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Vice President Kamala Harris has still not called back Democrat Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren after many believed that Warren sniped at her in an interview.
It has been six weeks since Sen. Warren called to apologize after many believed that she insinuated that President Joe Biden should consider another vice presidential pick for the 2024 presidential election campaign but Harris has not called back, CNN reported.
Several people close to Warren said the senator was calling to explain her statement as purely a mistake – a fumbling, unintentional attempt to avoid stepping on a campaign announcement from the president. A spokesperson for Warren pointed to the statement the senator issued hours after the original interview clarifying what she said, and an additional person close to Warren cited a personal and political relationship that goes back to being the first senator to endorse Harris for Senate and said of her support, “she didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
Warren made her case to Harris’ chief of staff Lorraine Voles, who returned the senator’s call in place of Harris, a source familiar with the callback told CNN.
But the Warren moment is infuriating many in Harris’s circle: To them, it’s the latest in a long string of snubs to a vice president whom they say has never gotten the respect or support she deserves. Warren’s words sting even more, they say, because they came from a former rival who in 2020 hoped to be picked as Biden’s running mate instead.
Warren, who said she supports President Joe Biden seeking re-election, did not commit to supporting Harris as vice president on the ticket.
“I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team,” she said on Boston Public Radioin January. “I’ve known Kamala for a long time. I like Kamala. I knew her back when she was an attorney general and I was still teaching and we worked on the housing crisis together, so we go way back. But they need — they have to be a team, and my sense is they are — I don’t mean that by suggesting I think there are any problems. I think they are.”
But she quickly issued a statement to say that she fully supported the vice president after many Democrats were furious with her.
“I fully support the President’s and Vice President’s re-election together, and never intended to imply otherwise,” she said. “They’re a terrific team with a strong record of delivering for working families.”
The issue for many Democrats is that Sen. Warren is not the only one who has questioned Vice President Harris’ abilities and they want it to stop before the 2024 election campaign.
In January former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team responded to a report that claimed that she questioned the political instincts of Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Members of Congress, Democratic strategists, and other major party figures all said she had not made herself into a formidable leader,” The New York Times reported of the vice president.
The Times said that two Democrats it spoke to on the condition of anonymity said they had private conversations with Clinton, where she said that Harris lacked “the political instincts to clear a primary field.”
A spokesperson for Clinton did not deny that the former secretary of state had said those things about the vice president, but did say that the two women have “built and maintained a strong bond” about being a woman in a position of power and said that she is supportive of Harris.
The report on Clinton came just after another report by The Washington Post that said some top Democrats are concerned about the vice president’s political prospects.
“Such concerns about Harris’s political strength were repeated often by more than a dozen Democratic leaders in key states interviewed for this story,” it said. “Harris’s tenure has been underwhelming, they said, marked by struggles as a communicator and at times near-invisibility, leaving many rank-and-file Democrats unpersuaded that she has the force, charisma, and skill to mount a winning presidential campaign.”
“People are poised to pounce on anything — any misstep, any gaffe, anything she says — and so she’s probably not getting the benefit of the doubt,” Jacquelyn Bettadapur, the leader of the Cobb County Democrats in Georgia said. She said that people “don’t know enough about what she’s doing” and “it doesn’t help that she’s not [that] adept as a communicator.”
“Every fiber in my body wants her to be president; everything I’ve ever fought for is for someone like her to be president,” a South Carolina Democratic strategist said on the condition of anonymity. “I think she’s a good person with a good heart who can lead the country. But I don’t know that the people who have to make that happen to feel that way right now. I don’t know that she has what it takes to get over the hump in our present environment.
