Axios: Harris ‘Stiff-Arms’ Biden in Closing Days

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The Police said it best: Please don’t stand so close to me. 

With her “closing argument” taking place tomorrow for some strange reason, one might think Harris would welcome all the help she can get. She already has two former presidents and one aspirational president on the trail in the Obamas and the Clintons. Why not add another former president? And I don’t mean Jimmy Carter, either.

Unfortunately for deposed-in-all-but-name Joe Biden, he’s been added to the “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You” list, according to Axios. 

President Biden wants to campaign for Vice President Harris in the last days before the election.

• Harris’ campaign keeps responding: We’ll get back to you, three people familiar with the dynamic told Axios.

Why it matters: Harris’ team believes Biden is a political liability at a crucial time in the campaign — but is reluctant to directly say they don’t want him to campaign for her.

On second thought, maybe Sugarloaf said it best. 

On one hand, this makes a lot of sense, given Biden’s unfavorability and the unpopularity of the administration. As of yesterday, Biden’s aggregate favorability at RCP in polling sits at nearly 15 points underwater, 40/5/55.1. Thanks to a full-court press from the Protection Racket Media, Harris has managed to improve hers to 46.7/49.9, but that mainly comes from keeping her distance from Biden. The more voters see of Biden stumping for Harris, the more that he ties her to his status quo — and that would hang the historically bad right/wrong direction trend around Harris’ neck:

There may be another reason why Team Kamala wants Biden on the sidelines. The more he talks, the more obvious his incapacity becomes, and the more questions it raises about Harris. She still can’t answer why she is the nominee instead of Biden if nothing’s wrong with him, as Harris keeps claiming. It is so obviously dishonest that the only way Harris and her campaign team can avoid dealing with it is to keep Biden as far away as possible. 

The irony of this, however, is that Biden was the last connection Democrats had to the working and middle classes in terms of cultural and rhetorical connection. “Scranton Joe” might have been mainly a conceit, especially after decades in DC, but at least Biden knew how to speak the cultural language. He could make emotional connections to the previous iteration of Democrat identity as a working voters’ party; his speech at the 2012 Democrat convention was perhaps the best of the event. Even a diminished Biden in 2020 could still make those connections enough to convince voters that he’d return the party and country to the status quo ante of the contemporaneous chaos of the pandemic and Trump.

The chart above shows how well that worked out, in Americans’ estimation, which is why Harris and her team have good reason to keep Biden off the campaign trail. Their problem, though, is that they don’t have any surrogate to fill that gap. Every single one of their surrogates come from the same Academia-drenched elite class that only knows how to talk down to voters rather than with them. Consider the list from just the last couple of weeks alone:

• Barack Obama 
• Michelle Obama
• Hillary Clinton 
• Beyoncé
• Gretchen Whitmer

Bill Clinton might be the closest they have to someone who connects to that class, but Bill Clinton is a spent force. He ended up underscoring the border crisis while speaking in Georgia, flirting weirdly with Kari Lake in absentia, and painting Harris as “vulnerable” when voters want presidents to project strength. He sounds old and weak himself, with none of the charisma or energy that vaulted him into the presidency. But even with all of those problems, Team Kamala would prefer Bill to Joe.

Speaking of closing arguments, Donald Trump released a new ad this weekend that will apparently run in battleground states. Titled “More,” the message is pretty direct and simple — “Kamala broke it — President Trump will fix it.” With that chart above, this one will resonate in the final 183 hours of the campaign … or the final 27 or so, when Harris delivers her “closing argument” tomorrow.