President Joe Biden held the floor for an impromptu Q&A session Friday afternoon during the White House press briefing, where he claimed Vice President Kamala Harris is ‘in constant contact.’ His comments may not come across as music to the Harris campaign’s ears.
In the president’s surprise appearance, he remarked on the port strike, the latest jobs numbers, and briefly on Hurricane Helene. No reporters asked about the administration’s response to the storm, but one asked Biden to assess whether Harris has been deeply involved in policy.
‘Well, she’s, I’m in constant contact with her. She’s aware we all, we’re singing from the same song sheet. We, she helped pass all the laws that are being employed,’ said Biden.
‘Now, she was a major player in everything we’ve done, including passage of legislation which we were told we could never pass. And so she’s been, and her, her staff is interlocked with mine in terms of all the things we’re doing,’ Biden continued.
The president strongly linked Vice President Harris to the Biden administration’s record over the past 3 ½ years, despite the Harris campaign’s attempts to distance her from everything from ‘Bidenomics’ to inflation to the border crisis, since Biden announced he was ending his reelection campaign, and Harris assumed the mantle of nominee.
Harris recently changed the Biden fiscal year 2025 plan from a capital gains tax rate of 39.6% on a salary of $1M or more to her own 28%, for example. As illegal migration across the border surged to historic levels, Harris has also insisted she was never in charge of Biden’s border policy, despite Biden personally handing her the reins at the White House in March 2021.
Axios reported that Harris would begin creating some daylight between herself and Biden in August in order to defeat Trump, as inflation raged, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East heated up, the border crisis continued, crime lingered as a concern, and other factors, including Harris’ own weak approval rating, weighed her campaign down. Other outlets and pundits on the left soon followed suit.
But Biden has reportedly bristled about his vice president distancing herself from him behind the scenes. He has also hinted that he believes he could have won the election had he not dropped out.
During an appearance on The View last week, Biden said, ‘I never fully believed the assertions that somehow there was this overwhelming reluctance to my running again. The fact of the matter is, my polling was always in range of beating [Trump].’ Biden even joked about jumping back into the race during Friday’s surprise appearance at the White House.
He also began his first White House briefing appearance of his presidency at the same Harris was taking the stage at a campaign event, raising questions over whether it was a communications issue between him and the campaign, or he was trying to upstage her.
Biden sparked questions on the topic before, on the anniversary of September 11, by wearing a Trump hat momentarily. The White House referred it to as a ‘unity gesture’ – after Biden spent years casting Trump as a ‘threat to democracy.’
