1,750
online users
thotties       tv/movies       gaming       gear       tech       guap       rides       eats       health       bxwf       misc

Dec 4 - A Kamala Harris staff exodus reignites questions about her leadership style



more
ADVERTISEMENT
 
topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot 3X PLAT



section  1   0 bx goons and 1 bystanders Share this on Twitter       Share this on Facebook
 

section news
  

 2 years ago '06        #1
7107 page views
211 comments


imthatinfamous  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x1
avatar
Props total: 56154 56 K  Slaps total: 14582 14 K
Dec 4 - A Kamala Harris staff exodus reignites questions about her leadership style
 

 
A Kamala Harris staff exodus reignites questions about her leadership style — and her future ambitions

The rumors started circulating in July: Vice President Harris’s staff was wilting in a dysfunctional and frustrated office, burned out just a few months after her historic swearing-in and pondering exit strategies. A few days later, Harris hosted an all-staff party at her official residence, where most of her office bit into hamburgers and posted pictures of smiling, congenial co-workers on Twitter, pixelated counterpoints to the narrative of an office in shambles.

“Let me tell you about these burgers at the VP’s residence!!” chief Harris spokesperson Symone Sanders gushed in a tweet. “The food was good and the people were amazing.” Her official defense against reports of staff unrest was more searing. She called people who lobbed criticism behind nameless quotes “cowards” and stressed that working for a groundbreaking vice president was a difficult job, but not a dehumanizing one. “We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day,” she told one outlet. “What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club.’ ”

Five months later, Sanders is leaving the vice president’s office, the highest-profile member of an end-of-year exodus that includes communications chief Ashley Etienne and two other staffers who help shape the vice president’s public image. Sanders told The Washington Post her departure is not due to any unhappiness or dysfunction, but rather because she is ready for a break after three years of the relentless pressure that came with speaking for and advising Biden and Harris while navigating a global pandemic.

But the quartet of soon-to-be-empty desks reignited questions about why Harris churns through top-level Democratic staff, an issue that has colored her nearly 18 years in public service, including her historic but uneven first year as vice president. Now, those questions about her management extend to whether it will hamper her ability to seek and manage the presidency.
Critics scattered over two decades point to an inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions. People used to putting aside missteps, sacrificing sleep and enduring the occasional tirade from an irate boss say doing so under Harris can be particularly difficult, as she has struggled to make progress on her vice-presidential portfolio or measure up to the potential that has many pegging her as the future of the Democratic Party.

“One of the things we’ve said in our little text groups among each other is what is the common denominator through all this and it’s her,” said Gil Duran, a former Democratic strategist and aide to Harris who quit after five months working for her in 2013. In a recent column, he said she’s repeating “the same old destructive patterns.”

“Who are the next talented people you’re going to bring in and burn through and then have (them) pretend they’re retiring for positive reasons,” he told The Post.

The Washington Post spoke with 18 people connected to Harris for this story, including former and current staffers, West Wing officials and other supporters and critics. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid about a sensitive topic. The vice president’s office declined to address questions about Harris’s leadership style

Her defenders say the criticism against her is often steeped in the same racism and s3xism that have followed a woman who has been a first in every job she’s done over the past two decades. Her selection as President Biden’s vice president, they say, makes her a bigger target because many see her as the heir apparent to the oldest president in the nation’s history. They also say Harris faces the brunt of a double standard for women who are ambitious, powerful or simply unafraid to appear strong in public.

Sean Clegg, a partner at Bearstar Strategies, the political consultancy that has advised many prominent California politicians, including an ascendant Harris, conceded that she can be a tough boss, but that she is not an abusive one.

“She has put me personally in the position of feeling like Jeff Sessions,” he said, referring to Harris’s sharp questioning of the former attorney general under president Donald Trump about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sessions said her question made him feel rushed, which, he said, “makes me nervous.”

But Clegg, who started working for Harris in 2008, said there is a difference between a tough boss and one who excoriates staff.

“People personalize these things,” he continued. “I’ve never had an experience in my long history with Kamala, where I felt like she was unfair. Has she called bulls---? Yes. And does that make people uncomfortable sometimes? Yes. But if she were a man with her management style, she would have a TV show called ‘The Apprentice.' ”

Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
For both critics and supporters, the question is not simply where Harris falls on the line between demanding and demeaning. Many worry that her inability to keep and retain staff will hobble her future ambitions.

The vice president entered the White House with few longtime staffers. Among the senior staff in her vice-presidential office, only two had worked for her before last year: Rohini Kosoglu, Harris’s top domestic policy adviser and her former Senate chief of staff, and Josh Hsu, counsel to the vice president and former Senate deputy chief of staff.

By contrast, President Biden remains surrounded by staff who have been allied with him for large swaths of his five-decade career. The three men who served as chief of staff when he was vice president — Ron Klain, Bruce Reed and Steve Ricchetti — all work in the West Wing in senior roles. Even much of Biden’s communications team when he served as vice president now serve as the core of the White House communications office.
Several of Harris’s former top aides are in senior roles in the administration — they just don’t work for her. Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who worked in Harris’s Senate office before becoming her traveling chief of staff on her presidential campaign, is the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Emmy Ruiz, a senior adviser on the campaign, is the White House director of political strategy and outreach.
White House officials argue it’s not unusual that staff would depart at the one-year mark and note there will probably be exits from the West Wing as well.

“In my experience, and if you look at past precedent, it’s natural for staffers who have thrown their heart and soul into a job to be ready to move on to a new challenge after a few years,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at Thursday’s press briefing. “And that is applicable to many of these individuals. It’s also an opportunity, as it is in any White House, to bring in new faces, new voices and new perspectives.”

Still, the quartet of announced departures were all for jobs that helped shape the vice president’s image to the American people — important roles for one of the nation’s most closely watched politicians, one whose first year missteps have been picked apart in the public eye.

As Harris looks for a new communications director and press secretary, several of her former communications aides are working in top roles at government agencies: Lily Adams, her former campaign and Senate communications director, works at the Treasury Department; Rebecca Chalif, her deputy communications director on the campaign, now works as the director of press at the U.S. Agency for International Development; Ian Sams, national press secretary for Harris’s campaign, and Kirsten Allen, deputy national press secretary, are at the Department of Health and Human Services.

But the loss of Sanders is the biggest blow. During a 2020 presidential campaign during which the country struggled to address racial inequality and unrest, she was a frequent defender of Biden’s dubious statements and previous missteps on race. She often took the lead on persuading crucial demographics outraged at systemic racism that Biden’s administration would usher in something better. She was an early go-between connecting Biden’s campaign to George Floyd’s family. And as Harris’s chief spokeswoman, she called out racism and s3xism in defense of the first woman of color to hold a nationally elected office.

On cable news and in late-night conversations with reporters, Sanders deflected criticism that Harris hasn’t done enough to address the issues in her portfolio.

While Harris’s reputation is connected to those issues, both her supporters and critics acknowledge that her ability to solve problems is limited by the political capital Biden is willing to expend. Biden, for example, has been reluctant to support wholesale changes to the Senate filibuster, something that would be required to make meaningful progress on immigration reform or voting rights in the current Senate makeup.

In March, Biden asked Harris to address the root causes of migration from the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, but critics have tried to brand Harris as Biden’s border czar and tie her to chaos at the United States’ southern border.

Her first international trip — to Guatemala and Mexico as part of an effort to address the root causes of migration — was marked by an exchange with NBC News’s Lester Holt in which she awkwardly said she would go to the U.S. border with Mexico — something Republicans and other critics had been calling for her to do for some time.

And activists have expressed frustration that Harris asked to be put in charge of the issue of voting rights, then made little meaningful change in one year of the Biden presidency.

Sanders has been by Harris’s side through almost all of those controversies, briefing her before important interviews, smoothing things over after missteps.

In an interview, Sanders said her departure wasn’t related to displeasure with the office. She wanted a new challenge but would not detail what, if any future career plans she has.
“I’ve been with the president since before he announced his run for president. I staffed him on the road. I traveled with him for nearly two years and during that time, there were days when on Monday I would get on a plane with Joe Biden. And then the plane would land in Delaware I would drive from Delaware to Washington DC. And Tuesday morning, I would be on a plane with Kamala Harris,” she said.

“I’m getting married next year. I would like to plan my wedding. You know, I have earned a break. So me deciding that I’m leaving has absolutely nothing to do with my unhappiness. I feel honored every single day to work for the vice president who gave me an opportunity to be her spokesperson at the highest levels.”

 https://www.washingtonpos .. ff-departures/


Last edited by imthatinfamous; 12-04-2021 at 07:51 PM..
+8   



icon
best
icon
worst
211 comments

 2 years ago '21        #2
FleshAxe  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x3
Props total: 9336 9 K  Slaps total: 9445 9 K
KK-amala knows who she serves
emoji
+18   

 2 years ago '16        #3
Dino87 
Props total: 7063 7 K  Slaps total: 2712 2 K
she's a trash human that locked up black men and decreased food stamps for all ppl in California

Lol

+78   

 2 years ago '16        #4
foshoVoodoo  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x60
Props total: 135130 135 K  Slaps total: 27534 27 K
now I see why you can't find none of her court cases online


Last edited by foshoVoodoo; 12-05-2021 at 09:00 AM..
+20   

 2 years ago '17        #5
Ymmot  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x5
Props total: 144236 144 K  Slaps total: 59258 59 K
She trying to do trump numbers with all these resignations.
+16   

 2 years ago '07        #6
stogz  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x2
Props total: 148614 148 K  Slaps total: 18167 18 K
This bi#ch sux. I predicted that sh1t the second she announced she was trying to run for president. She has zero idea of what a national politician looks like.
+24   

 2 years ago '06        #7
Storchaveli  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x5
Props total: 42675 42 K  Slaps total: 10807 10 K
She seems like a mean bi#ch. Vindictive and just an authoritarian.
emoji
That simple.
+31   

 2 years ago '16        #8
BathWaterMelody  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x19
Props total: 142699 142 K  Slaps total: 17114 17 K
I just wanna know where was all this energy for Sen. Sinema?

was hoping Kamala would've walked down to her Capitol office and snatched her from the backside, but that news headline never came
emoji
+7   

 2 years ago '11        #9
Sin  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x69
Props total: 224154 224 K  Slaps total: 29457 29 K
Why are surprised by this like her presidential campaign didn’t fall apart




Last edited by Sin; 12-04-2021 at 08:57 PM..
+24   

 2 years ago '15        #10
thirssty58  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x1
Props total: 59489 59 K  Slaps total: 7736 7 K
Still yet to see concrete complaints...everything I've read suggests personality conflict in which case do your damn job like an adult. Not like the ma$s exodus during the last administration where people are committing crimes
-1   

 2 years ago '06        #11
Skateboard T  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x7
Props total: 125210 125 K  Slaps total: 27850 27 K
And they think her and Pete are going to win in 2024?


emoji
+18   

 2 years ago '08        #12
AnyGiven 
Props total: 1039 1 K  Slaps total: 80 80
From healthcare to immigration she doesn't stand for sh*t. She literally has no plan if you just listen to her since the primaries to now. She flip flops on everything. No consistency so of course her staff is falling a part. Main reason why she dropped out early. And this is the woman the democratic party will force on us in 2024
+19   

 2 years ago '18        #13
Hearken 
Props total: 3460 3 K  Slaps total: 454 454
 GUCCI C0ND0MS said 🔗
Copmala is human garbage. Her treatment of s3x workers in California was absolutely atrocious.
slapped for quoting the entire article, idk why u bx heads do this sh1t
+32   

 2 years ago '17        #14
PackerTrelli3  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x28
Props total: 177197 177 K  Slaps total: 54375 54 K
Her and Biden are the worst

Lol they had folks thinking that were about to be some saviors. Anyone coulda won against Trump

So what did they accomplish?
+19   

 2 years ago '10        #15
acegutta22  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x3
Props total: 40471 40 K  Slaps total: 6738 6 K
Yo the crazy thing is she did all that tap dancing and she doesn't even have any friends in the media to have her back.

they're trying to destroy her before she even has a chance to run.

that will tell you how she really is and how they really feel about her.
+10   

 2 years ago '04        #16
jholla31  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x2
Props total: 16905 16 K  Slaps total: 2271 2 K
 GUCCI C0ND0MS said 🔗
Trump is a lock in 2024. We both know this.
At this rate..... They working together to get him back in office..... Nobody could watch that meltdown and come in and do just a bad, unless the game was rigged from the start
+10   

 2 years ago '18        #17
dogfood2 
Props total: 21650 21 K  Slaps total: 13545 13 K
Women make the worst leaders. Hopefully we have no female president in the future.
+15   

 2 years ago '04        #18
skillahmang 
Props total: 83446 83 K  Slaps total: 16017 16 K
Kamalas a fraud
+11   

 2 years ago '18        #19
dogfood2 
Props total: 21650 21 K  Slaps total: 13545 13 K
 AnyGiven said 🔗
From healthcare to immigration she doesn't stand for sh*t. She literally has no plan if you just listen to her since the primaries to now. She flip flops on everything. No consistency so of course her staff is falling a part. Main reason why she dropped out early. And this is the woman the democratic party will force on us in 2024
bi#ch went from Joe Biden is racist and sh1tting on him to "we did it Joe." Flip flopping at the highest level in front of everybody.

emoji
+21   

 2 years ago '04        #20
Randeezle 
Props total: 10559 10 K  Slaps total: 574 574
We screamed it from the rooftops.
These two were not fit for the white house!

Our sisters told us to shut our dumb asses up and get out of the way.
Look at poor Symone, she got snubbed for the press secretary role, and now she's on indeed looking for a job. Were we right? INDEED WE WERE dyke body built a$s broad.



+21   

 2 years ago '13        #21
Facts B  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x1
Props total: 49982 49 K  Slaps total: 5094 5 K
I’m voting for Trump in 2024 idgaf
-6   

 2 years ago '16        #22
kuul  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x12
Props total: 192789 192 K  Slaps total: 20766 20 K
 Dino87 said 🔗
she's a trash human that locked up black men and decreased food stamps for all ppl in California

Lol

if it wasnt her it was gonna be someone else. i would assume she at the very least did a couple good things aside from any other politician that dont give a fu#k about us.
-13   

 2 years ago '10        #23
Trilluminati GA 
Props total: 66453 66 K  Slaps total: 2576 2 K
Sell out rac00ns gon defend her to the death
emoji

She was used to get votes and has served her purpose
emoji


Calis top cop
emoji
+16   

 2 years ago '16        #24
kuul  topics gone triple plat - Number 1 spot x12
Props total: 192789 192 K  Slaps total: 20766 20 K
only thing i know is most black women managers i had were kinda a$$holes. its weird but its more than one experience up until i stopped working at jobs where black women were my managers. they get bossy af and they turn into this super authoritative figure. like they woke up and grew 3 inches.
+7   

 2 years ago '10        #25
Trilluminati GA 
Props total: 66453 66 K  Slaps total: 2576 2 K
 Randeezle said 🔗
We screamed it from the rooftops.
These two were not fit for the white house!

Our sisters told us to shut our dumb asses up and get out of the way.
Look at poor Symone, she got snubbed for the press secretary role, and now she's on indeed looking for a job. Were we right? INDEED WE WERE dyke body built a$s broad.



Dumb bi#ches do dumb sh1t
emoji
+9   

say something...

ADVERTISEMENT
Sign me up
 
 

yesterday...


most viewed right now
props-277
Image(s) inside The difference between a 30 year old in the 80s vs 2024
35 comments
2 days ago
@wild'ish
most viewed right now
props+825
Image(s) inside Damn she living like that
125 comments
2 days ago
@wild'ish
most viewed right now
4
logo LeBron gets called out for stat padding
99 comments
1 day ago
@sports
most viewed right now
4
Video inside What happened to 1994 atl cold case murdered pulled over in traffic
9 comments
1 day ago
@hiphop
back to top