Earlier this year, a senior European official was caught making remarks slamming Kamala Harris as “invisible” and claiming that the vice president “will never win the election.”
Isabel Schnabel, a member of the European Central Bank’s board of governors, offered a harsh assessment of Biden’s potential successor in a private conversation ahead of the event in February. Politico reported on monday.
“We should have had another candidate to replace Kamala Harris from the beginning,” Schnabel said in private comments, unaware that he was taking part in a livestream with audio.
“She’ll never win the election, that’s hopeless,” a European banker said of Harris.
“She was so low-key that I don’t know her,” Schnabel added.
The ECB told Politico that Schnabel’s comments were “misleading” and that he “never comment publicly on political events.”
But other European officials privately defended Schnabel’s assessment of Harris, saying it had been difficult to build a connection with her as Biden’s No. 2.
“There’s an argument to be made that the EU should have done more to nurture relations with Harris, given Biden’s age,” a senior EU official told the outlet, “but on the other hand, she never made it easy. It was not easy to find opportunities to meet with Harris.”
As Harris made public appearances abroad, her public comments angered some across the pond.
Ms Harris’ speech at a 2023 summit on artificial intelligence to be held in the UK was described by one attendee as “banal” and at odds with the conference’s theme.
According to Politico, the incident left the British government feeling so uncomfortable that afterwards it privately conveyed its concerns about Harris’ comments to White House officials.
A European official who met with Harris, 59, at the Munich Security Conference in February told the outlet that Ms Harris played a “two-faced persona” during the meeting, describing her as “engaged” and “charismatic” in private but “very scripted” in public.
The 81-year-old president’s shock withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race and his backing of Harris as his successor have sent European officials scrambling to choose a vice president.
“There’s going to be a lot of work going on to paint a picture of what kind of president Kamala would be, how she thinks and feels about the issues, and how she would deal with her and the people around her,” the British official said. “So I think we really need to look at her running mate, so we can evaluate the whole list of candidates and get our hands dirty on every corner of the list of candidates.”
