Barack Obama joined the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. Will incumbent President Joe Biden be doing the same for Kamala Harris? In fact, in no uncertain terms, I think the message Kamala’s people delivered to Biden’s staff was that the Delaware liberal should stay the hell away from her. It’s the final chapter in a long story between the two camps fraught with reported animosity, where the vice president’s aides believe that Biden was actively engaging in a campaign of sabotage.
Biden remains unpopular, with Kamala being unable to break free from the administration she still serves, which has been a sticky point for her campaign. She can’t define herself, which is bad. Her inability to say how she’d be different from Joe is equally incompetent. I guess when all else fails, physical separation is all you can do this late in the game (via NBC News):
With just two weeks left in the 2024 campaign, there are currently no plans for Vice President Kamala Harris to appear on the trail with President Joe Biden before Election Day, according to three Harris campaign officials and three White House officials.
Instead, Biden plans to try to help Harris this week by privately leveraging some of his longtime political relationships, specifically with labor leaders, and holding official White House events that highlight his administration’s record, officials said. His schedule in the final week before the election has not yet been determined, they said.
The strategy was crafted with coordination between Harris and Biden aides, who believe at this time that “the most important role he can play is doing his job as president,” said one of the White House officials who, like others in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
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It’s a remarkably diminished position in the 2024 campaign for a president who until just a few months ago was at the top of the Democratic ticket. It comes as Harris is trying to convince voters in the final days before the election that she does not represent a second Biden term and instead is a candidate of change. Harris aides believe that message could be undermined by images of her on the campaign trail with the president.
“Harris has to be establishing herself as a change agent, and it’s hard to do that with a sitting president at her side,” one longtime Democratic strategist said.
Harris has struggled at times to articulate how she would be different than Biden and has tried in recent days to be more definitive.
