“Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have at least one thing in common: They are both determined to put astronauts back on the moon to build a lunar base, in what is being viewed as the new space race with China.
In most areas the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are poles apart, but when it comes to space the Biden administration’s policy spearheaded by Harris has largely been a continuation of Trump’s legacy.
One of Harris’ less widely tracked roles is chair of the U.S. National Space Council. Those who have engaged with her view her as an active and detail-oriented advocate of getting back to the moon under the so-called Artemis program. That initiative was launched under Trump and has continued ever since, with a lunar landing likely after 2026, within the next presidential term.
As part of the overall U.S. space strategy, NASA has focused on convincing other nations to sign onto the Artemis Accords — America’s preferred rules for exploring and exploiting the moon and outer space — viewed as a counterweight to China’s project to build a lunar base.
Several countries, including Russia, Pakistan and Venezuela, have already signed up to Beijing’s plan.
Harris, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of helping convince many others to join the Artemis coalition.”
“Early in the administration, Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fundraiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.
But those successes only underlined the scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America, and how policies to narrow that gulf could take years or even generations to show results.
Rather than develop ways to turn away or detain migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Harris’ work included encouraging a Japan-based auto parts plant, Yazaki, to build a $10 million plant in a western Guatemalan region that sees high rates of migration and pushing a Swiss-based coffee company to increase procurement by more than $100 million in a region rich with coffee beans.
She convened leaders from dozens of companies, helping to raise more than $5 billion in private and public funds.
“Not a huge amount, but it ain’t chicken feed and that links to jobs,” said Mark Schneider, who worked with Latin American and Caribbean nations as a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.
Jonathan Fantini-Porter, the chief executive of the Partnership for Central America, the public-private partnership Harris helped lead, said the money had led to 30,000 jobs, with another 60,000 on the way as factories are constructed.
She also pushed Central American governments to work with the United States to create a program where refugees could apply for protection within the region.
Still, some of Harris’ critics said her focus on the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador was a mistake.
Most migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Obama and Trump administrations did come from those countries. But as migration from that region stabilized during the Biden administration, it exploded from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba.
The Northern Triangle countries accounted for roughly 500,700 of the 2.5 million crossings at the southwest border in the fiscal year of 2023, a 36% drop from the 2021 fiscal year, according to the Wilson Center.
“They didn’t care to do a good diagnosis of the issue, and they have just focused on a very small part of the topic,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political science professor at George Mason University who has studied Latin American relations and their impact on migration. Correa-Cabrera said Harris had “failed completely” in her mission by following an outdated approach to tackling the root causes of migration.
Biden had a similar portfolio to Harris’ when he was vice president. He was in charge of addressing the economic problems in Central America by rallying hundreds of millions of dollars of aid for a region where the United States has a complicated legacy.”
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“Ricardo Zúñiga, who served as State Department’s special envoy for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, said Harris was essential in bringing together Latin American and American business leaders to drive investment in Central America.
Less than a week into her role, Zúñiga recalled, Harris sat with members of the national security team and economists from the Treasury Department. After a round of introductions, she quickly got into probing the personalities of the Latin American leaders with whom she would be interacting.
Zúñiga said he later watched her put the information she had collected into practice. In Mexico City, she connected with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador by expressing interest in the artwork at his presidential palace.
In Guatemala, she took a much more direct approach to President Alejandro Giammattei. She warned him last year about attempts to disrupt the handover of power of the newly elected president, Bernardo Arévalo, while also pushing him to help form programs that migrants could use to apply for refuge in the United States closer to their home countries.
“She was curious and asked many questions,” Zúñiga said. “She very quickly realized that we weren’t going to solve 500 years of problematic history in a single term.””
“The vice president was never in charge of the border. That job belongs to Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, and to Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services.
Still, a combination of right-wing spin, media fascination during Harris’s early tenure, miscommunication from the White House, and growing migrant surges during the Biden presidency have all made that label stick. Now, it stands as one of the more serious challenges Harris faces”
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“in March 2021, when Biden announced that he would be giving Harris essentially the same assignment he got during his own vice presidency: coordinating diplomatic relationships to address the “root causes” of migration into the United States.
“I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” Biden said during a White House meeting on migration on March 24, 2021.
The idea behind this approach is a long-term strategy: Border surges were just one symptom of deeper economic, diplomatic, and security problems these countries face that cause people to make the trek north. The assignment was a bit cursed from the start — a “politically treacherous job with little short-term payoff,” as it was described by the Los Angeles Times — because any benefits from addressing these root causes would obviously take time to appear. Meanwhile, the border saw more legal as well as illegal crossings every month.
Senior White House officials who briefed reporters before the announcement emphasized at the time that this was a diplomatic assignment: a two-pronged approach to build diplomatic ties with these countries and to oversee investment and implementation of foreign aid to these countries to address infrastructure, grow business, and strengthen civil society.”
“Democratic delegates are largely volunteers who speak for no one beyond the primary voters in their areas. In this context, a contested convention could be chaotic, and its nominee lacking in democratic legitimacy.
To be sure, anointing Harris is not especially democratic either. She was not elected by primary voters, any more than any other non-Biden Democrat. But the US electorate did vote to make her the president’s heir apparent, and this gives her a source of legitimacy that any other selection would lack.
Second, and more importantly, failing to coalesce behind a nominee today would have left Democrats without a standard-bearer for a month. This would inhibit fundraising, at a time when the Trump-Vance ticket is taking in serious cash. And it would mean ceding swing-state airwaves to the Republican message — or else, running exclusively negative advertising — for the next four weeks. This is especially risky in a context where Democrats face the challenge of introducing a new nominee to the country.
As Biden’s default replacement, having been elected to fill in for him in the event of his death or disability, Harris was uniquely capable of becoming her party’s consensus nominee in the absence of a protracted process.
Finally, Harris would have been highly likely to win an open convention, anyway. Before Biden dropped out, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn — a highly influential member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) — let it be known that he would favor Harris were Biden to drop out.”
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“although Harris has weaknesses, she is not devoid of political gifts. At 59, she is young by the standards of American politics. She is an able speaker, whose recent appearances have brimmed with more vitality and coherence than either Biden or Trump have mustered in years. Her recent remarks debunking the GOP’s claims of being the party of “unity” were especially effective.
Harris does have a negative approval rating. But it is nevertheless better than Biden’s. And the public’s disapproval of her is less strongly held. As the political consultant Sarah Longwell has reported, voters in focus groups tend to have a negative impression of Harris — but it is just that, an impression, rather than a deep-seated evaluation. They do not know much about her and are aware of that fact.”