Back in September, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that 95 percent of registered voters want a candidate who represents a change from President Joe Biden. But that could mean bad news for Vice President Kamala Harris, because apparently the main difference between her and Biden is that she is a woman of color, according to Mitch Landrieu, a national co-chair for the Harris-Walz campaign.
CNN’s John Berman asked Landrieu on Thursday to weigh in on how Harris differs from her boss.
“Vice President Harris has been asked repeatedly how she’s different than President Biden, and some people think she’s been tripped up by answering that,” Berman said. “How do you think she is different than President Biden?”
“Well first of all, whatever the difference is between them, it’s not nearly as vast as the difference between her and Donald Trump. She’s obviously a woman, she is a woman of color, and she is of a new generation. … So she is, she is not Joe Biden, as much as they want to try to make her Joe Biden. But she was and is part of the Biden administration …”
But unlike Democrats, the only color voters care about is green — and they’re not seeing much of it under the Biden-Harris administration. It doesn’t matter that Harris is a woman of color; what matters is whether Americans can afford groceries, electricity, transportation, and housing — and the answer is increasingly no.
New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ shows consumers paid 1.3 percent more for groceries, 3.9 percent more for food away from home, 3.7 percent more for electricity, 4.9 percent more for shelter, and 8.5 percent more for transportation in September of 2024 than they did in September of 2023. As my colleague Jordan Boyd noted, “Overall, essential goods and services are more than 20 percent more expensive now than they were when President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021.”
And voters can only expect those numbers to get worse if Harris is elected because Harris is “proud” of the policies that led to record-high inflation in the first place!
Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash during her first sit-down interview at the end of August that she is “very proud of the work” her administration has done “that has brought inflation down to less than 3%.”
During an appearance on “The View,” Harris was asked whether she would have “done something differently than President Biden during the past four years.”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I’ve been a part of … most of the decisions that have had impact,” Harris said.
Roughly 24 hours after her acknowledgment that she is just more of the same, Harris was cleaning up her remarks on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” telling viewers emphatically that she is “obviously not Joe Biden.”
“Well, I’m obviously not Joe Biden,” Harris said when Colbert asked her what her “major changes” would be and what “would stay the same” under a Harris administration. “And so that would be one in change, in terms of — but also I think it’s important to say with, you know, 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”
It was a desperate attempt to backtrack previous comments linking her to her own administration in an effort to try and convince Americans that her time as vice president never happened. With voters souring on the leadership of Biden (as highlighted by the NYT/Siena poll), Harris knows she has to distance herself from the leadership of the president.
The only problem? She was leading right alongside him.
Biden himself has made clear he and Harris are “singing from the same song sheet.”
“She helped pass all the laws that are being employed,” Biden said during a recent (and rare) surprise appearance at a White House briefing where he was asked whether Harris is involved in policy decisions. “Now, she was a major player in everything we’ve done, including passage of legislation which we were told we could never pass. And so she’s been, and her, her staff is interlocked with mine in terms of all the things we’re doing.”
Take it straight from the horse’s mouth: Harris is Biden (just in the female, non-white sense, according to Landrieu).