Politico: “In early April, a month after a trip to Poland and in between making dozens of calls to senators to push the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Vice President Kamala Harris took a day trip to, of all places, Greenville, Mississippi.
A rural town of 30,000 along the Mississippi River is not your stereotypical stop for a national Democrat, let alone one serving as the second most powerful politician in the country. But Harris had, nevertheless, traveled there that day as part of an effort to talk about small businesses and community lending programs.
“She wanted to understand the needs in places like the Delta and then in the Alabama Black Belt and in the Deep South,” Bill Bynum, who served as a member of an agency review team during the transition, recounted to POLITICO.
Bynum had first touched base with Harris last year when, on the phone for 30 minutes, the two discussed how the administration could play a role in increasing investments in underserved communities. His answer to her was simple: “Well, Madam Vice President, if you really want to see what’s going on, you come to the Mississippi Delta.”
Sure enough, months later, she arrived.
The swing to Greenville is part of an under noticed strategy for the VP’s office, one in which she’s homed her focus on the ways in which administration policy is intersecting with overlooked communities. It’s brought her to other far-off, non-traditional locales, including a recent swing to Sunset, Louisiana, a rural town of fewer than 3,000 people, to tout the administration’s work expanding rural broadband. And it’s manifested itself in the ways in which she’s approached some of the White House’s big-ticket items.”