Isabel Schnabel, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, was caught on a hot mic earlier this year criticizing the vice president as “invisible”, and predicting that she would never win. The Democratic Party selection process “is a failure,” Schnabel said in comments reported here for the first time.
“They should have built up another candidate to Kamala Harris from the beginning,” Schnabel said in a private conversation ahead of a panel event in February, apparently unaware her remarks were being live-streamed. “She would never win an election, I mean that's hopeless." Schnabel's next comment was particularly cutting: "I don't even know her because she has been so invisible.”
Two officials who met with Harris at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year told POLITICO she displayed a split-screen persona at the gathering.
On the one hand, her public interventions were highly-scripted — speeches delivered via teleprompter, with little spontaneity, with her 2023 speech at the same conference particularly ill-received as applause-lines bombed and she failed to connect with the audience.
Another example of this is her feather-ruffling appearance at a U.K. artificial intelligence conference in 2023. Harris came on stage late and gave a speech — described to POLITICO as "banal" by one attendee — which poked holes in the flagship conference's theme.
