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Team Kamala: Gosh, We May Need to Distance Ourselves From Biden Some More

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 08, 2024 10:25 AM

Incredible stuff.  In an article entitled, 'Harris weighs more breaks with Biden as he keeps injecting himself into the campaign,' CNN reports that Kamala Harris and her team are anxiously considering how to "weave in breaks with [President Joe Biden] on the campaign trail," but are feeling frustrated and stymied because "she keeps getting pulled back to his side for official business at the White House — and he keeps injecting himself into the conversation."  First of all, what do they mean "more breaks"?  Can anyone name a single "break" from Biden she's made, in terms of a position or proposal he doesn't agree with or support?  Second, it's quite something to see them treating her official duties as such a bummer for them because such things are not always perfectly politically advantageous, plus they remind people that she is the incumbent who has been co-piloting this unpopular administration for nearly four years. 

"Part of leading Democrats’ focus on Biden is seeing him as the albatross embodiment for the unsettling feeling spreading among Democrats that the vice president is not — or at least, not yet — where she needs to be to win in just over four weeks," the piece says.  How rude and inconvenient of the president to occasionally pop his head up and say something.  And I do mean very, very occasionally:

Joe Biden's visit to the storm-ravaged states in the South [last] week was an event that's become increasingly rare for the president: a public appearance. Biden hasn't scheduled public events in 43 of the 75 days since he dropped his re-election bid, a reflection of the 81-year-old president's unpopularity and age limitations as he approaches his last three months in office. Vice President Kamala Harris — who has praised Biden but doesn't routinely talk about him in her speeches — has had just one campaign event with him along with a few official events in Washington...Since dropping out on July 21, Joe Biden has scheduled just two public appearances before 11am, none before 10am, and five after 5pm, according to an Axios analysis of Biden's schedules. With one exception, all publicly scheduled calls and meetings with other world leaders have been between 11am and 5pm — a sign of how Biden's staff continues to narrow his work hours as they manage his stamina.

Manage his stamina?  They were telling us for months that he's good to go, full speed ahead, nothing to see there.  Indeed, obvious evidence of his decline were ignored or dismissed as 'misinformation,' ageism, and 'cheap fakes.'  Kamala Harris is still saying he's totally up to the job, which begs the question why she's the nominee, and he was forced out of the race.  This isn't an old headline from the spring or early summer.  This is from this past weekend:

Vice President Kamala Harris has full confidence that President Biden has the stamina and around-the-clock clarity of mind to handle the domestic and international crises in front of him, a Harris spokesperson tells Axios. The June debate that led Biden to drop his re-election campaign raised questions about Biden's mental fitness — and whether Harris had any concerns beforehand...Axios asked Harris' campaign Saturday whether she could "fully assure" voters that there is nothing to be concerned about Biden's "hour-by-hour performance." Harris spokesperson Ian Sams quickly responded: "Of course." Some of Biden's aides privately have acknowledged that he's more reliably on message between 10am and 4pm, and can get fatigued and have verbal miscues outside those hours...Harris was one of the most aggressive public validators of Biden's mental fitness in the aftermath of the report in February by special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden's handling of classified documents. After two lengthy interviews with the president, Hur wrote that Biden's memory was "hazy," "fuzzy," "faulty," "poor" and had "significant limitations." At the time, Harris called the report "gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate."

Biden's staff: 'Managing' his stamina.  Biden's Vice President: Still vouching for it, having been an "aggressive public validator" of a lie so massive that it caused Democrats to nullify their own primary election results once it was unspinnably exposed.  As a timely reminder, after spending another weekend at the beach while a storm destroyed large swaths of the Southeast, Biden finally went down there and surveys part of the damage.  Upon his return -- that same day -- he said he wasn't sure what storm a reporter was asking him about, and asserted that everyone was "very happy" down there.  Team Harris has no choice but to look at this and say, 'yes he's totally fine' through gritted teeth, while also wishing he would simply go away.  Instead, he's saying things like this:


These comments are quite unhelpful, given the Trump campaign's overwhelming focus on tagging Harris with Biden and the Biden-Harris status quo as often as possible.  Another sign that the Harris campaign isn't sure they're in a clear position to win is that they're not just thinking about dreaming up "breaks" from Biden for the final few weeks of the race -- they're also at least partially reversing (under pressure) their bubble-wrap/basement strategy.  They put Tim Walz on Fox News Sunday, which was not great for him, and they're putting her in front of overwhelmingly friendly interviewers for a "blitz" of media.  But when there's no script in front of her, Kamala is still Kamala:

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I addressed this on 'Outnumbered' yesterday: