NEWS
ANALYSIS
Silent No
More, Harris Seeks Her Own Voice Without Breaking With Biden
The vice
president’s expressions of concern for Palestinian suffering marked a shift in
emphasis from the president’s statements as she moved to establish herself as
the leader of her party.
The
challenge for Vice President Kamala Harris over the next 100 days will be
showing the public who she is while still demonstrating loyalty to President
Biden.
Peter Baker
By Peter
Baker
Reporting
from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/us/politics/kamala-harris-gaza-biden.html
July 26,
2024
After
meeting with Israel’s prime minister this week, Vice President Kamala Harris
said she “will not be silent.” She was referring to her concerns about
Palestinian suffering in the Gaza war, but in a way it was a larger declaration
of independence.
For nearly
four years, she has been the quiet understudy, relegated to the role of the
supportive deputy while President Biden made pronouncements. Now she has
suddenly been thrust to the fore as the new presumptive Democratic presidential
nominee, and neither silence nor agreeable head nods are sufficient any more.
The
challenge for her over the next 100 days will be to find her own voice without
overtly breaking with Mr. Biden, a delicate political high-wire act without a
reliable net. Every statement she makes, every sentence she utters, will be
scrutinized to determine whether it is consistent with the president she
serves. Yet even as she wants to demonstrate loyalty to Mr. Biden, she also
hopes to show the public who she is.
She is
fortunate in that she and Mr. Biden do not diverge all that much, according to
people who have worked with them. While friction between presidents and their
vice presidents is common, there have been few notable instances where Mr.
Biden and Ms. Harris have been reported to be at odds. So for her, it may not
be as difficult to suppress contrary instincts in the truncated election
campaign she faces as it has been for other vice presidents eager to
differentiate themselves.
But this is
a balancing act being figured out on the fly. Because Mr. Biden was running
himself until less than a week ago, neither he nor Ms. Harris has had much time
to figure out how to coordinate their messages. It was notable that Mr. Biden
left it to Ms. Harris on Thursday to be the public voice of the administration
during the White House visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel,
taking the silent role himself.
Mr. Biden
cares deeply about keeping former President Donald J. Trump out of the White
House and therefore has reason to be invested in Ms. Harris’s success. He also
knows that because, until he was forced to quit the race, he had insisted on
running again despite concerns about his age, many will blame him for not
ceding the stage earlier if Mr. Trump wins.
“Given the
unique circumstances of the present situation, I believe Harris will have more
room to maneuver in this tricky terrain,” said Richard Moe, who was chief of
staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale. “It all depends on the nature of the
issue, and whether it is one that Biden feels strongly about, but it’s apparent
nonetheless that Biden is prepared to give her a good deal of latitude.”
Joel K.
Goldstein, a longtime specialist on the vice presidency at St. Louis University
School of Law, said an incumbent vice president running for president faced
three challenges. The opposition will tag the vice president with any baggage
the administration has. The vice president must step out of the president’s
shadow to establish her own identity. And the vice president needs to pivot
from subordinate to leader — “and do so while someone else is still president.”
“It seems to
me that Vice President Harris has done remarkably well this first week in
presenting herself as an effective new leader of the Democratic Party,” Mr.
Goldstein said. “She has skillfully managed to remain loyal to President Biden
and the accomplishments of the administration while presenting herself as an
independent, vigorous new leader from a different generation with a different
style.”
But plenty
of trip wires lie ahead. In Ms. Harris’s lifetime, only three other sitting
vice presidents faced a similar challenge — Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George
H.W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000 — each finding it precarious in different
ways.
The most
charged situation was Mr. Humphrey’s race to succeed President Lyndon B.
Johnson, who, like Mr. Biden, dropped out. Mr. Humphrey was saddled with Mr.
Johnson’s war in Vietnam and waited until late in the campaign to call for a
halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.
“When Hubert
Humphrey desperately needed to separate himself from Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam,
the president drew a line in blood — literally,” said James Traub, author of
“True Believer,” a biography of Mr. Humphrey. Mr. Traub recalled that Mr.
Johnson told Mr. Humphrey that more generous terms for peace would lead to the
deaths of American troops, including Mr. Johnson’s own son-in-law, Charles S.
Robb.
“Kamala
Harris can afford to deviate from administration policy in a way that Humphrey
never could,” Mr. Traub said.
Mr. Bush
felt compelled to establish his independence after eight years serving under
the popular President Ronald Reagan and did so by opposing a deal with Manuel
Noriega, the dictator of Panama, who was facing drug trafficking charges. Mr.
Gore distanced himself from President Bill Clinton because of the scandal over
the president’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.
Unlike Mr.
Johnson, both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Clinton went along with their vice presidents’
stabs at separation, albeit grudgingly in the latter case, because they viewed
the success of their deputies as important to the country and their own
legacies.
Mr.
Goldstein said Mr. Biden might see it the same way. “I suspect that President
Biden will embrace Vice President Harris’s candidacy as furthering his values
and objectives,” he said.
Abortion
rights and the war in Gaza are the two most obvious areas where Mr. Biden and
Ms. Harris have been perceived differently. They both favor a nationwide right
to abortion, but Mr. Biden remains uncomfortable speaking about it, while Ms.
Harris has leaned into the issue with passion and energy. She has stuck by his
position on Gaza but has more emphatically addressed humanitarian concerns.
During Mr.
Netanyahu’s visit, Ms. Harris condemned pro-Hamas demonstrators as “despicable”
and made it clear that she supports Israel’s right to defend itself against
terrorism. But she talked forcefully about “the images of dead children and
desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety” from Israel’s assault on Hamas in
Gaza. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will
not be silent,” she said.
Ms. Harris’s
office had no comment on Friday, but an aide speaking on condition of anonymity
because of the internal sensitivities stressed that her remarks were consistent
with the president’s policy and what she had said previously.
Khaled
Elgindy, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli
affairs at the Middle East Institute, however, said Ms. Harris’s statement “was
a notable departure from Biden” in tone, if not in substance.
“Whereas
Biden typically centers Israeli needs, interests and trauma while treating
Palestinian suffering mostly as an afterthought or talking point, Harris kind
of flipped that formula by centering Palestinian suffering and humanity
throughout her remarks,” he said.
Ms. Harris
delivered her statement after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu and without the prime
minister by her side. Israeli officials were surprised by her comments, seeing
them as much sharper than what had been said behind closed doors. They
complained privately to reporters that she risked encouraging Hamas to resist a
cease-fire deal by making it appear that the United States was not in lock step
with Israel, a position Mr. Netanyahu echoed on Friday while meeting with Mr.
Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Mr. Trump
weighed in as well. “I think her remarks were disrespectful,” he said. “They
weren’t very nice pertaining to Israel. I actually don’t know how a person
who’s Jewish can vote for her, but that’s up to them. But she was certainly
disrespectful to Israel.”
Mr. Trump
did not explain how expressing concern for civilian casualties was
disrespectful, much less how it was any more so than his own comments on
Thursday insisting that Israel “finish up and get it done quickly,” referring
to the war, “because they are getting decimated with this publicity.”
But Ms.
Harris, whose husband is Jewish, feels no need to prove that she is more
supportive of Jewish people than Mr. Trump and is far more concerned about Mr.
Biden’s reaction to her comments than the former president. She wants to
exhibit respect for Mr. Biden, advisers say, without feeling boxed in.
“I believe
Harris should do everything she can to adhere to the Biden policy as long as
she is still the vice president,” Mr. Moe said. “That need not be an absolute
rule, because the public understandably will expect her to be her own person at
some point, so it’s tricky. But essentially, she can distinguish herself as a
matter of emphasis and style, as she did on Gaza and the Palestinians.”
Peter Baker
is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last
five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents
and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More
about Peter Baker
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