The Coming Biden-Harris Breakup

By Judson Berger

Friday, November 01, 2024

 

For all the foreseeable trouble Kamala Harris has had making a clean break from the administration in which she serves, Vice President Harris and President Biden are destined for splitsville — just give it a few days. “Garbage”-gate was but one portent.

 

If Harris wins on Tuesday, Axios reports, “she’s set to clean house and bring in her own people.” This, after Biden World had “trash-talked” her right up until handing her the nomination. Picture Dustin Hoffman’s triumphant Captain Hook fixing his gimlet eye on the crew as he barks “Who doubted me?” — before locking the infidels in the Boo Box filled with scorpions. The Biden-to-Harris transition would be a lot like that.

 

And if she loses, well — the recriminations to fly between the Biden and Harris camps will make Henry VIII’s separation from Anne Boleyn look like an amicable divorce.

 

The tensions are evident. Whether or not Biden was caught griping to former President Obama that “she’s not as strong as me” — as one “professional lip reader” attested to the New York Post, pertaining to a viral video of the two at Ethel Kennedy’s memorial service — the sitting president clearly thinks his would-be successor has needed more of him in her campaign.

 

Biden reportedly wanted to stump for Harris, but the Harris campaign put him off. Per the NYT:

 

Officials on Ms. Harris’s campaign think that holding joint events with Mr. Biden would “only hurt her” at the most crucial stage of the race, as one adviser put it. That leaves Mr. Biden, who has expressed an interest in helping stump for her in the coming days, left to arrange his own, campaign-approved events through trade groups and unions.

 

Ouch. As Jim Geraghty writes, it is easy to forget Biden is still the president, “because you see him so rarely, and apparently, that’s just the way the Kamala Harris campaign wants it.” The Harris camp’s cold shoulder toward Biden in the closing days of the election is a clear sign of the frosting-over relationship between them.

 

In one sense, Kamala Harris owes the world to Joe Biden. He picked her for VP, letting bygones be that even after she publicly flayed him at a primary debate the year before. Then, in deciding to abort his run for a second term after considerable party pressure, he endorsed her and thus helped avert a messy and contested convention out of which she might not have emerged as the nominee. The Biden White House remembers, if Harris doesn’t.

 

But Biden’s legacy on inflation and the border and the Afghanistan withdrawal, his persistent unpopularity, and his actions in recent days are a collective burden on her campaign. His at-the-worst-possible-moment “garbage” gaffe, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” was a gut punch to the Harris operation just when they were making hay of the sophomoric and actually deplorable set delivered by a Trump-rally comedian. Before that, Biden had to correct himself for saying of Donald Trump, “We’ve got to lock him up”; the slips and other remarks have only served to validate the Harris campaign’s preference to keep the president at the White House, ideally in a SCIF. Surely, a Rahm Emanuel type has kept track, too, of all the incremental slights Harris has endured over the years — not just the anonymous criticism but the feeling that, as one ally put it, her portfolio was “trash.”

 

Until the election, however, Harris cannot publicly separate herself from her 2020 running mate and administration partner. As Noah Rothman writes, “If she were to loosen her embrace of the former president, it would instantly become a Republican attack line” and might discourage Democrats. Yet “Harris’s dissembling contributes to one of her biggest weaknesses: the perception that she is a creature with no fixed beliefs or values.”

 

He concludes that “if Harris comes up short in November, that will be due in part to the fact that lugging Biden’s legacy across the finish line with her was just too heavy a lift.” If that happens, expect the grievances above to receive a full airing — and Biden to return serve. From where he sits — even though polls indicated he would have been in for an even tougher slog against Trump — a Harris loss would be seen as concrete confirmation that he should have listened to Jill.

 

Grab the popcorn.