Political right in the US and its idea of Biden-Harris rift
The political right in the United States, with or without help from Donald Trump, knows exactly how to connect events and things, even if they cannot be connected. It sees the approval rating of President Joseph Biden taking a beating and coming to an all-time low of 38 per cent; and with this the rightists link the number of times the President and his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, have been seen together in recent times.
The conclusion is not hard to fathom: Harris does not want to be seen with a person whose numbers are slipping only because she does not want to jeopardize her chances in 2024. That President Biden will still want to run for a second term is a different story and can be looked at some other time. For now, the right-wing spin is that things are not fine between the President and his deputy.
At the time of campaigning and after coming to office, President Biden and his senior White House aides have stressed that Harris will be the first and the last voice in the room before any major policy decisions are taken. And, since January 2021, she has been seen at the White House during the President’s Daily Briefs as also having a weekly private lunch with the boss that contemporary Presidents have put in their schedule. To make matters difficult for the right to swallow, Harris was given the lead role in some contentious issues like police reforms, immigration and voting laws among others. Nothing substantial has come out of any of these, but still it rankled many that Harris should be tasked with a lead role.
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It is not the first time that Harris or Democrats are facing a song like this. Even at the time of the campaigning, many were astonished that the California Senator would take on the Biden, especially on issues like racial segregation, and hammer him for cozying up to segregationists in the Senate. And what was appalling to some was that Biden would go on to pick Harris as his running mate and, in the process, set off whacko theories on eligibility and heritage, something that Trump deliberately hedge on during electioneering.
The right wing went to the extent of re-hashing the preposterous pizza-gate theory that dogged the Hillary Clinton campaign: Democrats were behind a pedophile operation run out of a pizza parlour in Washington DC that Harris’ sister was supposed to have attended! And then George Soros came along handy with the political right maintaining that the Hungarian philanthropist pressured Biden into accepting Harris as his running mate. The bottom line in all the invectives was not hard to fathom: aside from her first-class legal background, including as a top law enforcement officer of America’s largest state, Kamala Harris had a profile that none of her predecessors did: first non-white Vice-Presidential pick and highest ranking Asian American, who was the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.
Either way, Harris was in for trouble. If she is seen floundering in the policy areas assigned to her, she could be accused of biting off more than she could chew; and the flip side to this and to fan the flames of more discord would be to argue that the Biden White House deliberately assigned tough areas so that Harris could fail and could be sidelined. But the Harris team also knows that in the current circumstances, lying low is perhaps the best option: if the Vice-President is seen aggressively coming to the defence of her President, she will be accused of trying to over-shadow Biden and hence her “intentions” for 2024.
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In fact, former President Trump and his supporters had openly talked of a Biden Presidency lasting no more than two months — that the 25th Amendment would be invoked to put Harris in the Oval Office. From the very beginning of the 2020 campaigning, the political right had no regards for Kamala Harris with Trump calling her a socialist and a communist. “She’s worse than a socialist. She is a communist. She wants to open up the borders to allow killers and murderers and rapists to pour into our country,” Trump had said. But what many in the Grand Old Party had not figured out was that Biden was going to allow the same latitude for Harris as President Barack Obama had given his Vice-President, knowing and understanding fully well the limitations of a President. In fact, since the 1950s, Presidents have come to lean on their Number Two in a variety of ways and not even bat an eyelid in the fear of being politically outdone.
In all this hoopla of how many times Biden and Harris have met in the last eight months or how many times they have skipped a meeting together, there seems to be a tendency to forget that this Vice President is politically astute enough to realize that whether President runs in 2024 is a call he would have to make; so is the decision whether Biden is still going to have Harris as his running mate, as is normally done. Vice President Harris knows that until such time Biden takes a call, it would be better for her to keep a low profile, not on account of submissiveness but in being politically smart.
(The writer was a former senior journalist in Washington DC for about 15 years covering North America and the United Nations)
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal)
