Liberal New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait pleaded with Vice President Kamala Harris to break her ties to President Biden by directly rejecting his “unpopular” policies.
Chait cited a New York Times article in which Democrats described the challenge Harris faces in promoting herself as the “change” candidate during Tuesday’s debate while remaining “loyal” to Biden and his current administration, which she is a part of.
“Why is this a struggle? Why not directly repudiate unpopular Biden positions?” Chait asked in his Monday column for NY Mag.
“Rather than trying to balance loyalty to Biden against catering to the desires of the electorate, Harris’s strategy should focus entirely on catering to the public with no attention whatsoever to Biden’s feelings,” he urged.
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By refusing to challenge the historically unpopular president’s policies, Harris was allowing Biden to drag her candidacy down, Chait claimed.
“And Biden is, on the whole, a liability for Harris. He has been deeply and consistently unpopular since relatively early in his administration,” he argued.
“There are certainly issues where Biden has taken a popular stance or achieved something popular that Harris can take credit for,” Chait conceded, such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill. However, that doesn’t mean Harris needs to “own every action Biden has taken.”
“She can even say that she disagreed with him. Her role as vice president was to give the president candid advice in private and support him in public, but now that she is running for his job, she can advocate her own ideas,” he argued.
A New York Times poll out this week found over 60 percent of voters want the next president to constitute “a major change” from Biden, but “only a quarter of them believe Harris would constitute such a change.”
Chait said he sympathized with Democrats who didn’t understand why Biden had become “toxic” to voters because of the economy, arguing he deserved credit for how he managed the inflation surge. But that bewilderment shouldn’t “cloud their judgment,” he said, and force Harris to stand by Biden’s policies.
“I don’t think there is a needle to thread. If Biden has an unpopular stance, Harris should simply oppose it. People understand that she couldn’t undermine her boss. Harris can say she privately disagreed with some of Biden’s positions on fiscal management and immigration enforcement but supported them because she was a good soldier. Alternatively, if she didn’t disagree with any Biden decisions at the time, she is free to say that she disagrees with them now and wants to go in a different direction,” he argued.
Harris is free to distance herself from Biden as well because she lacks “constitutional power” and therefore isn’t “responsible” for his actions, he concluded.
The Trump campaign has argued that Harris’ role as the incumbent vice president should not be overlooked by voters who’ve been disappointed by the Biden administration’s policies and “failures.”
“Kamala Harris is not the candidate of change, nor is she the candidate of the future,” Trump 2024 national press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently told CNN. “Kamala Harris is the Vice President of the United States right now. And she is wholly responsible for the failures over the past four years.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement to the Times that Biden “has always had unwavering faith in [Harris’] leadership and ability to win. That’s why he passionately endorsed her out of the gate, rejecting other approaches that would divide the party.”
The White House did not return a request for comment by Fox News Digital.
Since President Biden dropped out of the race and Harris emerged as the nominee, Harris has closed the gap with former President Trump and boosted her approval ratings.
The latest polls show the race remains neck-and-neck between the two candidates ahead of their debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Harris leads Trump 49% to 48% among registered voters, showing a race that has tightened since August when Harris held a 3-point lead against Trump, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist National Poll released Tuesday morning.
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace contributed to this report.
