Recent declining approval numbers have led Vice President Kamala Harris to turn to confidants such as Hillary Clinton for advice, Briahna Joy Gray said, adding that doing so is not a good idea.
During an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Gray, former National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign, said that Harris has been “leaning” on Clinton for guidance, which she says “isn’t particularly well-advised.”
She said Harris seems to be suffering “a little bit from a soft bigotry of low expectations.”
“Which isn’t to say that she couldn’t be a better candidate,” Gray clarified. “I think a lot of people, when she won [her Senate race] in 2017 … really expected her to be the heir apparent if only for these superficial identity-focused reasons.”
While many articles initially compared Harris to former President Barack Obama during the election, Gray said that Obama was “ultimately more charming” than Harris.
“One bit of advice I might offer [to Harris] is to stop relying on the same council and guidance that Hillary Clinton relied on, including Hillary Clinton herself,” she said.
While discussing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Gray emphasized that she believes another woman could have won the presidential election that year. However, Gray said she wouldn’t deny that sex may have played a role in Clinton’s loss.
“You can say what you want to say about there being a discriminatory element, a biased element, as there always is in some capacity when you’re dealing with these kinds of first types … but I also very much believe that a woman, who wasn’t Hillary Clinton, could have won,” she said.
Gray expressed similar sentiments about Harris’s job performance.
“And that a vice president who isn’t Kamala Harris, but who is Black, Asian, female in some combination could obviously be doing a much better job if she behaved differently,” she said.
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