Page 11 of 107 Days
And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.
“The VP should take on irregular migration.”
From March 2021, my assignment was to attack the root causes of the misery that was driving people from their homes and villages in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Because I’d prosecuted cartels and human traffickers from the Northern Triangle, I was up to speed on the region and its problems, and had ideas about the kinds of investments and other interventions that over time would reduce irregular migration, help to bring stability, and offer people a safer future in their own community.
Most people don’t want to leave home. They don’t want to leave their grandmother, their church, their friends, their language.
And when they do, it is usually for one of two reasons: they fear for their lives, or they can’t make a living.
Much of that region is rural, and farmers are increasingly hit by climate events such as floods and droughts.
If you can no longer grow food where you are, and if there’s no other livelihood, you will leave, because there’s simply no choice.
Corruption and gangs thrive when there are limited resources.
When Republicans mischaracterized my role as “border czar,” no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved.
I won commitments of $5.2 billion in new investments by private companies for the region.
I had already seen almost a billion of that money deployed, thanks to enthusiastic partners such as Mastercard, Microsoft, and Nespresso.
I held numerous bilateral meetings with leaders throughout the region, especially with President Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala, and later his successor, President Bernardo Arévalo.
I had multiple calls with Giammattei, warning him that I expected free and fair elections, sending my national security adviser Phil Gordon to reinforce the message in person, and publicly supporting Arévalo once the election was called.
I met with activist groups fighting corruption and for human rights in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Cabinet members pitched in: Tom Vilsack at the Department of Agriculture accessed resources to train farmers in the latest methods to increase yields.
I worked closely with Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and later his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, on our mutual border concerns.
The investment I was bringing was a bargaining chip with regional governments to crack down on corrosive levels of corruption.
These American companies, I told them, would not invest unless real steps were taken.
The investments I encouraged have connected communities to the internet and brought people into the formal financial system, creating jobs and opportunity.
In the locations where I was able to bring new enterprises and greater stability, data showed it was working.
Our investments had created seventy thousand new jobs, reached over a million people with training programs, and connected 2.
5 million previously unbanked people with banking services and access to credit.
These people were staying put. I wanted to get that good news out.
But White House staff stalled. “Not yet. We need more data.” The story remained untold.
Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
Even the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family separation policy hadn’t deterred the desperate.
It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time.
No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with .
Then the Dobbs decision came down.
Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead.
Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment.
He ceded that leadership to me. I initiated a national tour and rallied the outrage in red states and blue states alike.
As well as big public events, I convened roundtables, starting out with ten or twelve state legislators whom I would connect with resources in the Justice Department or Health and Human Services.
Soon, advocates started attending, then health care providers, then families affected by restrictive laws.
There would be hundreds of people at these meetings, building a national coalition.
All this work upended the narrative that we were doomed to a shellacking in the midterms. We defied historical precedent because of our efforts on this issue.
(Since 1934, the president’s party has lost an average of twenty-eight House seats and four Senate seats in midterm elections.
We lost just nine seats in the House and retained control of the Senate.)
Joe was already polling badly on the age issue, with roughly 75 percent of voters saying he was too old to be an effective president. Then he started taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.
When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging.
In Selma, Alabama, at the commemoration of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers were attacked and beaten once they’d crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I gave a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Desperate people had been shot when they swarmed a food truck, and I spoke of families reduced to eating leaves or animal feed, women prematurely giving birth with little or no medical care, and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.
I reiterated my strong support for Israel’s security and called on Hamas to release the hostages and accept the ceasefire agreement then on the table.
I also called on Israel for greater access to aid.
It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council.
It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased.
I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well.
Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed .
None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.
That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital.
It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him .
His team didn’t get it.