Kamala Harris Should Cut Joe Biden Loose

Kamala Harris is navigating a tricky dilemma, according to the New York Times. She “will try to promote herself as a change candidate without criticizing President Biden.” The story quotes numerous Democrats, inside and outside the administration, as to precisely how Harris should manage the delicate balance between her loyalty to Biden and the public’s clamoring for change during her debate with Donald Trump.

I have no reason to doubt that this accurately conveys the calculus within the Harris campaign. That struggle was apparent in Harris’s interview with CNN, when she responded to a question about turning the page buy contrasting herself exclusively against Donald Trump, rather than her current boss. My question is: Why is this a struggle? Why not directly repudiate unpopular Biden positions?

Joe Biden is literally one person. He lives in a safe state. Harris doesn’t have to worry about forfeiting his vote. Even the universe of people who are personally loyal to Biden, and might take offense at slights to his accomplishments, consists entirely of partisan Democrats who will vote for the Democrat at the end of the day (or more likely, several days before the end of the day).

Rather than trying to balance loyalty to Biden against catering to the desires of the electorate, Harris’s strategy should focus entirely on catering to the public with no attention whatsoever to Biden’s feelings.

There are certainly issues where Biden has taken a popular stance or achieved something popular that Harris can take credit for. On those issues — letting the federal government negotiate prescription-drug prices, signing a bipartisan infrastructure law, reducing health-care costs — she should proclaim her agreement and highlight her tie-breaking vote.

But there is no rule requiring Harris to own every action Biden has taken. She can even say that she disagreed with him. Her role as vice-president was to give the president candid advice in private and support him in public, but now that she is running for his job, she can advocate her own ideas.

And Biden is, on the whole, a liability for Harris. He has been deeply and consistently unpopular since relatively early in his administration. The most recent Times poll finds that 61 percent of voters want the next president to constitute “a major change” from Biden, but only a quarter of them believe Harris would constitute such a change.

The best data point Biden’s defenders can summon on behalf of his political viability is the party’s midterm performance, in which Democrats forfeited the House majority but lost fewer seats than a first-term incumbent typically would. But that modest success can be explained by a combination of a backlash against the Dobbs decision, the general unacceptability of the Republican opposition, and the fact that Democratic candidates for Congress had some natural distance and didn’t have to run as Biden superfans. Nothing about the 2022 midterm elections contradicts the overall fact that Biden is an unpopular president.

Exactly why Biden has proven so toxic has confounded Democrats. I sympathize with their bewilderment. The economy is excellent, and people should be crediting Biden’s management rather than blaming him for an inflation surge that was mostly beyond his control and has almost entirely receded.

At this point, alas, public opinion is what it is. And I fear that Democrats have allowed their sentiment that Biden has gotten an unfair rap to cloud their judgment.

The Democrats quoted by the Times seem to imagine there is some invisible fence prohibiting Harris from wandering too far away from the administration. Congressman Henry Cuellar suggests Harris must delicately engage in a “threading of the needle.” Democratic strategist Robert Shrum “said Ms. Harris was unlikely to explicitly criticize the president, even on issues where the administration is unpopular.”

I don’t think there is a needle to thread. If Biden has an unpopular stance, Harris should simply oppose it. People understand that she couldn’t undermine her boss. Harris can say she privately disagreed with some of Biden’s positions on fiscal management and immigration enforcement but supported them because she was a good soldier. Alternatively, if she didn’t disagree with any Biden decisions at the time, she is free to say that she disagrees with them now and wants to go in a different direction.

Trump’s campaign perceives clearly that the problem facing Harris is not a tricky dilemma but a straightforward incentive to distance herself from an unpopular presidency.

“Kamala Harris is not the candidate for change nor is she the candidate of the future,” a Trump spokesperson tells the Times. “Kamala Harris is the vice-president right now, and whether she likes it or not, she is responsible for the economic, immigration, and foreign-policy crises over the past four years.”

In fact, that is not true. The vice-president has no constitutional power. If the president wants to do something Harris doesn’t like, Harris can’t stop him. She is therefore not responsible for any policies she doesn’t wish to associate herself with.

The vice-presidency is a strange office, lacking any formal authority. Its inhabitants have generally lamented the powerlessness of the job. Harris really ought to stop thinking about her position as a confining dilemma and realize that it is a liberating opportunity to define her campaign as whatever she wants it to be, unburdened by what has been.