A senior adviser to the campaign said Vice President Harris had no intention of publicly breaking with President Biden in the 2024 presidential race and wanted to avoid the negative news cycle that would result from doing so.
On the campaign trail, Harris defended her reluctance to publicly criticize the sitting president, saying she was following a “tradition” of vice presidents remaining loyal.
“She had no intention of changing that precedent for whoever the future presidential-vice-president partnership would be, because that would mean a series of… Because it means a different issue,''' Stephanie Cutter, a senior adviser to the Harris-Waltz campaign, said during an appearance on “Pod Save America” on Tuesday's episode.
“So unless we're willing to say, you know, on certain issues Biden said green and she said blue, we're never really happy with that. No,” she added.
“Because she felt like she was part of the administration. So why does she have to look back and cherry-pick some things that she would have done differently if she had been involved?” Is there? And she had tremendous loyalty to President Biden,” Cutter said.
“So the best thing we could do, and the best thing she felt comfortable with, was to say, 'Look, the vice president never breaks with the president.'” In recent memory, Trump The only time Pence broke with Trump was after he stormed the Capitol,” Cutter added.
After being criticized in a separate interview on “The View,” Harris responded to a question in a mid-October interview with NBC News in which she was asked if she had acted differently than Biden. , I answered that I couldn't think of anything.
“I want to be very frank with you: The vice president, including Mike Pence, has not criticized the president. In fact, both in terms of his heritage and in terms of what's going to happen. But I don't think that's going to be a productive, significant relationship,” Harris told NBC News.
Harris later said in an interview on Fox News that her potential stay in the White House was “not a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency,” but again avoided making specific criticism.
His campaign advisers told Pod Save America that he will focus on his life experiences, redefine his priorities and perspectives, and reflect his work inside and outside of his administration. He said he tried to distance himself from Biden.
“So our focus was to look to the future. Let's talk about her and her approach to things. To demonstrate that difference, we leveraged policy, forward-looking policy. Let's do it,'' Cutter said. “But at the end of the day, we all look at the data. It's that too many people thought you were going to get a sequel. Which affected the economy, you know. , was an existing murderer.”
