The holiday news week calls for a special guest on the Sunday shows and “Face the Nation” has us covered. The next losing Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, will sit down for an extended chat about the White House’s failures to contain COVID, pass Build Back Better, or convince Russia not to invade Ukraine. I’m guessing Team Harris views this morning as a part of an “image reset” for the VP as she approaches her second year in office, knowing that she has work to do — a lot of work — if she wants the field to clear for her in 2024.

Luckily for Harris fans, she’s getting advice on likability and winning from an expert source.

Faced with declining approval ratings, a series of staff departures and a drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and the conservative news media, she has turned to powerful confidantes, including Hillary Clinton, to help plot a path forward…

“There is a double standard; it’s sadly alive and well,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “A lot of what is being used to judge her, just like it was to judge me, or the women who ran in 2020, or everybody else, is really colored by that.”

Excerpts from the interview, which was pre-taped, have already been released. Harris will threaten Russia with sanctions like they’ve never seen if they move on Kiev and urge the various parties to a BBB deal to put aside their differences and work it out. All of that is aimed at reassuring Americans that Harris has her eye on the ball policy-wise.

So why don’t I feel reassured?

Representative Henry Cuellar, a moderate from Texas and one of the more prominent voices on border issues in the Democratic Party, said his experiences with Ms. Harris’s team had been disappointing. When Mr. Cuellar heard Ms. Harris was traveling to the border in June, he had his staff call her office to offer help and advice for her visit. He never received a call back.

“I say this very respectfully to her: I moved on,” Mr. Cuellar said. “She was tasked with that job, it doesn’t look like she’s very interested in this, so we are going to move on to other folks that work on this issue.”

Elsewhere this morning, the White House’s public-health brain trust is back in action to say the usual stuff about limiting transmission. Anthony Fauci will be on “This Week” and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy will drop by “State of the Union” to discuss the explosion of Omicron cases in the U.S. and what the latest data says about severity. Infections are through the roof in hot spots but there’s been no run on hospitals so far. Fauci and Murthy will beg people to skip the New Year’s festivities in hopes of keeping that trend going.

Finally, “Meet the Press” has an interesting slate of guests booked for what looks like a discussion of Critical Race Theory, a smart topic for a week when there’s a lull in the regular news. The most notable guest is Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, who presumably will make the case for teaching CRT in schools. Opposing her is Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, an outspoken critic of CRT whose home state is pushing legislation targeting the subject. The head of the school board in Loudoun County, Virginia, is also scheduled; the debate over CRT in her district helped tip Virginia to Glenn Youngkin last month. The full line-up is at the AP.