Move over Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (maybe not Aaron Burr), we have a whole new generation of political talent these days and their concerns are well… deeply petty.
Gov. Josh Shapiro has a new book out in which he tells his side of the broken relationship with her and Kamala.
Shapiro asked Harris some questions of his own, probing for a sense of what kind of role she wanted her vice president to play. Harris, he wrote, described her own experience as vice president in stark terms, saying she had had a rough time in a position that had little autonomy or executive authority.
“I was surprised by how much she seemed to dislike the role,” he wrote. “She noted that her chief of staff would be giving me my directions, lamented that the vice president didn’t have a private bathroom in their office, and how difficult it was for her at times not to have a voice in the decision making.”
Also apparently you need new outfits.
Biden’s former White House counsel Dana Remus, who was a key member of Harris’s vice-presidential search team. suggested that the role of vice president might be a financial burden for him and his wife: Shapiro’s financial vetting showed that he didn’t have much money, and the vice presidency would require Lori to buy a new wardrobe and pay the costs for second-lady-level hair and makeup, even as the couple would be required to pay for food and entertainment at the vice president’s residence.
This stuff is petty, but we already knew Kamala was ridiculously petty and hung up on all the small stuff.
Sitting next to Walz in a chair that seemed to place her below him and heaping praise on Biden’s record, Harris did not look like a candidate seeking the highest office in the land… for the rest of the campaign, her team required that she be provided a chair that met certain specifications: “Leg height no less than 15 inches; floor to top of seat height no less than 18.9 inches; arms on chairs may not be very high, arms must fall at a natural height; chairs must be firm.”
15 inch chairs and private bathrooms. So what is the Kamala toilet story?
West Wing men’s rooms offered unique charms of their own. For proximity to power, there was the stall tucked against the Roosevelt Room, just footsteps from the Oval. For retro quirkiness, there was the restroom across from Valerie Jarrett’s office. Urinals there were large and basinlike, like bathtubs sawed in half. (Even stranger, they flushed via bulky foot pedals placed twelve inches from the floor.)
That’s assuming Kamala is talking about the VP’s office in the West Wing vs the office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (the one Trump is currently talking about demolishing.)
Offices in the White House, that aren’t the Oval Office, tend to small and cramped. I’m not sure if the EEOB office has a bathroom, but it’s really more of a meeting area, like most of the EEOB, and VPs are jealous and like to be close to the center of the action.
Senators of course have private bathrooms. In pictures, Kamala’s VP office does seem to have two doors, but maybe one is just a closet instead of a water closet, as the Brits say.
Either way this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue because Kamala didn’t actually do anything. There was no reason for her to be in the West Wing (let’s face it, there’s no reason for VPs to be in the West Wing anyway unless they’re trying to backseat drive the president, which tends to be a thing with Republican VPs not Democrat VPs, why, much like the toilet, I’m not sure) so it’s not as if she needed the bathroom. Kamala didn’t actually do anything that anyone can describe or define in the White House.
So the toilet was more of a status toilet. Much like her whole tenure.
But personally, I blame racism.
