Roving Periscope: Biden blamed for Harris’ loss, but she is defiant

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: The outgoing US President Joe Biden’s alleged ‘under-performance’ during his four-year tenure (2021 to 2024) is now being blamed for the electoral loss of his Vice President Kamala Harris whom Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump trounced convincingly on Wednesday, the media reported on Thursday.

Biden, fighting health-related issues at age 81, is set to deliver a Rose Garden address on Thursday about the election. He issued a statement shortly after Harris delivered her concession speech on Wednesday, praising her for running a historic campaign under extraordinary circumstances. 

Some high-ranking Democrats, including three advisers to the Harris campaign, expressed deep frustration with Biden for failing to recognize earlier in the election cycle that he was not up to the challenge. 

The outgoing POTUS is getting the flak for Harris’s defeat as she got only about 100 days to campaign for herself, cover up her boss’s ‘incompetence,’ and fight an aggressive Trump who overcame two impeachments, a felony conviction and an insurrection launched by his supporters. 

Trump has vowed to radically reshape the federal government and roll back many of Biden’s priorities.

Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020 and endorsed Harris’ unsuccessful run, said the biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden. “If Biden had stepped down in January instead of July, we might have been in a very different place.”

Biden’s name wasn’t there on the ballot, but history will likely remember Harris’ resounding defeat as his loss too. 

As downcast Democrats pick up the pieces after President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory, some of the Harris backers expressed frustration that Biden’s decision to seek re-election until this summer, despite longstanding voter concerns about his age, and unease about post-pandemic inflation and the US-Mexico border all but sealed his party’s loss of the White House.   

Biden will leave the White House in January 2025 after leading the US out of the worst pandemic (COVID-19) in a century, galvanizing international support for Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion and passing a USD 1 trillion infrastructure bill that will impact communities for years to come.

On Wednesday, he stayed out of sight for the second straight day, making congratulatory calls to Democratic lawmakers who won down-ballot races as well as one to Trump, who he invited for a White House meeting that the President-elect accepted. 

Biden, 81, ended his re-election campaign in July, weeks after an abysmal debate performance sent his party into a spiral and raised questions about whether he still had the mental acuity and stamina to serve as a credible nominee.

However, polls long beforehand showed that many Americans were worried about his age. Some 77 percent of Americans said in August 2023 that Biden was too old to be effective for four more years, according to a poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs. He bowed out on July 21 after getting not-so-subtle nudges from Democratic Party powers, including former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

He reluctantly endorsed Harris and handed over his campaign operation to her. Harris managed to spur far greater enthusiasm than Biden was generating from the party’s base. But she struggled to distinguish how her administration would differ from Biden’s. Trump successfully painted her as Biden II.

Appearing on ABC’s The View in September, Harris was not able to identify a decision where she would have separated herself from Biden. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, giving the Trump campaign a sound bite it replayed through Election Day. 

The strategists advising the Harris campaign said the compressed campaign timetable made it even more difficult for Harris to differentiate herself from the President. Had Biden stepped aside early in the year, they said, it would have given Democrats enough time to hold a primary.

At her concession speech on Wednesday, some Harris supporters said they wished she had had more time to make her pitch to American voters.

But even in her defeat, Harris was defiant.

“While I concede the election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign. Fight for freedom, opportunity, dignity for all people,” Harris said in a speech that lasted less than 15 minutes on Wednesday, after an acrimonious, turbulent, and polarising campaign.

Her supporters cheered, even though she admitted it was painful to lose. She told them to “keep fighting.”

“… I will close with this. Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. I know many people feel we are entering a dark time… Let us fill the sky with the light of billions and billions of stars, the light of truth, optimism, and service,” she said.

“The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for, but hear me when I say that the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting,” she said.

“We must accept the results of this election. Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory,” Harris told supporters in the concession speech at her alma mater Howard University in Washington.

“I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power,” she said with a straight face, reminding the audience of how Trump supporters went berserk and created chaos at the US Capitol in January 2021, rejecting his defeat to Biden. Trump never conceded that defeat and returned to the White House with wider margins than before.

Trump’s fresh victory, after one of the most hostile election campaigns in modern US history, was all the more remarkable given an unprecedented criminal conviction, a near-miss assassination attempt, and warnings from a former chief of staff that he is a “fascist.”

At 78, Trump will be the oldest President during his inauguration scheduled on January 20, 2025. Had Harris won, she would have been the first woman President of the US.