Kamala Harris Boasts That She’s a ‘Historic Figure’ Who Will Have a ‘Marble Bust’ in Not-Entirely-Flattering NYT Profile

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

Former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris boasted that she’s a “historic figure” who will have “a marble bust” of herself sitting in the Capitol during an interview for a not-entirely-flattering New York Times profile.

According to Shane Goldmacher, “Ms. Harris is busy selling books — a lot of them. She is not yet selling herself. Old advisers, both allied and estranged, have squinted from afar at her book tour, wondering what exactly her strategy is, or if there is any at all.”

“She has done little to distance herself from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. besides admitting aloud that it was ‘recklessness’ on her part not to have discouraged him from running again. There has been virtually none of the strategic repackaging that a future candidate typically does, the buffing out of flaws and shining up of strengths,” wrote Goldmacher, who continued:

Ms. Harris has made clear she doesn’t “feel burdened” — yes, she still uses that phrase — by where she fits in the punditry pecking order or the polls or the cable chyrons. She is enjoying the freedom from what she calls the “transactional” constrictions of campaigning, of asking people for a vote.

Her place in history is already secure, and she knows it.

“I understand the focus on ’28 and all that,” she said in the interview. “But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”

In other parts of the profile, Goldmacher observed that “in the year since [her loss], she has not capitalized on” the good will that last year’s campaign bought her, and suggested that “she has mostly been a bystander in the Democratic Party’s raging debate over its direction.”

“This sounds really corny,” Harris told him. “But we have to stand for the people. And I know that that sounds corny. I know that. But I mean it. I mean it.”