Vice President Kamala Harris is making a list. She’s checking it twice.
And all the “naughty” reporters she doesn’t like will get the cold shoulder.
According to a report by The Atlantic, Harris keeps a list of unfriendly journalists that she considers racist because they “don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience.”
“The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters,” Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote in The Atlantic on Monday. “Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression. And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience.”
Harris and her team monitor certain journalists and keep notes on how they describe her.
“She particularly doesn’t like the word cautious, and aides look out for synonyms too.”
If a journalist describes Harris in less-than-flatter terms — such as careful, guarded, or hesitant in an article — they make the enemies list and are effectively cut off by her team.
“But she continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public, and declines many interview requests and opportunities to speak for herself (including for this article),” Dovere complained. “At times, she comes off as so uninteresting that television producers have started to wonder whether spending thousands of dollars to send people on trips with her is worthwhile, given how little usable material they get out of it. ”
Harris’ list of unfriendly journalists she avoids isn’t a new strategy in the cutthroat political world of Washington, D.C.
In fact, Harris stole much of the idea from another ruthlessly ambitious Democratic Party leader: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Hillary kept a “hit list” of loyal lawmakers, as well as those disloyal, during her first failed presidential campaign.
“We wanted to have a record of who endorsed us and who didn’t,” Politico reported a former campaign member said in 2014. “And of those who endorsed us, who went the extra mile and who was just kind of there. And of those who didn’t endorse us, those who understandably didn’t endorse us because they are [Congressional Black Caucus] members or Illinois members.”
“And then, of course, those who endorsed him but really should have been with her … that burned her.”
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The Horn editorial team