WASHINGTON — After meeting with Israel’s prime minister this week, Vice President Kamala Harris said she “will not be silent.” She was referring to her concerns about Palestinian suffering in the war in the Gaza Strip, but in a way, it was a larger declaration of independence.
For nearly four years, she has been the quiet understudy, relegated to the role of the supportive deputy while President Joe Biden made pronouncements. Now she has suddenly been thrust to the fore as the new presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and neither silence nor agreeable head nods are sufficient anymore.
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The challenge for her over the next 100 days will be to find her own voice without overtly breaking with Biden, a delicate political high-wire act without a reliable net. Every statement she makes, every sentence she utters, will be scrutinized to determine whether it is consistent with the president she serves. Yet even as she wants to demonstrate loyalty to Biden, she also hopes to show the public who she is.
She is fortunate in that she and Biden do not diverge all that much, according to people who have worked with them. While friction between presidents and their vice presidents is common, there have been few notable instances where Biden and Harris have been reported to be at odds. So for her, it may not be as difficult to suppress contrary instincts in the truncated election campaign she faces as it has been for other vice presidents eager to differentiate themselves.
But this is a balancing act being figured out on the fly. Because Biden was running himself until less than a week ago, neither he nor Harris has had much time to figure out how to coordinate their messages. It was notable that Biden left it to Harris on Thursday to be the public voice of the administration during the White House visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, taking the silent role himself.
Biden cares deeply about keeping former President Donald Trump out of the White House and therefore has reason to be invested in Harris’ success. He also knows that because, until he was forced to quit the race, he had insisted on running again despite concerns about his age, many will blame him for not ceding the stage earlier if Trump wins.
“Given the unique circumstances of the present situation, I believe Harris will have more room to maneuver in this tricky terrain,” said Richard Moe, who was chief of staff to Vice President Walter Mondale. “It all depends on the nature of the issue and whether it is one that Biden feels strongly about, but it’s apparent nonetheless that Biden is prepared to give her a good deal of latitude.”
Joel K. Goldstein, a longtime specialist on the vice presidency at St. Louis University School of Law, said an incumbent vice president running for president faced three challenges. The opposition will tag the vice president with any baggage the administration has. The vice president must step out of the president’s shadow to establish her own identity. And the vice president needs to pivot from subordinate to leader — “and do so while someone else is still president.”
“It seems to me that Vice President Harris has done remarkably well this first week in presenting herself as an effective new leader of the Democratic Party,” Goldstein said. “She has skillfully managed to remain loyal to President Biden and the accomplishments of the administration while presenting herself as an independent, vigorous new leader from a different generation with a different style.”
But plenty of tripwires lie ahead. In Harris’ lifetime, only three other sitting vice presidents faced a similar challenge — Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000 — each finding it precarious in different ways.
The most charged situation was Humphrey’s race to succeed President Lyndon B. Johnson, who, like Biden, dropped out. Humphrey was saddled with Johnson’s war in Vietnam and waited until late in the campaign to call for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.
“When Hubert Humphrey desperately needed to separate himself from Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, the president drew a line in blood — literally,” said James Traub, author of “True Believer,” a biography of Humphrey. Traub recalled that Johnson told Humphrey that more generous terms for peace would lead to the deaths of U.S. troops, including Johnson’s own son-in-law, Charles S. Robb.
“Kamala Harris can afford to deviate from administration policy in a way that Humphrey never could,” Traub said.
Bush felt compelled to establish his independence after eight years serving under the popular President Ronald Reagan and did so by opposing a deal with Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, who was facing drug trafficking charges. Gore distanced himself from President Bill Clinton because of the scandal over the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Unlike Johnson, both Reagan and Clinton went along with their vice presidents’ stabs at separation, albeit grudgingly in the latter case, because they viewed the success of their deputies as important to the country and their own legacies.
Goldstein said Biden might see it the same way. “I suspect that President Biden will embrace Vice President Harris’ candidacy as furthering his values and objectives,” he said.
Abortion rights and the war in Gaza are the two most obvious areas where Biden and Harris have been perceived differently. They both favor a nationwide right to abortion, but Biden remains uncomfortable speaking about it, while Harris has leaned into the issue with passion and energy. She has stuck by his position on Gaza but has more emphatically addressed humanitarian concerns.
During Netanyahu’s visit, Harris condemned pro-Hamas demonstrators as “despicable” and made it clear that she supports Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism. But she talked forcefully about “the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety” from Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent,” she said.
Harris’ office had no comment Friday, but an aide speaking on condition of anonymity because of the internal sensitivities stressed that her remarks were consistent with the president’s policy and what she had said previously.
Khaled Elgindy, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute, however, said Harris’ statement “was a notable departure from Biden” in tone, if not in substance.
“Whereas Biden typically centers Israeli needs, interests and trauma while treating Palestinian suffering mostly as an afterthought or talking point, Harris kind of flipped that formula by centering Palestinian suffering and humanity throughout her remarks,” he said.
Harris delivered her statement after meeting with Netanyahu and without the prime minister by her side. Israeli officials were surprised by her comments, seeing them as much sharper than what had been said behind closed doors. They complained privately to reporters that she risked encouraging Hamas to resist a cease-fire deal by making it appear that the United States was not in lockstep with Israel, a position Netanyahu echoed Friday while meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Trump weighed in as well. “I think her remarks were disrespectful,” he said. “They weren’t very nice pertaining to Israel. I actually don’t know how a person who’s Jewish can vote for her, but that’s up to them. But she was certainly disrespectful to Israel.”
Trump did not explain how expressing concern for civilian casualties was disrespectful, much less how it was any more so than his own comments Thursday insisting that Israel “finish up and get it done quickly,” referring to the war, “because they are getting decimated with this publicity.”
But Harris, whose husband is Jewish, feels no need to prove that she is more supportive of Jewish people than Trump and is far more concerned about Biden’s reaction to her comments than the former president. She wants to exhibit respect for Biden, advisers say, without feeling boxed in.
“I believe Harris should do everything she can to adhere to the Biden policy as long as she is still the vice president,” Moe said. “That need not be an absolute rule, because the public understandably will expect her to be her own person at some point, so it’s tricky. But essentially, she can distinguish herself as a matter of emphasis and style, as she did on Gaza and the Palestinians.”
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