Kamala Harris’s Balancing Act
“How do you distance yourself from an unpopular president while also running on his policies?”
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This week, Joe Biden gave his first speech alongside Kamala Harris since announcing that he would not continue seeking reelection. This appearance comes just days ahead of the Democratic National Convention, where Biden will speak to delegates in what, by the end of the week, will amount to Harris’s official nomination. As Democrats balance running on Biden’s record while also trying to present Harris as a fresh candidate, the president’s role on the campaign trail after the convention remains in question.
“How do you distance yourself from an unpopular president while also running on his policies?” Tarini Parti asked last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic. “Even though they’re trying to portray this very warm relationship … we’re going to see some of this awkwardness at play here, because the convention, for all these months, was being set up to be headlined by someone else.”
As Biden’s time in the White House nears its end, his legacy as president in part hinges on the outcome of this election, Susan Glasser said last night. If Harris “doesn’t win, there will be plenty of recriminations that find their way to Biden,” Glasser continued. “If she does win, people will hail him for having made a decision to step aside in favor of the greater good of defeating Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, as Trump contends with his campaign in a race no longer pitted against Biden, many Republicans are calling on the former president to go after Kamala Harris on policy rather than rely on personal attacks. “It’s not just the casual lying or the slinging or invention of bizarre conspiracy theories,” Glasser said, but his comments more and more have the “feeling of an act of self-harm as an effort to gain attention no matter what.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Susan Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times; Tarini Parti, a national-politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal; and Chuck Todd, a chief political analyst at NBC News.
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