Tipsheet

Harris to Biden: Get Away From Me

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 28, 2024 10:25 AM

In some ways, it's the story of the election for Kamala Harris.  She says she cannot think of a single thing she'd have done differently than Joe Biden over the last four years -- a bold statement, given the public's view of the Biden-Harris administration and the overall direction of the country -- but she doesn't want to be seen with the man.  Last week, the report was that the Vice President had no 'plans' to campaign with the sitting President of the United States.  This weekend, we learned that said president would very much like to be out there stumping for his veep, but the campaign's message back to him has effectively been, don't call us -- we'll call you, and we've lost your number:

It's the latest example of Democrats, and even some of Biden's staff, tiptoeing around the 81-year-old president's ego and feelings. One person familiar with the situation compared it to a slow-moving break-up: Harris' team and allies respect Biden's service, but are wary of further tying Harris to the unpopular president on the campaign trail. Biden's approval rating is 39%, according to FiveThirtyEight's average. "He's a reminder of the last four years, not the new way forward," said another person familiar with the situation, in a nod to Harris' campaign slogan. Biden's team has held days open for campaigning, only for Harris' team to let those days pass, two people familiar with the matter told Axios...There are currently no scheduled events for Harris and Biden to campaign together before Election Day...[Some advisers close the president] believe Biden could help Harris in the final days. They also believe Harris' team is underestimating Biden's appeal among white, working-class communities in the Rust Belt — including in the critical state of Pennsylvania, where Biden has spent extensive time during his life and career. In 2020, Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton's 2016 numbers with some of those voters — helping him to defeat Donald Trump.

Team Harris obviously disagrees, 'stiff-arming' Biden along the campaign's final stretch, which undoubtedly burns a privately embittered Biden.  Harris promises voters a vague 'new way forward,' but has embraced every decision Biden has made, without exception.  It looks like there's plenty of bad blood to go around:


I thought revenge-minded recriminations was something we were told to worry about with the other guy.  In any case, the Vice President is clearly happy to appear alongside other major Democratic figures, as her campaign talks about 'fascism' and Hitler.  Adding to the joy is Michelle Obama, heavily implying Americans aren't embracing Harris because of her identity characteristics, and lecturing men:


Kamala Harris and her surrogates darkly leaning into identity politics, fear and hectoring might prove to be an appropriate final chapter of her campaign.  After all, this is a woman who is described by New York Times reporting as positively obsessed with DEI score-keeping and language policing:


She received intelligence briefings, and her big takeaway was supposedly gendered language within the documents. Perhaps such unseriousness is simply what's within her capacity. "Vice President Kamala Harris has put questions about gender and race at the center of many of the policy discussions in her office," the story says, noting that she also applied this fixation to her "leadership" during COVID:

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During the pandemic, she repeatedly asked her vice-presidential staff for demographic breakdowns on Covid vaccination recipients and pressed the administration’s health officials to address gaps, according to two former administration officials. She pushed the federal bureaucracy to incorporate concerns about equity into routine business — so much so that her advisers seldom briefed her on domestic policies without having prepared a ready answer about their impact on women, Black and Hispanic people and other racial minorities. “She was always interested in race and gender,” said one former aide who requested anonymity because of lack of authorization to speak publicly. “We all knew it was really important to her, so we would proactively add that to her briefings. She didn’t have to ask for it.”

If an identity politics fetish is one consistent component of Kamala Harris' public career, the other is unflinching abortion radicalism:


I'll leave you with two of the Trump campaign's closing argument ads. One's tag line is 'Kamala broke it, Trump will fix it.'  The other, which runs two full minutes in length, aired during yesterday's Philadelphia Eagles game: