President Joe Biden shared a photo of him smiling and clasping hands with Vice President Kamala Harris in celebration of their partnership’s anniversary.
“It’s been three years since I announced Kamala Harris as my running mate,” Biden captions the photo. “Since we’ve been in office, she has led on the fight for reproductive rights, voting rights, gun safety reform nationwide, and so much more.”
It's been three years since I announced @KamalaHarris as my running mate. Since we've been in office, she has led on the fight for reproductive rights, voting rights, gun safety reform nationwide, and so much more.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 11, 2023
I couldn't have chosen a better friend and partner. pic.twitter.com/fJCFuFW2sp
With Biden facing a challenging re-election bid in 2024, whispers that Harris is a potential liability on the ticket have long circulated among Democrats. (Earlier this year even Hillary Clinton had to deny a story that she had questioned Harris’s “political instincts.”)
And Biden’s VP pick — it is generally acknowledged — will be more important than the GOP candidate’s choice for VP because of the President’s age. He would be, at 82, the oldest President to take office if he wins re-election. (Some have even characterized 2024 as the Kamala Harris election.)
But if Joe Biden is excited about having Harris on his team — he says “I couldn’t have chosen a better friend and partner” — so are Republicans, who, unlike Democrats, don’t whisper about Harris’s purported incompetence — they yell about it.
The now dominant MAGA wing of the GOP paints Harris — a former prosecutor in Oakland and District Attorney in San Francisco — as a soft on crime, woke climate warrior who ignores hard realities like the problems at the border.
Here’s MAGA star Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene knocking and mocking Harris with the same rhetoric the GOP will use to fight an expected repeat of the Biden-Harris ticket.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who has battled with the Biden administration over the debt ceiling and more — including recently endorsing further investigations into Biden’s alleged “corruption” — once said of Biden and Harris: “I’m proud of you both.” (See video below.)
But those days are long gone — and a more recent post below indicates how McCarthy and the GOP are hitting not just Biden but Harris too in their pre-campaign rhetoric.
Under Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi, Democrats are the party of rising prices, crime, and incompetence.
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) May 5, 2022
Harris’s activity, profile, and approval ratings have gone up this year, and Democrats — if they are whispering — are whispering more softly.
But Republicans are happy about Biden’s commitment to Harris 2024 — they see electoral weakness where Biden sees strength. Republican presidential candidates down the line believe a winning GOP strategy is to convince voters that a vote for Biden means a vote for Harris, whose possible presidency they portray as “unpredictable and dangerous.”
The GOP presidential candidates are in consensus on the Harris narrative, which former UN ambassador Nikki Haley encapsulated when she said on Fox news last month: “Anyone is better than President Kamala Harris. Anyone.”
