Among the avalanche of questions falling on presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ head, one of the most intriguing is this: Where did your sister go?
Only two years younger than Kamala, Maya Harris, 57, has been described as the ‘Bobby Kennedy’ of the vice president, in reference to the late United States attorney general, who was an inseparable companion and indispensable advisor to her brother, the President John F. Kennedy.
In fact, the Harris sisters have long had experience working together, collaborating on political victories that led Kamala to become California Attorney General and, later, a United States Senator.
Kamala has called their bond “unbreakable.” And, when she received a call from President Joe Biden in July admitting that he would end his re-election campaign and pass the torch to her, Maya was one of the first to rush to her sister’s side at the vice presidential residence in Washington.
However, since then, Maya has largely disappeared from public view.
Aside from the occasional sighting during the election campaign, including an appearance on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer, Maya has been largely out of sight. Certainly, she has no official campaign title.
“I feel like Maya has had a very low profile… an extremely low profile,” one Democratic insider told DailyMail.com.
Aside from the occasional sighting during the election campaign, including an appearance on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer, Maya has been largely out of sight. Certainly, she has no official campaign title.
Perhaps Maya’s absence is not a mere precaution.
After all, as a former political adviser to Hillary Clinton, Maya served as campaign chairwoman in Kamala’s disastrous 2020 presidential bid.
That campaign infamously failed in December 2019, two months before voters could even render their verdict in Iowa’s first caucuses. And the blame fell squarely on Maya’s shoulders.
Democratic sources have confirmed to the Mail that they still hold Maya responsible, accusing her of pushing her older sister’s political positions even further to the left than those of proudly socialist Senator Bernie Sanders.
Socialized medicine, taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants, banning fracking, decriminalizing prostitution, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and supporting the ‘Green New Deal’…apparently nothing was too radical for Maya to suggest, or for Harris to consider when the time came. to gain the support of the progressive left in 2019.
As a Politico article about the doomed presidential race concluded at the time, Maya had been “involved in virtually every facet of the race.” Or, to put it another way, it was a derailed campaign and Maya was one of the drivers who derailed it.
However, Kamala’s official campaign manager, Juan Rodríguez, ended up taking the brunt of the criticism, although it was reported that he frequently deferred to Maya.
A New York Times report even went so far as to say that Maya remained “unopposed” while Kamala seemed unable or unwilling to take control.
It wasn’t just disgruntled campaign staffers who felt this way. Some of the sisters’ relatives also had doubts.
A source familiar with conversations among Harris’ extended family confirmed to DailyMail.com that some had blamed Maya for the failure of Kamala’s 2020 release.
But if Maya felt humiliated by that abject failure, it was certainly short-lived.
A sympathy prize for Kamala’s aborted 2020 primary bid was her choice as Biden’s running mate. And as soon as Kamala started measuring the curtains in her White House office, Maya was reportedly hard at work behind the scenes promoting her husband, Tony West, for the role of Biden’s Attorney General.
Those efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, but West, 59, is clearly an ambitious man.
West, who previously served as a senior official in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, is currently on leave from his role as Uber’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, and told staff in an internal email in August that will instead focus on ‘supporting my family and sister-in-law in the election campaign’.
But maybe that underestimates it. Because he has reportedly emerged as a key adviser to Kamala’s current campaign, is a regular presence on Air Force Two and acts as a sort of liaison between the vice president and a wary business community.
“Campaign leadership is a collaborative effort, but Tony West is probably the most guiding hand there,” Bakari Sellers, a CNN commentator and former South Carolina lawmaker close to the Harris campaign, said last week. “There’s nothing that happens in the campaign that he’s not a part of.”
Among the avalanche of questions falling on presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ head, one of the most intriguing is this: Where did your sister go?
Maya Harris and her husband Tony West.
That description sounds remarkably similar to how Maya Harris’ role in Kamala’s 2020 campaign was described (“involved in virtually every facet of the race”).
A person close to West told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that he has no plans to join a future Harris administration, but many in Washington suspect Kamala will want to keep her brother-in-law around anyway.
All of which seems to suggest that, although Maya is largely hidden in the shadows, she remains largely in her older sister’s orbit: as a trusted sister, wife to a close advisor, and certainly a quiet influence.
For her part, Maya once said that she has no doubt where the power lies in this relationship.
“My feeling is that when she is elected president of the United States, I will call her Miss President,” Maya said during a joint interview with her sister in 2019. “Until then, you’re just Kamala.”
But when it comes to official titles, the better question might be: If the Harris sisters sit together in the Oval Office in a few months, what will our new president call little sister Maya?