ask “why?” She also deserves a staff that respects her as a leader. She needs staff members she can count on. That was a problem in the early days of her vice presidency, enough so that President Joe Biden had to tell her staff to seal up the leaks or people would lose their jobs.
She seems to have fixed the issue: A former senior administration official told the Post that Harris “has developed a group of people around her that she trusts, that trust each other, and have the ability to work together as a coherent team. And that’s really critical.”
Harris holds herself to a high standard and demands the same from her staff, but it’s not for the glory of Prada or her own ego. She knows that when you’re doing the people’s business, the hard work never ends.
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“It’s stressful to brief her, because she’s read all the materials, has annotated it and is prepared to talk through it,” said one former aide.
Sooooooo you have to do real work because your boss does hers? Oh no, that must be so hard for you!
The Washington Post would never write that story about a man. Assholes.