President Joe Biden is dismayed Vice President Kamala Harris undermined their record since he stepped aside from the presidential race in July, six people familiar with his comments told NBC News on Tuesday.
Harris has tried to distance herself from Biden on the campaign trail. “I’m obviously not Joe Biden, and you know, I offer a new generation of leadership,” Harris told Brian Taff of Philadelphia’s Action News 6 ABC on September 13.
Harris faces a conundrum: She cannot campaign on policies to fix crime, inflation, and border security without undermining the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, but she must tout the administration’s policies to validate her record and candidacy.
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“My approach is about new ideas, new policies that are directed at the current moment. And also, to be very honest with you, my focus is very much in what we need to do over the next ten, twenty years to catch up to the twenty first century,” she added.
Biden pushed back on Harris’s decision to undermine their alleged accomplishments. Biden stated Wednesday that he delegated “everything” as commander in chief to Harris, including foreign policy and domestic policy.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the nation suffered soaring inflation, an invasion on the southern border, and foreign policy blunders, such as a deadly Afghan withdrawal.
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Fifty-seven percent of registered voters believe they are not better off under the Biden-Harris administration as they were four years ago under former President Donald Trump, RMG Research polling found in September. Only 25 percent of Americans rate the economic conditions under the Biden-Harris administration as “excellent or good,” a Pew Research survey showed.
Biden has noted at times that Vice President Kamala Harris, who took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, hasn’t been mentioning him in her campaign speeches lately, including when she talks about an economy he believes his policies set on a positive trajectory, these people said.
And he was particularly stung by one of the recent notable times when she did talk about him — during this month’s debate with former President Donald Trump, three of the people familiar with his comments said.
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Since Harris declared her candidacy, her campaign advisers have discussed how to navigate the question of whether she would be an extension of Biden’s agenda, and she has broken with him on some policies. But her and her team’s focus has been on how to win in November, and much of that is tied to explaining who Harris is, independent from Biden. Harris, however, didn’t mention Biden’s name once in a 40-minute campaign speech about the economy last week in Pittsburgh. And while she used to say things in her campaign speeches like “our country has come a long way since President Biden and I took office,” Harris now routinely says “we” when she talks about work the Biden-Harris administration has done.
“She has to become her own person,” a Harris campaign official told NBC News. “She needs to do that to win.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.