President Joe Biden’s 50-year-long political career came to a sad end last Sunday. It terminated a deeply embarrassing twenty-three-day-long media death watch for Biden’s re-election campaign in which, one by one, Biden’s former Democrat supporters, elected officials, and longtime media allies publicly called upon him to end his bid for a second term as president.
At least the end came with a modicum of dignity, with Biden publishing a brief letter on the X social media site formerly known as Twitter, announcing that he was withdrawing as a candidate for re-election in November. Twenty-seven minutes later, in a separate message on X, Biden endorsed his equally unpopular vice president, Kamala Harris, as his replacement at the top of the Democrat ticket.
Biden’s candidacy had been damaged beyond repair by his disastrous performance in a nationally televised June 27 debate against Donald Trump which revealed for all the world to see his sad cognitive decline due to the ravages of age. The subsequent attempts by Biden and his inner circle of family members and advisors to deny that reality proved to be futile, as poll after poll documented the rapid decline in public support for his candidacy, even from Democrats.
Worried Democrats had been increasing the pressure on Biden to withdraw his name from the top of their ticket because they were on track not only to lose the White House but also their current slim majority in the Senate and their hopes for taking over the House as well.
WHEN BIDEN RESISTED, HE WAS FORCED OUT
Democrats had given Biden little other choice. His stumbling debate performance had confirmed the widespread pre-existing concerns, even among Democrat voters, that he was unfit to serve a second term as president because of his painfully obvious deterioration due the effects of his age.
But the gathering storm of public calls by major campaign donors, liberal newspaper editorials, commentators and a growing number of elected Democrats for him to relinquish the nomination had pricked Biden’s presidential ego. Despite his dismal and still declining polling numbers, the embattled president, with the encouragement of his family members and closest advisors, remained stubbornly in denial. insisting that his candidacy still had enough time to recover before Election Day, November 5, and that he was still “in it to win it.”
Biden posted the public letter terminating his candidacy only after it became clear that senior Democrat party leaders, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, were about to go public with their warnings that, unless he stepped aside, the party was likely to suffer an electoral disaster in November of historic proportions.
“While it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus entirely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in the letter. He called it “the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president.”
Once Biden finally announced that he was stepping aside, and publicly endorsed Harris as his preferred successor, it was as if a dam of political support had finally burst. Democrat party leaders, elected officials, and major contributors rapidly fell into line in unanimous support for Harris as their new standard-bearer and party leader.
A QUICK CAMPAIGN TRANSITION TO HARRIS
The Biden campaign was quick to rename itself “Harris for President,” giving her immediate access to the campaign’s large political operation and $96 million in cash that was on hand as of the end of June. Democrat campaign donors who had been withholding any further contributions until Biden renounced his candidacy, inundated the newly renamed Harris campaign with a flow of fresh cash, raising a record of $81 million during the first 24 hours of Harris’ newly announced presidential candidacy. Within 36 hours of Biden’s announcement that he was stepping aside, virtually every Democrat elected official, and party activist, including all of Harris’ potential opponents for the nomination, had endorsed her candidacy. Harris had also received pledges of support from a majority of Democrat national convention delegates, effectively guaranteeing her the party’s presidential nomination, uncontested.
The Democratic National Committee announced that it would adopt new rules to allow for a virtual nomination of Harris almost two weeks before the scheduled August 19 start of its national convention in Chicago, to avoid a potential legal challenge stemming from an August 7 deadline for presidential ballot access in the state of Ohio.
Meanwhile, President Biden immediately took on lame-duck status. He was largely but respectfully ignored after he publicly passed the torch of party leadership to Harris, and the presidential race rebooted.
According to most of the latest polls, Trump’s previously narrow lead over Biden had grown, in some cases beyond the margin of error, both in the nationwide vote and in all of the battleground states that Biden had carried in 2020, thereby endangering many Democrat down-ballot candidates across the nation. The polls also indicated that Trump is now winning by a narrow margin in Virginia, a state that Biden won in 2020 by almost 10 points.
BIDEN’S ENDORSEMENT OF KAMALA HARRIS
Biden’s decision to hand over his Democrat presidential nomination to Harris was seen as an attempt to justify his original decision to name her as his vice president four years ago, despite her conspicuous lack of credentials for the job, other than her race and gender. In his endorsement, Biden wrote that his choice of Harris as his vice president was “the best decision I’ve made,” and that he was giving Harris his “full support and endorsement.” He then added in a call to “Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
Biden’s endorsement of Harris was a successful attempt to build a consensus behind her that would avoid a bitterly divisive nomination fight at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago next month by preventing other prominent Democrats from announcing their plans to challenge Harris for the nomination.
Harris also received quick endorsements from several key Democrat senators and influential House members, as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton, and some of the Democrats who might have challenged her for the nomination, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitner, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Prominent party officials and governors across the country immediately began organizing support for Harris among Democrat convention delegates. But according to the New York Times, that was not necessarily because she was their first choice, but rather because they believed it would be easier to rally the party behind her as their best chance to catch up with and defeat Donald Trump, who has been surging in the polls following a remarkable string of political and legal victories.
Democrat party leaders also feared that any attempt to deny her the nomination by throwing the selection process open to other candidates would risk igniting an open revolt by the party’s black and feminist leaders that would doom the already slim prospects for a Democrat electoral victory in November.
Democrats are hoping that as a woman of color, Harris will be able to regain the support of many black and Latino voters who, according to the polls, have abandoned their traditional allegiance to Democrat candidates and are now supporting Trump. They are also hoping that Harris will attract support from the many voters who told pollsters they were unhappy with the prospect that the 2024 election would be a rematch between two relatively unpopular old men, Trump and Biden.
On the other hand, shortly after Biden announced that he was stepping aside, former president Obama declined to endorse Harris as Biden’s replacement and did not even mention her name. Instead, Obama issued a call for an open and more competitive nominating process in selecting their new presidential nominee, given the fact that the original 2024 Democrat primary process had been tailored by party officials to eliminate all serious challenges to Biden’s nomination.
After praising Biden as “one of America’s most consequential presidents, as well as a dear friend and partner to me,” Obama added, “We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead, but I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”
President Bill Clinton’s outspoken political analyst, James Carville, as well as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, initially declined to endorse Harris, sending a thinly veiled message that they were not sure that she is up to the job of defeating Trump in November.
However, given the immediate outpouring of support for Harris by the party’s rank and file in the wake of Biden’s endorsement, the remaining reluctance by party elders to give her the nomination uncontested quickly faded away, as indicated by Pelosi’s subsequent public offer of support, saying she had “full confidence that she [Harris] will lead us to victory in November.”
“I have seen Kamala Harris’s strength and courage as a champion for working families, notably fighting for a woman’s right to choose,” Pelosi added.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries also told reporters that he and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would meet with Harris “shortly,” presumably to map out their plans for the rest of the election campaign, and implying that she had their support as well.
Democrats and media commentators are already debating Harris’ most likely choice of a vice-presidential running mate against the Trump-Vance GOP ticket. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is the early favorite because of the vital importance to Harris of winning his battleground state to preserve her narrow path to an Electoral College victory, given Trump’s current advantage in the polls.
TRYING TO TURN THE SPOTLIGHT BACK ON TRUMP
Democrats hope that by agreeing to step down, Biden will permit them to attack that advantage by turning the media spotlight back onto Trump’s faults now that the concerns about Biden’s age and his fitness to serve for a second term have been resolved by his withdrawal. The Democrats will try to hold Trump accountable for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision. They will continue to emphasize Trump’s recent 34 felony convictions in a Manhattan courtroom, even though that verdict is likely to be overturned upon appeal. They continue to condemn Trump for his stubborn refusal to accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election and warn voters about his allegedly dangerous authoritarian tendencies.
But none of these Democrat talking points against Trump are new or particularly effective at changing the minds of voters who do not already reject Trump. President Biden and the Democrats repeatedly tried to use them to disqualify Trump as a legitimate presidential candidate in 2024. But that was largely to no avail because the voters saw the legal attacks on Trump for what they were, cynical attempts by Democrats to weaponize the American legal system to try to convict Trump for highly debatable “crimes.” Instead, Trump found a way to use his mandatory court appearances as free media opportunities to garner more support.
There is no reason to believe that such attacks would now become any more effective against Trump if they were to come from Harris instead of Biden.
Democrats have also launched unfair attacks on the ethics of Trump-appointed and other conservative Supreme Court justices. They have also circulated unprovable conspiracy theories dating back to the notorious Steele dossier, which originated in 2016 as a Clinton campaign dirty trick, and falsely accused Trump and his followers of colluding with the Russians.
THE BIDEN COVERUP CONSPIRACY
However, there was a real conspiracy going on at the Biden White House over the past three years. Biden family members, led by his wife, Jill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other elected Democrats, including Harris, cooperated with senior White House staff and the entire White House press corps to keep the president’s accelerating cognitive decline secret from the voters until his June 27 debate meltdown in front of a national TV audience.
In addition, for more than a year before the June 27 debate, Biden’s advisers would respond with angry denials to any suggestion that Biden’s cognitive abilities were deteriorating at an accelerating rate and assured concerned reporters and Democrat contributors in private conversations that their worries about the age limitations on Biden’s ability to continue functioning were uncalled for and were playing into the Republican narrative that Biden was an incompetent figurehead president.
Another reason why Biden’s meltdown came as such a surprise to most Democrats was the concerted effort by his wife and the senior members of the White House staff to reduce the president’s routine daily contacts with other people, including senior cabinet officials, to a bare minimum, making it much more difficult for those outside of Biden’s inner circle to observe and track Biden’s cognitive decline.
While Biden officials were quick to respond by pointing out that former president Trump was also prone to “senior moments” causing him to occasionally mis-speak, forget the name of a person he knew, or wander off from the main subject of his talk, Trump did not exhibit the same telltale signs of his physical frailty and serious mental confusion which prompted so much concern about Biden’s fitness for duty after his debate with Trump.
The irony of the situation was not lost on the Republican supporters of Donald Trump, whom the Democrats have condemned for the third presidential election cycle in a row as a threat to American democracy. But in fact, it was the Democrat party leadership itself that denied their rank-and-file party members the option to choose anyone other than Biden as their presidential candidate, turning the Democrat primaries into sham elections.
WHY BIDEN’S EFFORTS TO REPAIR THE DAMAGE FAILED
The delayed effort by Biden and his handlers to repair the political damage done by the debate catastrophe by scheduling him for an unscripted long interview with a senior ABC News political reporter, live personal appearances at campaign rallies in some of the battleground states, and an extended press conference following the conclusion of a meeting of senior NATO officials in Washington, D.C., failed to calm the growing fears over Biden’s diminished capacity. In fact, Biden’s declaration during his ABC interview that nothing short of Divine intervention could persuade him to abandon his re-election bid, even if he knew that he was doomed to lose the election to Trump and the Republicans, angered many Democrats.
It was undeniably true, as his campaign had claimed, that Biden would have his good days and his bad days. But even on his good days, when the number of gaffes and mumbled, half-incoherent responses was sharply reduced compared to the June 27 debate, they still served as constant reminders of Biden’s underlying cognitive difficulties, and that they would only get progressively worse over the next four years if he were to be re-elected in November.
Biden even tried to stop the political bleeding by telling his followers the truth. At a North Carolina rally, Biden admitted, “I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easily as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.” But it was already too late. It had become clear that nothing could stop the aura of hopelessness engulfing his campaign, and the belief among a sizable majority of Biden’s fellow Democrats and a growing number of party leaders and elected officials that a huge Trump-led GOP victory in November was inevitable as long as Biden remained their candidate.
SAVING BIDEN’S LEGACY
By the time the announcement of Biden’s withdrawal was released, 39 congressional Democrats had publicly called upon him to exit the race. Party leaders told him that his potential path to victory in November had dried up. and that major party donors had shut off the flow of contributions without which the campaign couldn’t continue for long.
The only way left for Biden to preserve his remaining dignity and presidential legacy, the party leaders told him, was to voluntarily step aside in time to give the party a chance to find another presidential candidate with a better chance to beat Trump and save the other Democrat candidates from a looming electoral disaster.
Once Biden had finally made up his mind to do so, the decision was closely held to prevent it from being prematurely disclosed to the media. That allowed Biden to inform his closest aides and family members, as well as Kamala Harris herself, in advance, and to control the message after Biden broke the news to the world himself in a carefully crafted letter published on social media.
THE POWER OF THE UNDEMOCRATIC ELITES
When it became clear that Biden’s defeat by Trump was inevitable, it was the intense pressure applied by a small number of elites, celebrities, and Democrat supporters in the mainstream liberal media, rather than a majority of the party’s membership, which demanded that Biden stand aside. Does this mean that a small cabal of self-appointed influential Democrats can legitimately overrule the decision of the more than 14 million party members who voted for Biden as their presidential candidate in the state primaries just because his poll numbers aren’t high enough to guarantee victory in November? Is this insider-controlled process what Democrats mean when they claim to be fighting to protect democracy? Democrat party leaders have already answered these questions by refusing to give their long-neglected party members any way to block the selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s replacement.
As a result, Carson Holloway writes on the American Mind website, Democrat party leaders need a reminder that democracy demands that party nominees be selected by the secret ballot of all party members and that the voters alone deserve the right to hold their elected leaders accountable at the ballot box.
Even more ironically, that reminder was provided by President Joe Biden himself in a July 8th letter in which he wrote: “The voters — and the voters alone — decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well-intentioned.”
OVERRULING THE WILL OF THE VOTERS
But the interference by the elites in the Democrat candidate selection process did not begin with Biden’s meltdown during the June 27 debate with Trump. As Holloway notes, Biden won the primaries well before the people got a chance to vote. The choice of Biden as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate was made back in 2022 and 2023 when the elites decided to ignore the polls showing that a majority of Democrat voters didn’t want Biden to run again. Instead, the elites changed the rules of the primary process to favor Biden, and deterred the young rising stars of the party from challenging Biden for the nomination, by threatening to blame them if they did run and it resulted in Trump winning the general election.
In reality, Biden won the primaries because he had won the support of the insiders and the party elites who determined which candidates would be available to party members to choose from in their primary voting booths.
Holloway also notes that Biden was forced to relinquish his nomination by the same combination of elites and party officials using “the standard playbook for how to force out a suddenly scandal-plagued elected official who is believed to be hurting the party.” It includes making sure that the targeted official knows “that the battering will continue unless they quit.”
The same undemocratic process that Democrat party leaders used to convince Biden to give up his re-election bid, was also used to force New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign in 2021, and forced Minnesota Senator Al Franken to step down in 2017.
The elites and Democrat party officials rigged the primary process to assure Biden the nomination when they thought he could win the popular vote in November, and ditched him when they thought he no longer could, which Holloway concedes is a rough form of democracy.
However, it can also be argued that Biden and his supporters had deceived the voters and party leaders by refusing to participate in debates with other primary candidates and by avoiding answering hostile questions during media interviews. That deprived the voters and party leaders of the information they needed to make an informed choice, thereby justifying, at least to some extent, the undemocratic tactics the elites used since June 27 to force Biden to step down.
HARRIS’ POLITICAL DOWNSIDES
Byron York, a conservative political analyst who writes for the Washington Examiner, stated that within hours of Biden’s withdrawal from the race, there “was a stampede to Harris by. . . a majority of Senate Democrats, a majority of Democratic governors, and all of the state party chairs.
“[As a result], by Monday morning, Harris was well on her way to securing the Democratic nomination,” even though, according to York, Harris “is a provably terrible candidate, possibly the worst candidate Democrats could field in their situation.” She has a relatively thin political resume, including her 2020 run for the Democrat presidential nomination, “which started well and ended badly,” her poor performance during her early years as Biden’s vice president, as well as very low public approval ratings. Harris’ candidacy also comes with other liabilities, including a Biden-like tendency for committing minor verbal gaffes from time to time, and an irritating tendency to break out into giggles or a laugh that sounds like a cackle on inappropriate occasions.
During the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination, Harris was one of the first of the leading candidates to drop out due to a lack of support. She was also widely criticized at the time for her initial incompetence as Biden’s vice president and her difficulties in dealings with her staff. By early 2022, four of the most senior advisers in her vice-presidential office had quit, prompting the Washington Post to report that many of Harris’ critics and supporters “worry that her inability to keep and retain staff will hobble her future ambitions.”
Harris has also been criticized for occasionally providing incomprehensible “word salad” answers to simple and straightforward questions about Biden administration policies, without Biden’s excuse of advancing senile dementia. In response, Harris’ political defenders have suggested that the complaints of her critics are primarily due to their prejudices against women of color in positions of political power.
According to York, her 2020 presidential primary run started well because “for Democrat voters, Harris seemed appealing when she started her campaign and then they liked her less and less as they got to know her. Familiarity with the candidate killed her hopes.” What Democrat voters eventually saw in Harris four years ago “was a candidate who had few ideas, who rambled, sometimes semi-coherently, when speaking, and who was not the centrist many Democrats were seeking.” That does not bode well for Democrats if they choose Harris to replace Biden in this year’s run against Donald Trump.
HARRIS TOOK PART IN THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE COVERUP
Harris will also be vulnerable to charges by Trump and the Republicans that she must have been part of the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline because of their regular one-hour lunches together in the White House. Lake predicts that Harris will be asked the same question that brought down the participants in Richard Nixon’s Watergate coverup fifty years ago, “What did she know about Biden’s cognitive decline, and when did she know it? How could she have been unaware of Biden’s mental and physical decline, especially in recent months?”
Harris will have to explain why she gave public assurances that Biden was fit for re-election, especially her attempt during an MSNBC interview to explain Biden’s poor debate performance as the result of a “slow start” followed by a much-improved performance. Harris also publicly rebuked Special Counsel Robert Hur for his report in March which spared Biden from future prosecution for mishandling government documents by portraying the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory” whom no jury would ever convict.
HARRIS’ FUZZY IDEOLOGICAL BELIEFS
Some of Harris’ ideological beliefs and principals remain undefined because most of her prior political experience, aside from her four years in the U.S. Senate, was based upon her performance as a prosecutor and district attorney enforcing (or not enforcing) the law, or performing her ceremonial duties as vice president. During those years, Harris did not have to make many difficult public policy decisions or negotiate painful legislative compromises.
Veteran commentator Eli Lake, writing in the Tablet, cites the question of whether Harris was hard or soft on crime. Lake claims that, based on her record as a prosecutor, it’s nearly impossible to say. When she was San Francisco’s district attorney, she declined to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer. But as California’s state attorney general, she argued in favor of the state’s right to issue the death penalty.
On the other hand, during the riots that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020, when Harris was Biden’s vice-presidential running mate, she used her Facebook page to urge her followers to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail for those arrested during the riots. In 2022, that same fund helped to release on bail a repeat felon charged with murdering a passenger on a light-rail platform in St. Paul, Minnesota.
During her brief 2020 presidential primary run, Harris tried to portray herself, unsuccessfully, as a bridge candidate seeking common ground between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democrat party.
On the other hand, while she was the attorney general of California, Harris gained a reputation in the state’s financial community for being a liberal-progressive enemy, by filing major lawsuits against the state’s big banks and credit rating firms.
HARRIS’ FIRST TEST AS A CANDIDATE AGAINST TRUMP
Veteran Republican strategist Alex Castellanos predicts that Harris will soon be called upon to demonstrate the political skills she needs to overcome Trump’s sizable lead in the critical battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.
According to Castellanos, Harris still “has to prove something she has yet to demonstrate: that she is a serious leader. The women who succeed as presidents and prime ministers [such as Israel’s Golda Meir and Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher] have shown they are tough and strong because it’s a tough job, and Kamala Harris has not done that yet.”
Harris’ most obvious political advantage over Biden as a presidential candidate is that at 59, she does not have his age problem, and may have the option of using that issue against Trump, who is almost 20 years older than she is.
HARRIS STILL HAS A POLLING PROBLEM
However, New York Times political columnist Nate Cohn warns that Harris lacks the broad appeal to moderate mainstream voters that enabled Biden to defeat Trump four years ago. Instead, in the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, just 42 percent of voters said they viewed Harris favorably compared to the 51 percent who approved of Biden and the 46 percent who said the same for Trump.
The findings of a recent Wall Street Journal show that both Harris and Biden were viewed favorably by only about 35% of voters and unfavorably by about 56%.
Cohn also notes that for the past 10 months, Biden campaign officials had been offering a long list of excuses, most of which had nothing to do with Biden’s age, to explain why Trump had been consistently leading Biden in the polls. A majority of voters told pollsters that the country is heading in the wrong direction. They express a deep concern about the economy, especially inflation, as well as stopping illegal immigration. They are two of Trump’s most popular campaign issues, and because as vice president she will still be part of the Biden administration, Harris will be challenged on the campaign trail to defend Biden’s most unpopular policies.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, Cohn observes that their “party has held power for almost 12 of the last 16 years, and it has exhausted much of its agenda.” As a result, Democrats no longer have many popular, new liberal policies left to offer the voters, who are dissatisfied with the current status quo and are looking for a significant change in the current, largely dysfunctional federal government.
KAMALA HARRIS’ POLITICAL HISTORY
Before becoming vice president, Harris had served for four years as a U.S. Senator from California, taking over Barbara Boxer’s seat, who had stepped down. Before that, Harris had served for six years as the attorney general of California, and for seven years before as the district attorney of San Francisco. Early in her political career, Harris had been a protégé of former San Francisco mayor and speaker of the California House Willie Brown.
As a U.S. Senator, Harris had a strong pro-Israel voting record. However, as vice president, she has repeated some of the Biden administration’s criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s opposition to the two-state solution and the high civilian casualty rates due to collateral damage from Israeli military attacks directed against Hamas during the Gaza war. Whether as president she would continue Biden’s crucial military support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, in the face of growing opposition from Harris’ supporters in the progressive wing of the Democrat party, remains to be seen.
The Biden administration had also recruited Harris’ Jewish husband, lawyer Douglas Emhoff, to serve as its spokesman against antisemitism in reaction to the widespread recent pro-Hamas demonstrations, primarily on college campuses across the country.
However, Harris has been effective at leading nationwide Democrat attacks on the 2022 decision by the Trump-appointed majority of conservative justices on the Supreme Court who overturned the Roe v. Wade decision. Harris first gained national attention for her tough grilling of Brett Kavanaugh during his raucous 2018 Senate confirmation hearings after he was nominated by Trump for a seat on the Supreme Court on the recommendation of the conservative Federalist Society.
Harris is expected to emphasize her liberal support for women’s reproductive rights in her 2024 presidential campaign against Trump, who has praised the conservative court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade for returning those controversial questions to the jurisdiction of the states.
HARRIS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE MOST OF BIDEN’S POLICIES
As the new Democrat presidential nominee, Harris is not expected to make many significant changes to the Biden administration’s domestic policies before the November election, because they are already mostly aligned with the progressive agenda of Harris’ liberal San Francisco political base.
The main areas in which there are some policy differences between Biden and Harris have been healthcare, trade, climate, and taxes.
As a senator, Harris supported the liberal Medicare for All proposal, which would effectively end the current healthcare system of private and employer-based health insurance with a government-run socialized medicine program. But since becoming vice president, Harris has backed Biden’s more modest plan which would build upon Obama’s Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare), which would expand access to Medicare while keeping private health insurance intact.
On international trade, Harris was opposed to two recent major treaties that Biden supported, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), because she claimed that their environmental and worker protection provisions were insufficient.
HARRIS MORE RADICAL THAN BIDEN ON GREEN ENERGY POLICY
Harris is an advocate for the liberal Green New Deal and supports a total ban on the use of fracking for domestic oil and natural gas production, while Biden has permitted the use of fracking on privately owned land.
When she ran for president in 2020, Harris called for a full repeal of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts primarily benefitting business, while Biden wanted to leave in place the tax cuts for people making under $400,000 a year and making up the lost government revenue with new taxes on companies and high-income households. Harris also favored an increase in the federal estate tax.
While in the Senate, she proposed an increase in the federal tax credit for lower-income and middle-income workers worth up to $3,000 per year for individuals and $6,000 for married couples.
FORMULATING TRUMP’S POST-BIDEN STRATEGY
Meanwhile, at the well-run and well-organized GOP convention in Milwaukee last week, Trump was proclaimed to be a national hero for his courage after having been wounded and narrowly escaping death from an assassin’s bullet during a July 13 campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania. That is expected to give him yet another boost in the opinion polls.
Before the GOP convention, Trump and the Republicans had wisely refrained from making strong personal attacks on Biden that might have diverted attention away from his aging issues. The Republicans preferred instead to emphasize Trump’s impressive first-term accomplishments, especially with regard to growing the economy and enhancing border security.
From a political point of view, it would have been very much to Trump’s advantage had Biden remained his wounded Democrat opponent all the way to Election Day. But despite the enlarged advantage he now holds over the Democrats in the nationwide and battleground polls, Trump was not gracious in response to Biden’s decision to drop out as a candidate for re-election. Instead, his first reaction was to write, “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for president, and is certainly not fit to serve — And never was! He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement. All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t — And now, look what he’s done to our Country. . .”
TRUMP COMPLAINS ABOUT DEMOCRAT BAIT AND SWITCH
Trump also complained that it was unfair of Democrats to switch their presidential candidate so late in the campaign after the Republicans had formally nominated Trump as their standard bearer. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate and quits the race,” Trump wrote. “Now we have to start all over again.”
Fox News commentator David Marcus observes that even as President Biden now stands as exposed and humiliated as the emperor who had no clothes in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, the Democrats are preparing a new set of royal robes to present to Kamala Harris in addition to the nomination they have just forced Biden to relinquish.
But Marcus argues that Democrats should think twice before bestowing their nomination on Harris because, during her tenure as Biden’s border czar, she shared the responsibility for turning every state in the union into a border state “with tent cities and hotels being used for criminal activity by illegals.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial criticized Trump for his failure to act more magnanimously during his nomination acceptance speech in the face of his opponent’s downfall. But as the editorial also notes, the race is now Trump’s to lose, and one way to do that would be to fail to make the strongest possible case to the voters by continuing to attack Biden’s failed presidential record, upon which his successor as the Democrat nominee will be running.
IN POLITICS AND BASEBALL NICE GUYS FINISH LAST
Perhaps the editorial writers overlooked the fact that Democrats do not play presidential politics by politely observing Marquis of Queensbury rules, or, as the former Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball team manager Leo Durocher used to put it, “Nice guys finish last.”
However, Trump has also expressed confidence in his ability to defeat Harris because she has had one of the lowest approval ratings of any vice president. During an interview with Fox News commentator Jesse Waters, after Biden announced his endorsement of Harris, Trump said, “She’s not a competent person. She shouldn’t be president. I mean, she’s being laughed at all over the world.”
During their convention in Milwaukee last week, the Republicans laid the foundation for a campaign against Harris, out of recognition that she would be the most likely Democrat to replace Biden on the presidential ballot should he step aside.
Within an hour after Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, the pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again, rolled out an anti-Harris TV ad that began running in the three battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. It accuses Vice President Harris of being in on the White House conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden’s “obvious mental decline.” The Trump campaign will also attempt to hold Harris responsible for the Biden administration policies which triggered runaway inflation and illegal immigration chaos along the southern border.
HARRIS CONDEMNED AS BIDEN’S “ENABLER IN CHIEF”
The day after Biden dropped out, the Trump campaign issued a statement declaring that “Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two, Harris must defend the failed Biden Administration and her liberal, weak-on-crime record” during her years as the district attorney in San Francisco and the attorney general of California.
Republicans have also attacked Harris for her performance following her appointment by President Biden in March 2021, to handle the “root causes” of the illegal immigration issue, including her initial refusal to pay a personal visit to the border crossing spots with Mexico that were experiencing the largest number of illegal crossings.
In response to suggestions that Trump would have trouble pivoting to attack a Democrat candidate other than Biden, James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director responded by declaring, “Our organization is built for our candidate, not our opposition. . . The other side now has to shove a new candidate into a team and organization built for someone else. Best of luck.”
WHY BIDEN SHOULD BE REMOVED AS PRESIDENT AS WELL
Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson explained in a lengthy post on X why he is not satisfied with Biden’s decision to cede the Democrat presidential nomination to Harris. Johnson insists that Biden must resign as president as well because, as Margot Cleveland wrote in the Federalist, “The president of the United States cannot discharge his duties if he lacks lucidity for even a fraction of the day. The commander-in-chief must be able to command the executive branch 24-7.”
Speaker Johnson wrote: “At this unprecedented juncture in American history, we must be clear about what just happened. The Democrat Party forced the Democrat nominee off the ballot, just over 100 days before the election.
“Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite.
“The party’s prospects are no better now with Vice President Kamala Harris, who co-owns the disastrous policy failures of the Biden Administration. As second in command and a completely inept border czar, Harris has been a gleeful accomplice — not only in the destruction of American sovereignty, security, and prosperity but also in the largest political coverup in U.S. history. She has known for as long as anyone of his incapacity to serve.
“Regardless of the chaos in the current White House, our adversaries around the globe should be reminded that the U.S. Congress, the U.S. military, and the American people are fully prepared and committed to defend our interests both at home and abroad.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for president, he is not fit to serve as president. He must resign the office immediately. November 5 [Election Day] cannot arrive soon enough,” Speaker Johnson concludes.
THE CAMPAIGN HAS RESUMED
Meanwhile, the rebooted presidential campaign has now resumed in earnest.
In her first public appearance since Biden announced that said he would no longer seek re-election, Harris praised the president’s record, calling his accomplishments “unmatched in modern history.”
Later, at another event at her campaign headquarters, Harris displayed her hard-edged stump speech challenging Trump. She pointed out that as a prosecutor she “took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
The Trump campaign responded by criticizing Harris for being more liberal than Biden.
“A vote for Kamala is a vote to continue inflation, open borders, high gas prices, and war around the world,” the Trump campaign’s national press secretary said.
The pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again is also now up and running in several of the battleground states with a new 30-second ad titled “Kamala Harris Was In On It.” It claims, according to a PAC spokesman, that she “lied for years now about Joe Biden’s mental condition and America suffered for it.”
The Trump campaign will now have to adjust its attack strategy to fit Harris’ political profile and weaknesses. However, Trump campaign officials are reportedly optimistic about the switch in their target to Harris instead of Biden because, according to their internal polling, Trump had been leading Biden by two points just before he stepped aside, while Trump had been leading Harris by five points.
