Vice President Kamala Harris’s strategists may have thought they were avoiding problems by keeping President Biden holed up in the White House. But now they may need to take away his Zoom password, too.
In the final days of a coin-toss election, where any small shift theoretically could be decisive, Mr. Biden has twice caused headaches for his vice president with ill-timed gaffes. His latest, during a video call with Latino supporters on Tuesday night, forced Ms. Harris to spend part of the last Wednesday of her campaign distancing herself.
Mr. Biden was denouncing racist comments made by a speaker at a recent Donald J. Trump rally when he appeared to call supporters of Mr. Trump “garbage.” He later explained that he meant that “the hateful rhetoric” from the Trump surrogate was “garbage,” not his supporters generally. But Republicans, expressing umbrage, quickly pounced on what they hoped would be a galvanizing moment for their base and instantly began fund-raising off it.
The unscripted remark came at a particularly inopportune moment for Ms. Harris, barely a half-hour before she took the stage at the Ellipse just outside the White House for a high-profile rally where she unveiled her closing argument before tens of thousands of supporters. Even as she assailed Mr. Trump as a “petty tyrant,” her speech was filled with talk of unity and working across the aisle if she wins, a message undercut by the perception that her own president was denigrating Americans who vote for her opponent.
On Wednesday morning, Ms. Harris disavowed any such sentiment. Speaking with reporters before boarding Air Force Two outside Washington, she noted that Mr. Biden had “clarified his comments.” But she added: “Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
She also said that she and Mr. Biden had spoken on Tuesday night, but that they had not discussed his remarks.
Ms. Harris has already been trying to stand apart from Mr. Biden and present herself as an agent of change. She did not include Mr. Biden in her Tuesday night rally even though she held it on what amounts to his own backyard. Instead, he sat inside of the White House, unwelcome and unneeded, while Democrats who once cheered him applauded her instead just a few hundred yards away.
“I don’t think these comments by the president are going to matter much at all come Election Day, but it’s incredibly frustrating to watch as the Harris campaign has to spend precious time and energy clarifying what the president was trying to say,” said Jim Manley, a longtime top adviser to Senate Democratic leaders.
“We are way past the need to be concerned about the president’s feelings,” Mr. Manley added. “After all, he dealt her a pretty bad hand when he only finally agreed to drop out with months to go. If the Harris campaign feels the need to distance themselves, they should feel free to do so.”
Other Democrats tried to play down the significance of the latest mistake for Ms. Harris’s strategists. “I got a feeling they are focused on more consequential things,” said Cornell Belcher, who was a pollster for President Barack Obama. “This is a lot of nothing.”
Mr. Trump’s complaints may ring hollow to many since he has practiced the politics of division for years, regularly disparaging his opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within” and even threatening to use the military to round up liberal opponents. Democrats dismissed what they deemed Mr. Trump’s crocodile tears over Mr. Biden’s remark.
“These comments are not remotely in the same ballpark as what Trump’s team has been saying all year,” said Margie Omero, another Democratic pollster. “Never mind ballpark — not even in the same galaxy. Polls consistently show people of both parties are sick of our country’s divisions, and only Harris is reaching out to voters across the political spectrum.”
But Ms. Harris is not reaching out much to Mr. Biden lately. While she has hit the trail with Mr. Obama and other Democratic luminaries, she has not appeared in nearly two months at a formal campaign event with the president who first named her to his ticket in 2020. Democrats have made clear that he is not especially wanted on the campaign trail. While she plays arenas packed with thousands of supporters, he has held few campaign events, often in rooms with just a few hundred people.
That is a natural conundrum for an incumbent vice president running to succeed a president: finding a balance between not disrespecting the boss while carving out an independent identity. That was a particular challenge for Hubert Humphrey, who did not break from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam policy in 1968 until too late. To different degrees and in different ways, George H.W. Bush tried to distinguish himself from Ronald Reagan in 1988 and Al Gore from Bill Clinton in 2000, even though both of those presidents were more popular than Mr. Biden is now.
If anyone understands the dicey situation for a vice president, it might be Mr. Biden, who spent eight years as the No. 2 to Mr. Obama and at times bristled at the constraints that came with that. Aides said he did not blame Ms. Harris for wanting to move beyond him, even as some confidants acknowledge that it can be unpleasant for a lifelong politician who would like to be running himself.
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, said it was smart for Ms. Harris to create distance with Mr. Biden. “You want a new page,” he said. “She loves him, she respects him but you got to make your own way without the shadow of him. There’s one thing her and Donald Trump have to do which is be the change agent. And you can’t be the change agent if he’s there.”
Mr. Biden has focused his public appearances on appeals to labor unions, a longtime base of support; visits to Pennsylvania, where he lived for a time growing up; and ostensibly official events promoting various policies of the Biden-Harris administration, like health care.
Even during the relatively few times Mr. Biden is out campaigning these days, though, he risks making unforced errors. The president, whose career-long blooper reel is extensive enough that he once called himself a “gaffe machine,” suggested last week during a brief stop at a New Hampshire campaign office that he wanted to imprison Mr. Trump. “We got to lock him up,” he said. Catching himself, he quickly added, “Politically lock him up.”
But the damage was done. He had just given Mr. Trump ammunition for his argument that the four indictments and one conviction against him are just part of a Democratic witch hunt, even though there is no evidence that Mr. Biden has played any role in the prosecutions. The fact that Mr. Trump has regularly called for locking up his political opponents and, while in office, pressured the Justice Department to do so did not stop the former president from expressing offense.
Keeping Mr. Biden in the White House did not keep him from tripping up. During his video call with Latino supporters on Tuesday, he was assailing comments made at Mr. Trump’s rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian supporting Mr. Trump, called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” comments that enraged many Hispanic leaders and put the former president on the defensive.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Mr. Biden said in the video call. The White House later released a transcript rendering Mr. Biden’s comment with an apostrophe, meaning “his supporter’s” demonization.
“He was not calling Trump supporters garbage,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday. “This is why he wanted to make sure that we put out a statement that clarified what he meant he was trying to say.” She refused to characterize Mr. Biden’s remarks as a mistake or say whether he had discussed them with Ms. Harris.
Whatever Mr. Biden meant, it was a political gift to Mr. Trump, who relishes playing to resentment by portraying himself as the champion of Americans aggrieved by elites who look down their noses at them. “Joe Biden finally said what he and Kamala really think of our supporters,” Mr. Trump told a rally on Wednesday. “He called them garbage. And they mean it.”
With six days until the election, Ms. Harris tried to move on after addressing the matter, heading to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. She again struck themes of unity. “The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us,” she said in Raleigh, N.C.
Mr. Biden remained back at the White House, hosting an early Halloween event for local students and children of military service members, and trying to avoid handing any more unintended tricks to his vice president.
The post Biden’s Gaffes Complicate Harris’s Final Stretch, Worrying Democratic Insiders appeared first on New York Times.
