Here comes Kamala

One of the few notable things about the low-key launch of Joe Biden’s reelection bid earlier this year was the prominence of his unpopular deputy. Kamala Harris featured heavily in the video in which he announced his run.

At the time, White House insiders acknowledged sotto voce that Biden’s age meant his vice president would have to take on a bigger role than is normal for running mates. An octogenarian candidate might not be able to handle the punishing campaign trail schedule, and voters would need to be comfortable that the woman only a heartbeat away…

One of the few notable things about the low-key launch of Joe Biden’s reelection bid earlier this year was the prominence of his unpopular deputy. Kamala Harris featured heavily in the video in which he announced his run.

At the time, White House insiders acknowledged sotto voce that Biden’s age meant his vice president would have to take on a bigger role than is normal for running mates. An octogenarian candidate might not be able to handle the punishing campaign trail schedule, and voters would need to be comfortable that the woman only a heartbeat away from the presidency was up to the job.

For the White House, acknowledging the need for a bigger role for Harris meant addressing her unpopularity: Joe needed a Kamala relaunch. Harris would be photographed at high-stakes debt talks. She’d be handed some high-profile speaking gigs. It was a modest effort to get Harris out there — and appeared to be designed by a team well aware of her shortcomings.

A few months on, there are scant signs of this strategy working. At the end of last month, Harris set a new record low for her net favorability numbers (-17). Another set of numbers suggest that Harris hasn’t been out and about as much as the promise of a prominent role would have implied. In an article titled “Where is Kamala Harris?”, the Wall Street Journal reports that in the ten weeks since Biden’s launch “the vice president has traveled to nine states — three of them considered battlegrounds in the 2024 election — and appeared at seven fundraisers, according to her calendar.”

The Biden campaign response is to suggest that Harris’s travel is comparable to Biden’s when he was helping Obama win re-election in 2011. But the article’s quotes from Democratic fundraisers tell their own story, suggesting that Harris isn’t exactly in demand at events. “Speaking solely for myself, I don’t think I would ever be able to have a very successful fundraiser with her as the headliner,” Democratic donor and trial lawyer John Morgan tells the Journal. “First of all, for many people, Democrats included, she’s polarizing.”

Harris is on the road today — in what was once a swing state. In a speech in Florida, the vice president waded into the state’s vicious education wars, issuing an uncompromising attack on the state’s new history curriculum. (National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke argues that Harris has grossly misrepresented what is going on in Florida classrooms.)

Call me cynical, but I suspect Harris’s hardline intervention is less about boosting her boss and more to do with burnishing her credentials among Democrats where some combination of familial criminality and old age mean Biden doesn’t make it onto the ticket in 2024.

On our radar

HOT STRIKE SUMMER Bloomberg reports that more than 650,000 Americans are threatening to go on strike this summer or have already done so. This is more labor action than the US has seen in decades. These strikes could have wide-ranging consequences at a moment when it looked like the economy was turning a corner. With a president fond of boasting about his pro-labor stance, the politics of a hot strike summer could soon get tricky for the White House.

ROBO-PREZ Biden attempted an AI joke as he entered a room to deliver remarks on the technology at the White House today: “I’m the AI. If any of you think I’m Abe Lincoln, blame it on the AI.”

Administration downplays China hack

News broke last week that Chinese hackers conducted an advanced attack that compromised the emails of multiple high-ranking officials connected to the Biden administration’s China policy. The Wall Street Journal reports that targets included commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, assistant secretary for East Asia Dan Kritenbrink and US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns. One IT expert, Charles Carmakal, told the Journal that the hack used “a very advanced technique and capability and I imagine it was very valuable to the actor that used it.” The attack apparently started in May and was not found by Microsoft until June.

While it may have begun before Biden’s conjured-up “thaw” in US-China relations, it only emphasizes the exceedingly poor judgment of an administration that prefers to play theater and pretend relations with China are better than they actually are. The Journal indicates that the administration is trying to “play down” the “overall impact” of the attack, and the NSA’s Rob Joyce told the paper that “it is China doing espionage. That is what nation-states do. We need to defend against it, we need to push back on it, but that is something that happens.”

Given the timidness of the administration when it comes to reacting to Chinese provocations — not least the spy balloon — any attempts to water down Beijing’s nefarious activity should be looked at with a healthy dose of skepticism. The CCP has not scaled back its hostile actions since the so-called thaw, and shows no sign of doing so in the future, despite the train of administration officials making their way to Beijing. No matter how much the Biden administration bends over backwards trying to thaw the relationship, Xi Jinping gets a vote. The question now is whether or not the administration can recognize that, far from a warming of ties, Xi is keeping things on ice.

-John Pietro

Revealed: who gets to ask questions at the White House

An official guide to covering the White House created by the White House Correspondents’ Association confirms that Karine Jean-Pierre is intentionally selective about which media outlets she calls on at White House press briefings. The document, last updated in March 2023, notes that “the current press secretary has indicated she prefers not to call on people who are standing.” Of course, the seats in the briefing room are assigned by the WHCA and mostly reserved for left-leaning legacy media outlets — particularly the first few rows. Anyone else looking to get a question in is probably better off staying home….

–Cockburn