Kamala Harris’ trickiest debate nemesis won’t be Trump

When Kamala Harris walks onto the debate stage at the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia on Tuesday (Wednesday, AEST), her toughest opponent will not be Donald Trump. After all, she is quite familiar with his type, as the vice president frequently reminds us. No, Harris’ most complicated antagonist will be one who she can’t criticise, question or contradict, one that she must both deflect and defend.

Harris will have to face off against President Joe Biden — his record, his shifting public approval rating and their intertwined legacies — from now until election day. Her supporters are eager to watch her “prosecute the case” against Trump in their debate. But when it comes to the Biden years, Harris is both prosecutor and defendant, reformer and institutionalist, contrast and continuity. And that’s a harder sell.

Vice president Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden at a campaign event in Pittsburgh on Monday.Credit: AP

Americans are ready for a “new way forward” and are eager to “turn the page,” Harris told Dana Bash of CNN in an interview last week. But it’s tricky to campaign on a new way when you also represent the old one, to turn to the next page when you helped write the previous chapter.

On debate night, Harris’ sharpest contrast with Biden will be simple but fleeting; all it will take is showing up. Assuming the vice president speaks with even modest eloquence and clarity, calls out Trump’s distortions and doesn’t declare victory over Medicare, she will have skipped over the lowest of bars that Biden set in the June debate against Trump, instantly appearing more presidential than the current president.

In fact, the Harris campaign, usually unstinting in its politeness toward Biden, has already let slip a subtle dig. When the Harris and Trump camps sparred over whether the candidates’ debate microphones should remain on or be muted depending on whose turn it was to speak (as they were in the Biden-Trump debate), a Harris campaign spokesperson made the case for live mics. The vice president “is ready to deal with Trump’s constant lies and interruptions in real time,” he said. The unfortunate implication is that Biden was not similarly ready.

Merely surpassing Biden’s debate performance may not suffice, however. On policy matters, Harris has been compelled to cherry-pick parts of the Biden administration’s record while still striving to appear independent. For example, when Bash asked the vice president whether “Bidenomics” had succeeded, Harris praised some of the administration’s specific policies — like capping what older adults pay for prescription drugs and extending the child tax credit — while stopping well short of endorsing the term that Biden had embraced for his economic program.

Donald Trump at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Saturday. Credit: AP

For the Harris campaign, it’s farewell to Bidenomics and hello to the “opportunity economy.”

The irony is that the US economy under Biden has shown some notable successes, particularly in its post-pandemic recovery, yet recent polls show that voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy. So the Democratic Party, not just the Harris campaign, looks for ways to dance around the Biden record. Democrat congressman Steven Horsford, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Harris’ economic program will “absolutely” differ from Biden’s, even as Biden himself has denied that Harris will seek to separate herself from his policies.

This same-but-different message is particularly complicated with inflation. “Costs are still too high,” Harris said in an August 16 speech on her plans for the economy, citing the price of groceries, rent, gas and medicine and calling for a federal ban on price gouging. Yet in her CNN interview two weeks later, Harris tried to stress the positive, emphasising that “we have inflation at under 3 per cent.” It’s tough to credibly present yourself as a champion of a lower cost of living when prices are up nearly 20 per cent since you took office.

On the difficulties at the southern US border, Trump handed Biden and Harris a gift when he torpedoed a bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year because he thought it would benefit the Democrats. In her speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago, Harris said she would not “play politics with our security” and pledged to bring back the bill and sign it into law.

But this comes after three years in which Biden struggled to get border crossings under control and during which Harris — whom Biden assigned to work with Central American nations in addressing the root causes of migration — has at times stumbled when discussing the issue. Even now, when crossings have fallen in recent months following a Biden executive order restricting asylum-seekers at the southern border, and when Harris is talking tougher on immigration, the latest New York Times/Siena College poll of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin shows that they still trust Trump more than Harris on both the border and the economy.

When he left the 2024 race and endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination, Biden said choosing her as his running mate was the “best decision” he’d made. And in his convention speech last month, the president repeatedly referred to the work “Kamala and I” had done on infrastructure, education, public safety and gun violence. Biden seems to understand that his legacy is now wrapped up in her success: If she wins in November, he’s the selfless statesman who stepped aside for the next generation; if she loses, he’s the self-obsessed politician who hung on too long.

Harris’ own prospects intersect with Biden’s legacy, record and popularity as well. She served less than a single full term in the Senate — where she did not have a particularly distinguished legislative record — before ascending to the vice presidency. Her case for replacing Biden as the party’s nominee rests largely on her standing as his loyal No. 2, yet that very status undercuts her ability to turn that page. “No vice-president makes policy,” David Axelrod, a former adviser to president Barack Obama, said bluntly on CNN after Harris’ interview. “It is a challenge for her to take credit for the things that are good and to try and walk away from the things that are not.”

Harris’ dilemma is simple but awkward: She can own the positive aspects of Biden’s record but risk getting tarnished by inflation and the border, or she can distance herself from the administration in which she still serves but risk appearing to be a non-factor in the highest executive post she has ever held.

Writing in the New York Times this week, James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, urged Harris to break “clearly and decisively” from Biden on key issues. The case for a full break is potentially undercut by Biden’s approval ratings, which have been trending higher since he left the race. (Somewhere, LBJ is scowling in sympathy.) I suspect Harris, out of some combination of loyalty, expediency and strategy, will continue to split the difference between herself and her boss. On Wednesday, for example, she called for an increase in capital gains taxes for Americans who earn more than $1 million a year, but to a far lower rate than Biden had proposed — a move aimed at wooing the business community and putting some distance between her and Biden.

One of Harris’ campaign slogans, “We’re not going back,” is a bit of genius in its ambiguity and elasticity. The Democratic nominee mainly uses it to contrast her priorities with those of her Republican opponent. The “sum total” of the Trump project, Harris said in her convention speech, “is to pull our country back to the past. But America, we are not going back. We are not going back. We are not going back.”

But the slogan can also imply a broader rejection of the past, including Harris’ move beyond the tenure of the man who twice put her in position to reach the presidency — first by naming her as his running mate, and next by anointing her as his successor when he decided that running was no longer an option.

Trump seems to wish he could still run against Biden. Harris probably wishes she didn’t have to.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.