22 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALSUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020WASHINGTON — At a chic
cafe in the West End neighbor-
hood here, a young waiter knew
that the incoming vice president
lived “upstairs,” as he noted by
gesturing to an upscale condo-
minium building overhead, but
said he had not actually seen her
lately.
“The Secret Service sometimes
stops me from taking out the
trash, though,” he added, saying
that agents closed off the build-
ing’s alley when their protectee
came and went from its garage.
Around the corner, two black
Suburbans with federal license
plates were parked by the build-
ing’s entrance — the only visible
clue to the nearby presence of the
California senator and vice presi-
dent-elect, Kamala Harris.
In the days since he prevailed in
the election, President-elect Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr. has made sev-
eral public remarks and released
summaries of his calls with for-
eign leaders as reporters track his
every public movement. But Ms.
Harris has barely appeared on the
public radar since her acceptance
speech last Saturday in Wilming-
ton, Del., where she declared “a
new day for America.”
She shared a stage again with
Mr. Biden in Wilmington two days
later, after a coronavirus briefing
they had attended together. Ms.
Harris stood silently several feet
away while Mr. Biden spoke, with-
out giving remarks of her own.
It is not unusual for a vice presi-
dent-elect to keep a low profile in
an election’s aftermath. “You
know, you’ve been fairly invisible
since the election,” the ABC News
host George Stephanopoulos told
Mr. Biden in an interview more
than a month after his own elec-
tion as Barack Obama’s vice presi-
dent.
Mr. Biden replied by insisting
he had “been in the room” for ev-
ery one of Mr. Obama’s important
transition meetings. Because of
social-distancing restrictions re-
lated to the coronavirus, Ms. Har-
ris has no such luxury, at least not
in the physical sense.
After spending election week in
Delaware, she has returned to the
two-bedroom Washington condo-
minium she bought after she was
elected to the Senate in 2016. From
there, she is in regular touch with
Mr. Biden, by text message or tele-
phone, according to aides with the
Biden-Harris transition team, and
with other transition officials. Ms.
Harris’s husband, Douglas
Emhoff, also has a close relation-
ship with the incoming first lady,
Jill Biden; the two campaigned to-
gether in the race’s final weeks.One focus of her time is the
quantum leap Ms. Harris is soon
to make from the legislative to the
executive branch. Whereas Mr.
Biden will have virtually no learn-
ing curve upon returning to the
White House after eight years as
vice president, Ms. Harris has
spent little, if any, substantive
time at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave-
nue. (A transition official could
not immediately say when she
had last visited there.)
That process is made no easier
by President Trump’s refusal to
acknowledge the election resultsand authorize an official transi-
tion process in which Ms. Harris
and her aides would have access
to White House officials and docu-
ments. Ms. Harris has not been
contacted by her departing coun-
terpart, Vice President Mike
Pence. Days after the 2016 elec-
tion, Mr. Biden hosted Mr. Pence
for nearly two hours at the official
vice-presidential compound at the
U.S. Naval Observatory. “I told
Mike, the vice president-elect,
that I’m available to him 24/7,” Mr.
Biden told reporters.
Biden-Harris transition offi-cials declined to comment.
For now, Ms. Harris remains a
senator. It is unclear when she
might relinquish her seat. Mr.
Obama stepped down from his
Senate seat days after his 2008
election, but Mr. Biden, ever the
sentimentalist, hung on to his un-
til shortly before he was sworn inas vice president the following
January, telling friends he wanted
to take one last oath of office for
the seat he had held for decades.
(Mr. Biden also said he wanted to
retain his vote in case it might be
needed in a lame-duck Senate ses-
sion.)
Like Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris also
has her own staff to build — an-
other task potentially made more
challenging by her relative lack of
Washington experience. While
Mr. Biden, after nearly 50 years in
the capital, has a network of hun-
dreds of former Senate and White
House aides, Ms. Harris has a
smaller circle, though she is ex-
pected to hire several familiar
faces from her Senate office and
her 2020 campaign.
On social media, Ms. Harris has
stayed rigorously on message,
posting on Twitter several times
about the coronavirus and her de-
termination to work with Mr. Bi-
den to contain it. “In just a few
months, we will swear in a new
president who is committed to get-
ting the pandemic under control:
@JoeBiden,” she tweeted on Sat-
urday morning.
Later in the day, Ms. Harris,
who will become the first occu-
pant of the White House who is of
Indian heritage, also tweeted
greetings for the beginning of Di-
wali, the Hindu festival of lights.
Ms. Harris has ventured out in
the Washington area at least once
since the election. On a rainy Vet-
erans Day, wearing bluejeans and
a black raincoat, she and Mr.
Emhoff dropped by Georgetown’s
Dog Tag Bakery, which was
founded to help support veterans.
She has otherwise been out of
sight at her condo building, about
a mile from the White House, and
twice that distance from the Naval
Observatory complex she will
soon call home. “No great thing
created suddenly,” reads an in-
scription on the side of the build-
ing, a quote from the Greek Stoic
philosopher Epictetus.
Mimicking a sad face, the serv-
er at the Bluestone Lane cafe on
the building’s ground floor said he
hoped she would visit again soon.Largely Out of Sight Since Victory, Harris Preps for the White House
By MICHAEL CROWLEYVice President-elect Kamala Harris speaking in Wilmington, Del., with President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., on Tuesday.AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMESStill no comment
from the departing
No. 2, Mike Pence.
Transition in WashingtonThe Vice President-Elect
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