Biden Steps Aside. How Might Harris Step Up?

With barely 100 days to go before the general election in November, President Joe Biden has announced that he won’t run for a second term, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket.

Staff writer Franklin Foer, who wrote a book on the Biden administration, and staff writer Elaina Plott Calabro, who profiled Harris for this magazine, discuss this extraordinary moment in a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. They share their unique knowledge of these two politicians and where this chaotic election might go next.

What does a Harris campaign look like? How might the struggles of her 2020 run become the strengths of her sudden 2024 campaign? And how well (or not so well) did Biden prepare Harris as the “bridge” president he promised to be?

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Franklin Foer: Hello. I’m Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, and I’m coming to you on this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic because earlier today, President Joe Biden announced that he’s abandoning his bid for reelection. He’ll finish his current term, but he’s endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee.

Presidents have backed out of reelection in the past, but this is truly a surreal and unprecedented moment in American politics: a frenetic three weeks after a disastrously revealing debate performance, ending in the president stepping aside with barely 100 days to go before people vote. So as we speak on Sunday, there is a lot we don’t know.

But with me to discuss where Democrats and the 2024 race go from here is my colleague Atlantic staff writer Elaina Plott Calabro. Hey, Elaina. Thanks for talking with me.

Elaina Plott Calabro: Hey, Frank. Yeah, not a lot to talk about these days.

Foer: God. Day from hell for political journalists; the Sunday bomb drops, and off we go. So let’s just start at the very beginning, Elaina. What do we know about this decision from Biden?

Plott Calabro: The reporting that’s come out that I’ve seen since the decision has been pretty remarkable, which I sort of was clued into with the fact that about 10 minutes after he made his announcement, I received in my inbox a Biden-Harris fundraising solicitation, which I think just kind of reinforced that this decision was not something that was planned days in advance.

For example, this was not something he and his team were drafting, you know, five days ago or whatnot. The New York Times, I think, reported that as late as last night, a Democratic delegate was receiving calls from Biden aides about wanting this delegate to stress their support publicly. So I think this was something that caught a lot of people, even within the White House, off guard and has gone to show, I think, sort of the futility of a lot of these roundtables we’ve seen the past couple of weeks—of, you know, What is Biden going to do? When is he going to do it? This has always been just about him and his innermost circle and the precise moment that they made a decision.

Foer: Yeah, I’m just struck by the utter claustrophobia of it and how the circle just kept getting more and more claustrophobic—that you have all these aides within Biden world who’ve been with him since the 1980s, or maybe not quite as long, but they’ve been with him for decades, and they think of Biden as a father figure.

But a lot of them started to get frozen out for various reasons. And then, so you were stuck with the people who were basically just reinforcing what Biden himself wanted to hear. Biden desperately wanted to hear that he is an indispensable man who’s got to run, got to slay Donald Trump for a whole variety of reasons.

And it ended up being his family itself, which became the innermost inner circle. And then you have Biden stuck with COVID out in Rehoboth Beach as he’s making this decision, where he’s literally, not just metaphorically, isolating himself. And he arrives at this lonely decision at this incredibly lonely moment where he’s got no choice but to give up this mantle that he desperately wants to cling on to to Kamala Harris, who’s somebody he doesn’t especially care for as a successor.

So, really, where do we go from here? What’s your sense of what the next couple of weeks are going to look like? Is there anybody who’s going to step forward to throw their hat in the ring? Or is this just a fait accompli at this point?

Plott Calabro: I think harkening back to just everything about the past three weeks in American politics, I would hesitate to call anything a given at this point. But, of course, what you did see quite immediately after Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris as the nominee: You had the Congressional Black Caucus come out. You had several progressive members, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. A lot of people lining up rather quickly behind Kamala Harris—Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

President Obama notably came out with a statement that seemed to endorse an open convention process.

Foer: So what does that mean? Does it mean that their support was lined up in advance or that they’ve just been thinking about these decisions for so long because Biden had been twisting in the wind so long that they had internally arrived at a moment where they knew they were going to do this when the moment came?

Plott Calabro: I think that’s a great question. And based on my reporting, a lot of members were prepared for that possibility. So in a recent piece, I spoke to several members of Congress, especially within the Congressional Black Caucus, who made quite clear to me that Kamala Harris would be the person they endorsed as the nominee.

Foer: So when she tweeted herself about what was about to happen, she said that she wanted to earn the nomination. She believed that she could win it, but it needed to be earned. How do you interpret her use of that phrase?

Plott Calabro: I mean, I think a lot of it is just politician-speak. I think that she and her team at this point are just very prepared to have the nomination. I frankly don’t know what the mechanics of a Democratic National Convention would look like in terms of it actually seeming like Kamala Harris quote unquote earned this nomination if there’s not somebody who puts their hat in the ring and the rules are opened up to let this person actually have it out, as it were.

Foer: So, Kamala Harris, you profiled her, you were one of the few magazine writers in America to have any bit of sustained access and you have, you know, real insights into the way in which her brain works.

So let’s just talk about her as a political persona and the woman who is about to step into the ring to go toe to toe with Donald Trump. Do you think that she has a good sense at this stage of what her persona is going to be as a politician headed into the homestretch of this election where she’s done basically nothing to lay the predicate for what’s to come about herself?

Plott Calabro: You know, ironically, as insane as this moment feels and is in a lot of ways, and would be for any candidate having to take on the mantle of a party’s nomination three months in advance of the election, I actually think this is where a politician like Kamala Harris is best positioned to thrive.

And why do I say that? Let’s think back to her presidential primary bid in 2020, which was just an absolute disaster. She was somebody who never quite landed on a story about herself. Her vision for the American people, and it was why in the first months of her vice presidency every kind of catastrophic interview that she did—specifically to Lester Holt one—it really filled a vacuum because Americans did not have a sense of who she was as a person, what her agenda was. And for that reason, any you know missteps she made within that first year, and there were many, came to have a definitive quality to her. But what I think this moment, where she is perhaps better-positioned than anyone else, is that three months out from the election, the mandate is not necessarily to sell Americans on a story about yourself.

It’s to sell Americans on a story about the candidate you’re trying to beat. And that’s where I think that her background as a prosecutor—which, you know, it’s become cliche at this point, prosecuting a case against Donald Trump. But having gotten to know her as I have and having had several conversations with her where I really, the moments I really felt her settle into just a clearly comfortable role when we were talking was when she had turned the questions back on me. You’ll see that with Q and A’s that she does across the country, whether it’s at a college campus or just at a convention center of some sort.

I think those moments when she can kind of feel she has control of the conversation and she’s making a case for or against something in particular, rather than sort of going 30,000 feet and talking about, you know, the state of democracy or the future of it or gauzy things like that. That’s where she doesn’t thrive.

But I think when she gets on a stage and she can pointedly talk about what she thinks Donald Trump hasn’t done for the American people, that’s where I think that, you know, she could really excel.

Foer: Yeah. Well, one thing that I’m very curious about is that. Biden was running a bad campaign based on everything before the debate, that he was doing a bad job of defending his record, which I think there’s a compelling record that they could run on. And he was unable to articulate even the most basic bumper sticker explanations of what he accomplished or what his vision will look like.

Do you have a sense of how, not only will she defend the Biden record, but she’ll be able to talk about what she would do affirmatively as president, not just all the horrors of Trump that she would be stopping?

Plott Calabro: So for one, she will actually be able to be in the arena to do that in a way that he has just not been. I think it’s important, you know, when I would talk to Republicans really before this campaign got underway, one reason they felt so optimistic, was that they, you know, in their view, 2020 for Joe Biden was a campaign by Zoom, essentially, which is really what in, Senate races, what a lot of candidates had to do with the COVID restrictions and whatnot.

But they felt that because of that, Americans hadn’t really seen what a real Joe Biden campaign could or should do. Look like, and we’ve sort of seen that, right? We’re talking about a bedtime at 8 p.m., and this is not somebody who’s barnstorming the country necessarily for campaign events. But Kamala Harris has been barnstorming the country really, even if people haven’t been paying attention, for much of the past two years, and so I think that fact alone is going to really elevate her in the minds of Americans because it’s such a contrast already from Joe Biden.

Foer: Has she gotten better at the barnstorming than when she began?

Plott Calabro: Yes, absolutely. Even in the short time that I was with her, I feel I saw that over time. I think she has gotten better with controlling conversations from where she sits, and sort of massaging whatever the topic is to be something that she actually wants to talk about as opposed to what she’s actually being asked— which I just think is a hallmark of a talented politician that was not something I think she excelled at at all at first. But especially the last few events I went to her with, you sort of saw in real time, oh, this person is really understanding more about what this game is and what it means to answer the question you want to answer, not necessarily the one you’re asked.

I think she has just gotten clearer in her communication. I think she does not get lost in the weeds as much. You know, if you look at some of her earlier campaigns, like when she was running for DA of San Francisco. She had a much better sense of the immediate impact of the work she was doing. When you’re running for an office like DA, especially when you’re an incumbent, when she ran the first time, she said: The incumbent’s conviction for felonies is X percent. I’m going to raise it. And she did do that as a prosecutor. She did that successfully. What translates so compellingly on the campaign trail when she was running again for a second term was that she was able to say, Here’s somebody’s life I was able to change because I was able to get those conviction rates up.

Now. When you get higher and higher in levels of national politics, your connections to those individual stories necessarily become much more distant. And I think that to me was something that she struggled to figure out her place in early on as a vice presidential, Presidential-like figure, because it becomes a lot more difficult to say, you know: Here is Sam and Fred and here was their life before this policy. Here is their life afterward. And I think without that really those really specific moments to latch on to, she struggles to tell a larger story of how America writ large perhaps has changed because of the policies

Foer: That’s interesting because in policy debates, one place where I would hear people talk about a commonality between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was that their interjections in policy debates, the questions that they asked were very similar because they were very gritty questions they would ask about, Oh, how does this grandmother access this policy here? How does she learn about these benefits? And so that that was something that I heard people saying was an area of overlap between the two of them. One thing that I would hear about the way that she would prepare for policy decisions or for appearances, which was interesting to me and felt very distinctive, was that she liked to stage debates.

That if there was a question about Afghanistan or a question about Gaza, she would bring in two experts and she would say, Okay, you’re affirmative, you’re negative, and you’re going to have this debate out here in front of me. It was kind of gladiatorial style, argumentative combat, which I think she really enjoyed.

But I found it to be a very interesting thing to learn about her because it kind of indicated to me that. For ways that are both good and ill, she wasn’t necessarily coming to a lot of questions with first principles or predetermined ideas about where she stood. She wanted to be guided to them.

Does that track with the Kamala Harris that you know?

Plott Calabro: I think that really, Frank, is so much of the story with her and I think this becomes apparent with her primary bid in 2020. People say all the time, she never found a lane for herself. And that’s really true. And one reason I think is that. She came in and her instinct, as it would be for most politicians, is to talk about what they’ve accomplished in the past, what their background is.

And Kamala Harris’s background was essentially in law enforcement. And in 2020, that was not a popular background to have. And she had people around her, especially her sister, Maya Harris, saying that. You know, we don’t need to highlight this aspect of your background so much and her response of course was but it is my background. You know, this is who I am. But she’s very persuadable when it comes to, well, this is not what the base wants to hear right now. And as David Axelrod told me for my profile of Harris last fall, you know voters can sense that when it seems like you’re just trying to say maybe what they think you want to hear as opposed to where they’re actually coming from deep down at an issue.

And I think going to her preparation style, I mean, she wants to be sold on an argument herself. She’s not necessarily going to advisers. This is what my instinct is. Help me get there to make the case for that.

Foer: But some of that sounds like it would be very virtuous from the perspective of policy-making. But, the question of like, what is your lane when you’re running for president, what is your political identity, becomes much more heightened. And if you don’t know who you are as a candidate, it becomes harder.

And so maybe she falls back into this prosecutor mode, which is very comfortable for her. And look, Trump is there to be prosecuted as he is being prosecuted actually in the courts themselves. But then there’s this other question about: Who do you appeal to? Who do you feel most comfortable appealing to, you know, as you think in a more granular sort of way about the electorate and how to cobble together a winning coalition.

And I remember hearing stories about her that were about, at the beginning of the administration, she was like, okay, I’m going to win over white working-class dudes. And so I’m going to talk to them directly. And then I remember hearing from people in the administration being like, wait a second. Do you know what you’re up against there?

You’re never going to win these guys over. Why aren’t you going around making appeal… And there was a sense that maybe the Dobbs decision in the role that she played helped settle her into a place where she started to know who her natural constituencies were and she knew how to talk to them. What’s your sense of the political identity that she’s going to bring, and how that will affect maybe electoral political strategy for the Democrats?

Plott Calabro: So I think the truest display we’ve ever gotten of who she really is as a politician and where her priorities lie was at the very very end of her campaign in 2020. Again, I know it feels like a lifetime ago, but right before everything sort of imploded, she had landed on this idea of the 3 a.m. Issues. What are the issues that voters that keep them up in the middle of the night? You know, keeping food on the table, their water bill, things like that. That to me, I mean, she really is a pretty pragmatic politician, I think at heart. And it’s one reason I think that a lot of people around her were actually pretty optimistic about her partnership with Joe Biden, because their policies were not actually especially far apart.

She was not so much further to the left than he was on a lot of issues in a way that I think she’s been sort of caricatured. And so I think Dobbs, one reason that that was such a great moment for her, was it allowed her to step into this more base friendly role in a way that was also authentic to her.

Reproductive rights, these are important issues to her. This is not something where she is speaking in a way that she just thinks will kind of help curry favor with the base. It is actually authentic to how she feels. And so you did have sort of this kind of perfect confluence of a lane for, you know, an appeal to those sort of voters, but also an issue that was actually true to what she felt comfortable talking about, if that makes sense.

Foer: It does make sense. It does make sense. Alright, so there’s one question that I would struggle to come up with a very good answer for. And I don’t know if she can come up with a good answer for, which is, it’s often posed like: What have you accomplished as vice president? What has Kamala Harris done as Vice President, successfully and independently, other than the Dobbs work that she’s done, which is important.

Plott Calabro: So I have a lead into this, Frank, and I’d be especially interested to hear your take on it. I think I have talked to you about this before, but I think one major failure of Joe Biden in these past four years has been his inability to really set Kamala Harris up for success. And one reason I identify that as such a particular failure, a lot of people will come back to me and say, well, you know, what other past president has tried to do that for his Vice President?

Well, not especially many, but not a lot of presidents have gone in before and specifically said, I am a transitional candidate. I am a bridge builder. I am setting up to be a handoff essentially present as a president. He’s never really done that for Kamala Harris. And, you know, let’s look at the very first issue that she was saddled with and the way it came about. You know, there was no great vision for her vice presidency from either of them going into it.

And then you have early in the administration, she’s sitting in a meeting with Joe Biden, Ron Klain, his then chief of staff, other advisers. And they’re talking about these so-called root causes of the border crisis. So issues like poverty and violence in Central American countries that cause migrants to flee north to begin with.

And Joe Biden’s listening to Kamala Harris offer suggestions for, you know, helping with those structural issues. And he says, Oh, you know, these are pretty good. Why don’t you take this on? And she’s sort of just awkwardly, I mean, what do you, well, Yes, Mr. President. And then, Ron Klain is telling me this, that after the meeting, she approaches him and says, you know, I’m honored to be asked, but I kind of put those out there so somebody else could be thinking about them, not as something that I should take on.

Here is, I think, the disconnect between maybe a Biden and a president who is really thinking seriously about positioning his VP for success. Biden saw it as a show of respect. That was hit in his issue portfolio when he was vice president for Barack Obama. And so hit in his calculation, it’s, Well, this is, this is a show of confidence that I have in you, that I would give you this issue that I myself took on. But it’s totally divorced from, is this actually a way to get Kamala Harris a win early in her vice presidency when, you know, a lot of people are looking to see what kind of leader she will be. I mean, what, at the end of the first year, Kamala Harris will have solved El Salvador? I mean, you know, the metrics just don’t make sense at all. And then of course, right after that, it was voting rights, which was an issue she wanted. But that was again, the strategy never made sense to a lot of people because absent getting rid of the filibuster, a voting-rights bill was never getting on Joe Biden’s desk.

Foer: By the way, they didn’t actually want to give her the voting-rights issue. She had to fight.

Plott Calabro: Really, really lobby for it, yes, exactly,

Foer: Yeah, no, I think that this is, I mean, you’re getting at a couple of big problems. The first is that Joe Biden, I don’t think ever actually really believed that he was the bridge.

Plott Calabro: Yeah, that’s the upshot here,

Foer: And then secondly, his whole framework for understanding the vice presidency was his historic personal experience of the vice presidency.

And so he was avoiding replicating what he thought were the slights that Obama inflicted upon him. And so ostensibly he thought he was treating her with great respect, but really he wasn’t giving her any meaningful chunks of policy where she was set up to be successful. There was not really any mentoring that actually went on and just this sense that she was going to tag along.

I mean, a lot of it at the beginning of the presidency, she was tagging along. Like he was, it was COVID they were stuck in the White House. It was hard to travel. She would come to meetings. He would run the meetings in his Joe Biden–type way. She would chime in with questions that kind of mirrored the type of questions that Joe Biden himself would ask in meetings.

And I’m sure that actually was an important learning and growth opportunity for her, but it didn’t leave her with this long list of accomplishments that she could point to where I went off and I did A, B, and C things that showed my ability to govern.

Plott Calabro: And so yeah, a few more things about that. One is that it was not even, it was not just Joe Biden. So other than his chief of staff at the time, Ron Klain, she also didn’t have a lot of huge champions in the West Wing itself. So you didn’t have a ton of people saying to Joe Biden, hey, we should be doing a little bit more work to promote her and showcase the work that she is doing, that she could be doing. That started to change a bit, I think, when you saw him tap her to be the U.S. representative at the Munich Security Conference, um, which is also, as you know, something that he did as vice president and took very, very seriously.

Foer: That was in the run-up to the Ukraine war, it was a very pivotal moment.

Plott Calabro: And she met with Zelensky there, and her advisers were telling me they thought it would be the last time she ever saw him. I mean, it was a hugely, hugely, you know, watershed moment when it came to just those, you know, moments right before the war broke out. And she’s continued to serve in a pretty impressive capacity in a diplomatic sense, however, it’s not something that a lot of Americans pay attention to.

I mean, Americans just really haven’t paid much attention to their leaders’ diplomatic skills abroad. So it’s another area where her advisers can tout what she did in that respect, but is that message actually getting to the American people? And they themselves will admit to you, no, it’s not.

And so going back to the Dobbs decision, what’s remarkable about that is it’s the closest thing she’s had to sort of an anchor, a substantive anchor to her vice presidency, but it was entirely by happenstance, right?

Foer: It’s the fact that Joe Biden is Catholic and does not enjoy talking about the issue.

Plott Calabro: And the decision happened when it did, and it just happened that, you know, the No. 1 isn’t comfortable talking about that on the campaign trail. So it was ceded to her. She took up the mantle, but it was not necessarily sort of a premeditated visionary sense of, okay, this is what we’re positioning you for.

Foer: Yes. Well, and also, the other thing that people don’t really understand about her work on Dobbs, which is that it’s assumed that this is a rhetorical political thing that she’s done where she goes off and she gives a lot of campaign-like messaging on Dobbs, but she’s been in charge of a lot of the coordination that’s happened and a lot of the legal work and there is actually substantive policy stuff attached to it. It’s not just going off and giving campaign speeches that Joe Biden can’t deliver.

Plott Calabro: Right.

Foer: Okay, I want to ask a few questions to get your personal sense of them. uh, And they’re kind of unfair questions to ask of a reporter that I would hate to get asked of me.

Plott Calabro: Oh, great.

Foer: I feel like there’s, there’s a way to answer it that is true to your journalistic self. The first is personally, there’s been all these memes and all these things that make her out to be an unlikable person. Like the way that she laughs has been meme-ified by Republicans. The way that she repeats certain lines has been meme-ified. And it feels to me that once you’re in that realm, it’s distant from an actual flesh and blood character.

I’ve only had very limited interactions with Kamala Harris, but I found her to be a very warm person when I’ve interacted with her and very different from the presence on the stump. Just give me your sense of her as a person and, kind of how you feel in a conversation with her in her presence.

Plott Calabro: Yeah, so a few elements to this. I am coming at this as a journalist, so I think she is a pretty guarded person by nature, a pretty private person, and she is especially going to be, you know, You know, the first time she’s around a member of the media, somebody who is quite literally standing there evaluating her.

And so we had three pretty long interviews for my profile last fall. The first two, I wrote this in the story, it sort of felt like tiptoeing around glass. Like you didn’t quite know at what moment your question would have pushed her too far. The third interview though, we actually did it at the vice president’s residence.

She took me on a tour of the residence, um, you know, clearly proud of the way that she had redesigned it. And once we, you know, really settled into that conversation in her space, I thought she was quite warm and she’s even maternal. And I talk about this all in the piece, you know, at one point she’s giving me marriage advice, basically, that I didn’t ask for.

But again, that was just sort of seeing those ways that she’s suddenly taking control of the conversation. What I will say is that one-on-one with the voters, she is incredibly warm. She really lights up with voters just on a rope line or whatnot, and I’ve covered a hell of a lot of politicians who hate that stuff more than anything else.

Who they hate the photo line or, you know, coming off the plane and meeting with the people who, the school groups who are there to send them off or whatnot. She really thrives in that environment and it doesn’t feel phony in a way that it does with a lot of politicians. So I think that’s on a one-on-one level that I would describe it where I think that this sense of unlikability or inauthenticity. One, we have those things bound up in a lot of just racist and sexist stereotypes that exist. Putting those aside though, she—what I learned covering her is, when she gets onstage, she actually gets quite nervous.

When you are up close with her and she is onstage, you can hear at first her voice quivering. She is not somebody who is just kind of striding in and feeling immediately in her element.

Foer: Talk about what that means and what that reveals about her.

Plott Calabro: So she said to me once: My career was not about giving lovely speeches, it was about the work. And I know she meant that as a way of saying, I’m focused on what I’m doing for the American people, not giving lovely speeches. Well, if you can’t communicate that work in a lovely speech, you know, it’s like a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, did it really fall? So, especially at her level, lovely speeches are really a lot of the ball game.

Foer: I’m just now flashing forward to her convention speech, like the biggest speech she’s going to give in her life, where she’s going to have to really introduce herself to the American people in prime time and make this case. Do you see her seizing up in that moment or do you think that she’ll come closer to delivering?

Plott Calabro: I think she will come closer to delivering, because I don’t think she will feel as defensive as I think she often does. Especially because her first year and a half of her vice presidency, just really did go so poorly I mean her favorably ratings were the lowest that NBC had recorded of any vice president in the history of the poll, and what I sensed was that she would get up there and she felt like she was trying to prove something.

Which is just never really a great head space to be in a setting like that. But I think that, and what you saw—especially after Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, people suddenly looking at her saying: Where has this Kamala Harris been?—is you saw a politician on the offense, I think in a way that really excites her and motivates her, I think in a way that makes her feel like she’s maybe in a courtroom again.

So I’d be hesitant to say that or predict that her convention speech could mirror a lot of other big speeches I’ve seen her give in the past just because I don’t think she’s in the moment really feeling as defensive about herself anymore.

Foer: So one obvious thing we need to hash through is. If Harris manages to be the nominee, which we think that she will be, who does she pick to be her Kamala Harris? Who would her vice presidential nominee be?

Plott Calabro: So, you know, just in the past few hours, calling and texting with, Democratic strategists and outside advisers to the White House, I mean, clear disclaimer that nobody knows at all at this point, um, people are mentioning North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper because she has been spending quite a bit of time with him just on the trail in the past week or so. But, also you have names like Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, so it’s a lot of kind of the more moderate cut of Democratic executive I think is the consistent theme of the names that you’ll hear. But, you know what, Frank, at this point, I just don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows anything.

Foer: Okay. We’ll submit to that humble answer and leave it there. One last question: There was clearly a whole campaign apparatus, a whole set of messaging that the Republicans had developed to demolish Joe Biden. And it was pretty effective, I think we need to say. And Joe Biden let it be effective. So there’s talk that they’ve got all these plans on the shelves for attacking Harris. What’s your sense of what the main lines of attack against her would be from the Republicans?

Plott Calabro: So I will say that even though, I mean, obviously, their campaign apparatus has been oriented around Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, they haven’t been caught flat footed, apparently, by Kamala Harris standing in for him, or the idea that she almost certainly will. You saw that Trump’s super PAC immediately dropped an ad, I mean, within minutes, specifically calling her the “border czar” and trying to sort of misrepresent what her job actually was when it came to the border and saddling her specifically with responsibility for the border crisis. So I think you’ll see a lot of attack lines like that continue.

But obviously at this point, because she is somebody who can be on the campaign trail and be a lot more nimble in her response to those attacks, I just think the Trump campaign is going to have a lot harder time. They can’t bank on the fact anymore that there might be a three-to-five-business-day delay until Joe Biden can get back to them with a response on whatever that latest attack line was.

Foer: Yeah, you know, I think that one thing that I’m curious, I just want to see out of her that so much of the Republican attack about Joe Biden’s age is really about a guy in an administration that are governing over a world that’s spinning out of control, whether it’s inflation, or the wars, or the border… Things are spinning out of control. He’s too old to be able to exert control. That’s why we need strength. That’s why we need … And I think that her prosecutorial style projects a certain amount of strength, but whether voters buy that, whether she’s able to, to package herself in a way that counters that line of attack, which I think will still be pretty potent if she’s not able to demonstrate that.

Plott Calabro: Absolutely. It’s such a great point. It’s not even the communication, but to what extent, you know, has her posturing in the past four years just been emblematic of Biden’s? And to what extent might we see something a bit more independent emerge in the coming months?

Foer: And as the, uh, proverbial political reporting ending says, only time will tell. We shall see it all comes down to turnout. Yeah. Okay. Though. Thanks so much for talking. I’ll always so much fun to kibitz with you about

Plott Calabro: You too, Frank. Thanks so much for having me.

Foer: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Executive Producer Claudine Ebeid. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor, and Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic. I’m Franklin Foer. Thanks for listening.