Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Balancing Act

“How do you distance your self from an unpopular president whereas additionally working on his insurance policies?”

Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic
Courtesy of Washington Week With The Atlantic

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This week, Joe Biden gave his first speech alongside Kamala Harris since asserting that he wouldn’t proceed looking for reelection. This look comes simply days forward of the Democratic Nationwide Conference, the place Biden will converse to delegates in what, by the top of the week, will quantity to Harris’s official nomination. As Democrats stability working on Biden’s file whereas additionally attempting to current Harris as a recent candidate, the president’s function on the marketing campaign path after the conference stays in query.

“How do you distance your self from an unpopular president whereas additionally working on his insurance policies?” Tarini Parti requested final evening on Washington Week With The Atlantic. “Regardless that they’re attempting to painting this very heat relationship … we’re going to see a few of this awkwardness at play right here, as a result of the conference, for all these months, was being set as much as be headlined by another person.”

As Biden’s time within the White Home nears its finish, his legacy as president partially hinges on the result of this election, Susan Glasser stated final evening. If Harris “doesn’t win, there will probably be loads of recriminations that discover their option to Biden,” Glasser continued. “If she does win, individuals will hail him for having decided to step apart in favor of the better good of defeating Donald Trump.”

In the meantime, as Trump contends together with his marketing campaign in a race not pitted towards Biden, many Republicans are calling on the previous president to go after Kamala Harris on coverage relatively than depend on private assaults. “It’s not simply the informal mendacity or the slinging or invention of weird conspiracy theories,” Glasser stated, however his feedback an increasing number of have the “feeling of an act of self-harm as an effort to realize consideration it doesn’t matter what.”

Becoming a member of the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to debate this and extra: Susan Glasser, a workers author for The New Yorker; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White Home correspondent for The New York Occasions; Tarini Parti, a national-politics reporter at The Wall Avenue Journal; and Chuck Todd, a chief political analyst at NBC Information.

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