PHILADELPHIA – President Joe Biden on Tuesday said Kamala Harris would “cut her own path” once she wins the 2024 election, allowing for more daylight between him and his vice president as she works to win over skeptical voters three weeks before Election Day.
“Kamala will take the country in her own direction, and that’s one of the most important differences in this election,” he said. “Kamala's perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective old and failed and quite frankly, thoroughly totally dishonest.”
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Biden’s comments may give Harris more license to stake out her own political and policy stances in the critical closing phase of the presidential race, and appear to go further to distance the two than Harris has herself. The vice president's aides have privately expressed some frustration that the 81-year-old president has been too focused on his own legacy — and not the race to succeed him.
But Harris has of late faced increasing pressure to articulate how she'd govern differently from Biden, a question trickier than it seems on the surface.
While Biden's favorability ratings remain underwater, some of the biggest pieces of his legislative agenda, from infrastructure to lowering the costs of some prescription drugs, are popular, and signaling any daylight with the president on foreign policy at a time of global crises could be seen as reckless.
Harris herself has been loath to do anything that could be perceived as disloyal to Biden, who elevated her from a first-term senator to the vice presidency, and then handed the reins of his political operation over to her, endorsing Harris when he dropped out of the race in July.
She's brushed off questions about how she would be different than the Democratic president by saying “I’m not Joe Biden,” but has offered few specifics. At the same time, she’s tried to seize the mantle of being the candidate who would bring positive change to the country, largely relying on being of a different generation than both Biden and Trump.
Harris said last week in an interview on ABC's “The View” that she couldn’t think of a move made by Biden that she would have decided differently — a line that was featured prominently by Trump at rallies and online. She later offered that she would, unlike Biden, select a Republican for her Cabinet if elected.
On Tuesday, Biden spoke in the hall of the Sheet Metal Workers International Association in Philadelphia, pumping up a slate of local candidates including Sen. Bob Casey before a vibrant crowd: boys in button-down shirts and kente cloths stood alongside women who leaned on canes. They sat at tables adorned with red, white and blue balloons and ate from plastic plates crowded with meatballs and kielbasa and bread rolls.
"Every president has to cut their own path, that’s what I did,” Biden said to a crowd that chanted “Thank you, Joe!” “I was loyal to Barack Obama, and I cut my own path as president. That’s what Kamala is going to do.”
Biden’s words were particularly poignant because he’s done so few political events since stepping away from the 2024 race, a stinging decision he said he made for the good of the country, following a disastrous debate performance and mutiny within the Democratic party.
“When I decided it was time to pass the torch to the next generation, I knew. I knew who I wanted to replace me,” Biden said.
He also took multiple swipes at Trump, calling him a loser, laying into the Republican nominee for his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election he lost, his continued stoking of misinformation around the election and his embrace of the violent mob that sought to overturn the results of the election on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Every generation faces a moment where democracy has to be defended,” Biden said. “This is our moment.”
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Associated Press White House Correspondent Zeke Miller contributed to this report.