OPINION:
Vice President Kamala Harris personifies a heavenly slice of classic soul. As Teddy Pendergrass sang in 1977: “You can’t hide from yourself. Everywhere you go, there you are.”
Ms. Harris is trying to run, run, run from President Biden and his landfill of policy failures. Her campaign slogan might as well be “Joe who?”
“Ms. Harris won’t say it this bluntly in public, but her advisers do so privately: She wants to break with Biden on issues on which he’s unpopular,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote Wednesday in Axios. “This is part of a highly choreographed effort to define herself — in some cases, redefine herself — as a different kind of Democrat.”
Who can blame Ms. Harris for trying to put several time zones between herself and her boss’s legacy?
• President Biden turbocharged inflation, up 20.25% — the worse since 1981 under Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
• Under Mr. Biden, average private sector hourly earnings grew from $29.93 in January 2021 to $35.07 in July 2024, up 17.2%, thus lagging inflation by 3.05 percentage points.
• Mr. Biden obliterated the U.S.-Mexico border and let 8,114,501 aliens enter the country illegally in his first 42 months in power versus 2,305,683 during former President Donald Trump’s like period — up 352%.
• Crime rages under Mr. Biden, from a surge in shoplifting and smash-and-grab robberies to assaults, rapes and murders, many perpetrated by the same illegals he has welcomed.
• Mr. Biden’s catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan humiliated the United States and telegraphed our nation’s flaccidity to foreign thugs and killers. Consequently, Earth is ablaze: Battles rage in Europe. Bombs blast the Middle East. China menaces Taiwan. And the phrase “World War III” surfaces with chilling frequency.
But as much as Ms. Harris tries to sprint from Mr. Biden’s roaring dumpster fire, the president and his past and present aides drag her back toward the flames that she herself helped ignite.
“How much does it bother you that Vice President Harris might soon, for political reasons, start to distance herself from your economic plan?” Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked the president on Thursday afternoon.
“She’s not going to,” Mr. Biden snapped.
Susan Rice, Mr. Biden’s former domestic policy chief, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday, “Kamala Harris has been an integral architect and executor of the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Ms. Rice continued: “But this notion that she somehow doesn’t deserve credit for, and isn’t part of, and wasn’t an integral architect of the Biden-Harris administration agenda is not only false. It’s, frankly, somewhat bizarre and offensive.”
“When did you guys learn that Vice President Harris wants to distance herself from Bidenomics?” Mr. Doocy asked presidential press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday.
“Do you know that this is the Biden-Harris administration?” Ms. Jean-Pierre replied. “Are you aware that this is the Biden-Harris administration? And she is, indeed, the vice president.”
Fielding a question on “the Harris portfolio” versus “President Biden’s portfolio,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said earlier this week, “The vice president was a critical partner in getting a lot of the big pieces, historic pieces done. The heavy lifting, she was part of that.” She said of Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden: “They’ve been aligned for the last three and a half years. There’s not been any daylight.”
“Thank you @PressSec for confirming: there is ‘no daylight’ between Kamala and Joe!” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded Monday via X. “Kamala owns the border crisis. Kamala owns inflation. Kamala owns the wars, chaos, and crime over the past 4 years.”
Mr. Biden has said as much, but as warmly as possible.
“Kamala, I love you,” Mr. Biden said in January 2022. “You always have my back. You’re really amazing. You’re the best partner I could imagine.”
This confirms that Ms. Harris is a treacherous and disloyal ingrate. She can pretend never to have met Mr. Biden, but she fools no one. For 3½ years, as the whole world was watching, she rode shotgun while Mr. Biden steered the stagecoach into a ditch.
• Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor. Aaron Cichon contributed research to this opinion piece.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.