Joe Biden and Tim Walz are doing damage to Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, a former White House official has warned, by forcing voters to connect the Democratic ticket with the events of the past three and a half years.
Ahead of the hotly anticipated vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, Republicans have continued to accuse the Harris-Walz ticket of running away from its status as the incumbent in this year’s election. Given Americans’ ongoing dissatisfaction with the state and direction of the country, they believe the key to a Republican victory lies in demonstrating Harris’ integral role in the Biden administration.
“What makes the Walz and Biden goofs so damning is that they puncture the pretense on which the Harris campaign is built,” William McGurn wrote in a Monday op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
Tim Walz delivers the keynote address at the 2024 Human Rights Campaign’s National Dinner in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 7, 2024. A former Bush official has urged JD Vance to focus on the “failures” of the Biden-Harris administration during the upcoming vice presidential debate.
Dominic Gwinn/AFP via Getty Images
The “pretense” to which McGurn referred is the ability of Harris to so far “cast herself as the challenger and not the incumbent” in this year’s race, an approach which he claims “has largely gone uncontested by a compliant press.”
However, McGurn, who served as chief speechwriter for George W. Bush between 2006 and 2008, believes that both her running mate and the incumbent president have complicated the strategy.
On September 21, Walz told rallygoers in Pennsylvania that “it doesn’t have to be this way. We can’t afford four more years of this.”
While his comment was in reference to gun violence in the U.S., and not the record of the Biden-Harris administration, the soundbite has been jumped upon by Republican critics due to its apparent irony.
McGurn also cited Biden’s recent appearance on The View, during which he defended his decision to withdraw from the race and criticized Trump as having “no social redeeming value.”
However, Biden also claimed that, as president, he would frequently lay key decisions at Harris’ feet, telling the hosts: “I was able to delegate her responsibility for everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.”
“That’s important because, for all the criticism of Ms. Harris as an empty pantsuit, she is savvy enough to appreciate that the Biden-Harris record is deeply unpopular,” McGurn wrote.
According to the most recent polling aggregate by 538, Biden’s approval rating currently stands at 41.4 percent, with 53.5 percent disapproving of the current president.
A September poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that only 27 percent believed the U.S. was “on the right track,” compared to 63 percent who thought the country was heading “in the wrong direction.”
Given this, McGurn believes it falls on JD Vance to “keep the focus on the unpopular policies of the incumbent administration,” something which his running mate failed to do during the September 10 debate versus Harris.
Walz is set to face off against Vance on Tuesday evening in a debate moderated by CBS, in what McGurn called “the only national moment left” for Republicans to upset the narrative that Kamala Harris “would be any different from the Biden administration.”
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