Biden circle seeks to boost Harris’ image
REPUBLICANS STEP UP ATTACKS ON VICE-PRESIDENT’S LEADERSHIP STYLE
In an urgent May 16 meeting on the debt ceiling in the Oval Office, US VicePresident Kamala Harris sat between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, symbolically positioned at the centre of the highstakes talks aimed at staving off a first-ever US default.
Two days later, Harris was on a teleconference with thousands of elected officials and opinion leaders, urging them to ramp up pressure for a deal.
“President Biden and I met with our four congressional leaders Tuesday here at the White House. We had a productive conversation,” she reported. “We believe that it occurred in good faith, with all the leaders in that meeting agreeing that America will not default.”
President Biden and I met with our four congressional leaders Tuesday here at the White House. We had a productive conversation.”
Public engagement
The public staging of those moments, Democratic operatives say, is part of a concerted effort to bolster Harris’s image in the weeks since Biden announced his re-election.
Anita Dunn, one of Biden’s closest key political strategists, recently directed the White House public engagement and political teams to help schedule events with Harris, having her promote popular causes like abortion rights and infrastructure spending.
In the three-minute video announcing Biden’s reelection, Harris is featured more than a dozen times, depicted as an engaged leader and Biden’s indispensable partner. On Saturday, she became the first woman to serve as commencement speaker in the 221-year history of the US Military Academy.
Kamala Harris | US Vice-President
Re-election challenge
The president and his allies, meanwhile, have made an evident effort to defend Harris and highlight her role in recent weeks, with Biden saying in a television interview that she is “really very, very good.”
The moves reflect the fact that Biden’s fate is entwined with Harris’s in a newly direct way, since his re-election may depend on persuading Americans that she is qualified to step in.
Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by voters, let alone Republican adversaries. Meanwhile, Harris’s approval ratings have hovered below 50 per cent, and consistently below Biden’s, her entire tenure. Republicans, however, are hardly sugarcoating their message.
Migration bogey
Harris joined Biden’s campaign after four years in the Senate and an ill-fated presidential run, and Republicans say she has never found her footing since then. They have seized on one of the tasks Biden gave her — tackling the root causes of irregular migration into the US — and labeled Harris Biden’s “border czar”.
Early in her tenure, Harris stumbled through an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt as she demurred and then committed to visiting the border, one of several missteps that ricocheted around social media.
Her allies insist that those stumbles have been eclipsed by recent successes: She has been the administration’s voice on abortion rights and has had successful foreign trips, including a week in Africa that highlighted her personal ties to the continent and her unique place in American politics.