Being the president’s No. 2 can be stifling—an afterthought at best and a liability at worst.
Those constraints were on display during Vice President Harris’s tour of Africa, where she avoided the big news stories and issued a steady supply of lower-priority announcements, showing the greater effort required for her to bend the federal bureaucracy, with less staff help to do it and a class of travel one notch below President Biden’s.
Over the course of the eight-day trip that concludes this weekend, Ms. Harris did bring substantive help for the continent—$1 billion in commitments to support women, and a pledge for more U.S. investments to counter the widening influence of China in Africa, even if she avoided describing it as such. The trip also gave her some license to depart from prepared remarks and flash some emotion, something she hasn’t often done since her selection as Mr. Biden’s governing partner.
Attracting attention to a vice presidential foreign trip—short of a major gaffe—is always difficult, and Ms. Harris’s voyage was no different as she and Mr. Biden prepare for a likely re-election campaign. Some Washington outlets skipped the sojourn, and the trip’s timing overlapped with other major international news: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced mass protests that threatened his government; Finland moved closer to joining NATO, a potential blow for Russia; and Taiwan’s leader visited the U.S. And, at home, former President Donald Trump was indicted.
After news first broke about the imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia, Ms. Harris kept quiet when asked, following a protocol that the White House should officially speak first, even though she was seven hours ahead of Washington.
The U.S. Constitution gives scant power to the vice president, making it an office each occupant has had to define on his—and now her—own. The base-level role involves showing up. “And here I am,” were Ms. Harris’s first words upon walking into the Jubilee House, Ghana’s presidential palace.
Being second fiddle also means there are fewer concrete deliverables. In Ghana, she announced $100 million in security aid to help Western African nations fend off threats from militant Islamists. She noted that the administration was seeking money for direct aid to Ghana, but the partisan split in Washington complicates her ability to deliver it. In Tanzania, she highlighted parts of Mr. Biden’s budget request that would help the country—spotlighting a document that Republicans described as dead on arrival in the House.
Ms. Harris instead leaned on the softer power of the office she holds. In Ghana, she interacted with a delegation of about 60 U.S.-based business and cultural leaders who made the trans-Atlantic trip and attended a state banquet in Accra at the invitation of the Ghanaian government.
They added Western-style celebrity sparkle to the Ghanaian seaside city, with actor Idris Elba holding forth in the lobby of Accra’s gleaming Kempinski Hotel before attending the dinner, Emmy-award winning actress Sheryl Lee Ralph breaking into song and director Spike Lee posing for photos before taking his seat at the Ghanaian state banquet in the country’s presidential palace.
The same convening power was on display as she rolled out a series of new public-private investments in the continent, many of which came after she worked the phones with CEOs and corporate leaders, according to her staff, marshaling about $1 billion in investments aimed at getting more women in the continent online and supporting female businesswomen.
Ms. Harris used her itinerary to highlight the aspirational aspect of the continent. Instead of visits to AIDS clinics and traditional villages, staples of past trips by U.S. officials, she danced a smidge at an Accra recording studio. She met with African businesswomen in a trendy Accra neighborhood where she opened up about the challenges women face as they become more successful.
The most emotional piece came on her second full day in Africa, when Ms. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, choppered from Accra to tour the Cape Coast Castle. It is a whitewashed 15th century structure that, according to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, was originally built by the Swedish and used by European merchants as a prison for Africans before they were forced to board slave ships bound for the Americas.
Ms. Harris’s father is from Jamaica, an island destination for many of the trans-Atlantic slave journeys. While Ms. Harris never explicitly connected the tour to her family’s heritage, she had a visible emotional reaction to experiencing a place so central to the heritage of many Black Americans.
Standing just outside the castle doors toward the end of the tour, the vice president brought both hands to her face. As a guide explained some of the history, she held up her hand, almost as if to protest what she was hearing.
“Anguish…reeks from this place,” said Ms. Harris, in brief remarks she made while Atlantic waves crashed below.
Source: wsj.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.
