Democrats believe Vice President Kamala Harris must admit to the failures of the Biden-Harris administration to survive exposure during Tuesday’s debate as the status quo candidate of the past three and a half years.
Harris has clear vulnerabilities as the vice president: 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.
“The debate will pose a challenge for Ms. Harris, who will have to decide how much to embrace or distance herself from President Biden and his policies at a moment when polls show that many Americans are hungry for change,” Katie Rogers and Erica L. Green of the New York Times acknowledged Monday. “It is a conundrum other vice presidents have faced while seeking the presidency.”
Sixty-one percent of likely voters believe the next president should represent a major change from the Biden-Harris administration, while only 25 percent said Harris represented that change, a Times/Siena College found Sunday. A majority said Trump represented the change.
Only 26.9 percent of Americans believe the nation is headed in the right direction, according to RealClearPolitics average.
To overcome the “conundrum” in Tuesday’s debate, Democrats suggest Harris will have to throw the administration under the bus for failing to live up to its promises, a risky move that could undermine her candidacy.
“The frame, instead, should be, and I think probably will be, ‘A lot done, a lot more to do,’” Robert Shrum, a longtime Democrat political strategist, told the Times.
Bakari Sellers, an ally of Harris and a Democrat political commentator, admitted that Harris must “praise Biden and talk about the accomplishments, but also acknowledge that the work is not done.”
The catch-22 was already exposed by CNN’s Dana Bash during Harris’s first and only pre-taped interview. Harris tried to talk her way out of the conundrum by simultaneously owning the administration’s economic record and blaming Trump for it.
The contradiction was striking. It produced an outcome that forced the vice president to tout her administration’s policies to validate her candidacy, all while she undermined her record and her candidacy.
“So, you maintain Bidenomics is a success?” Bash asked in the interview.
“I’ll say that that’s good work,” Harris replied “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”
Maher: CNN Had Harris ‘Dead to Rights’ on Fracking; She Can’t Admit She ‘Got It Wrong’
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.
