House Democrat Recalls Meeting Dismissive Kamala Harris: ‘She Just Walked Away from Me. There Was Kind of an Eye Roll’

LEFT: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (AP Photo/Jenny Kane) RIGHT: Kamala Harris (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) had tough words for her party and its ex-standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, in a new interview with The New York Times.

Gluesenkamp Perez, who prevailed in her reelection bid despite being considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the House of Representatives, was asked by the Times about her “thoughts about Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.”

Her answer was not flattering.

“When Harris first came out, I was open to talking with her. I know she called a lot of my colleagues; she never called me,” she replied before noting that she had only “had one interaction with Harris, at her Naval Observatory Christmas party.”

“I’m not super comfortable at that kind of thing. I’d had a couple of beers, and I noticed that almost all of the garlands were plastic. My district grows a hell of a lot of Christmas trees,” she recalled. “I was strong-armed into taking a picture. I said, ‘Madam Vice President, we grow those where I live.’ She just walked away from me. There was kind of an eye roll, maybe. My thinking was, it does matter to people where I live. It’s the respect, the cultural regard for farmers. I didn’t feel like she understood what I was trying to say.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Gluesenkamp Perez lamented that her party has been disrespectful of voters’ concerns.

“I was talking to a woman who runs one of the largest labor and delivery wards. She said 40 percent of the babies there have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. What is empathetic — to tell them that’s their problem, or to take border security seriously?” she remarked. “People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.”

Asked if she thinks “the Democratic Party will be forced to change after this crushing election cycle,” the congresswoman observed that “It’s a lot easier to look outward, to blame and demonize other people, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing what we can do. It is not fun to feel accountability. It requires a mental flexibility that’s painful.”

“So who knows?” she concluded.