WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has privately complained to allies that his name and his accomplishments have virtually disappeared from the national conversation and about how quickly the party that he has served for more than five decades appears to have moved on from him, according to six people familiar with his comments.
Biden has noted at times that Vice President Kamala Harris, who took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, hasn’t been mentioning him in her campaign speeches lately, including when she talks about an economy he believes his policies set on a positive trajectory, these people said.
And he was particularly stung by one of the recent notable times when she did talk about him — during this month’s debate with former President Donald Trump, three of the people familiar with his comments said.
“Clearly, I am not Joe Biden,” Harris said at the time, adding: “And I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.” She made the remark in response to Trump’s contention that “she is Biden” as he tried to make the case that Harris’ and the president’s economic policies are no different.
Details of Biden’s mixed feelings about the messaging of a campaign he painstakingly abandoned offer a window into how he has been settling into his extraordinary decision to step aside from seeking the Democratic nomination and endorse his vice president. His private comments also reflect a transition in Harris’ campaign while she’s staking out her own ground as a candidate and navigating a key question voters have about her candidacy: how she would differ from Biden.
This account of the president’s private comments is from 12 people with knowledge of the dynamic between Biden and Harris, including administration and campaign officials, as well as allies who have been involved with the transition of his campaign to his vice president. They were granted anonymity to speak freely about the inner workings of the campaign and the White House.
All of them made it clear that Biden wants Harris to win in November — a development that he believes would also shape his legacy — and that he plans to do whatever he can to help her.
According to a senior campaign official and another person familiar with the dynamic, the president has personally, and repeatedly, relayed that to Harris.
“He always just says to her, ‘The most important thing is that you win,’” the senior campaign official said, adding that Harris and Biden had a productive lunch together last week and saying her campaign is about “looking forward.”
“We have to tell people who she is and what she would do,” the campaign official said. “There wasn’t a real interest in hearing about his accomplishments when he was running. That’s still the case.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement responding to this article, “These uninformed claims are the polar opposite of the truth.”
“President Biden welcomes the strong response the American people are having to Vice President’s Harris’ leadership and to policies that move us into the future, away from dangerous agendas from the past like MAGAnomics and abortion bans,” he added.
The six people with knowledge of Biden’s private comments said he gets the political reasoning behind shifting campaign messaging away from running on his record, even if it frustrates him at times.
“He understands completely the general lack of mentioning ‘Bidenomics’ and ‘Joe Biden.’ Politically he gets that,” one of the people familiar with the dynamic said.
A senior Biden aide said the president asks daily whether there’s anything more he could do to help Harris and that the two of them speak regularly.
“He wants nothing more than to do everything we possibly can to support her,” the senior Biden said. “He’s 100% in.”
But while Biden is attuned to political realities, he also has expressed a range of emotions about his exit from the race — from feeling his legacy rests on a Harris victory to anguishing over his imprint’s vanishing from the national stage, according to the people familiar with his private comments.
They described a president who feels loyal to his vice president — and she to him — and less bitter than he was in the immediate aftermath of his exit from the race, when he felt pushed out by people he thought were his friends, but also at times feeling left behind.
“It’s very complex,” a person familiar with his thinking said.
In the month after she declared her candidacy on July 21, Harris regularly talked about Biden while campaigning — repeatedly opening her rallies by saying she brought “greetings” from the president. Those mentions have tapered off in her campaign speeches in recent weeks, though she praised Biden at a White House event last week and appeared with him Sept. 14 when they both addressed the Congressional Black Caucus’ Phoenix Awards Dinner. The two also appeared together at a Labor Day rally this month.
“History will show what we here know,” Harris said at their Sept. 2 event. “Joe Biden has been one of the most transformative presidents in the United States that we have ever witnessed. And it comes from his heart.”
Harris, however, didn’t mention Biden’s name once in a 40-minute campaign speech about the economy last week in Pittsburgh. And while she used to say things in her campaign speeches like “our country has come a long way since President Biden and I took office,” Harris now routinely says “we” when she talks about work the Biden-Harris administration has done.
“Over the past 3½ years, we have taken major steps forward to recover from the public health and economic crisis we inherited,” she said, for instance, in her economic speech last week.
By contrast, Biden — who is expected to headline events for Harris in October — and members of his administration have dramatically increased how often they mention her publicly since she became a presidential candidate.
“She has to become her own person,” a Harris campaign official said. “She needs to do that to win.”
While Harris led Trump on the question of which presidential candidate better represents change in a new NBC News poll this month, 40% of registered voters said they were more concerned that she would continue the same approach as Biden (compared with 39% who were more concerned that Trump would continue the same approach from his first presidential term).
Harris feels genuine affection toward Biden, and their relationship has remained strong during their 3½ years in the White House together, people familiar with their relationship said. They said Biden has expressed his appreciation for her loyalty, especially through the most difficult times when he was under pressure to drop out of the presidential race and felt other leaders of the Democratic Party had turned on him.
“She loves the president. She adores the president. She’s proud of the record that they have,” a person familiar with Harris’ strategy said. “But I think the difficult part for a lot of people is that this will be the Harris administration. It won’t be Biden Part Two.”
Since Harris declared her candidacy, her campaign advisers have discussed how to navigate the question of whether she would be an extension of Biden’s agenda, and she has broken with him on some policies. But her and her team’s focus has been on how to win in November, and much of that is tied to explaining who Harris is, independent from Biden.
Some of her advisers believe Harris needed to say “I am not Joe Biden” rather than “I am not the president,” because the latter could leave the perception that she wasn’t capable of doing the job, four people with knowledge of discussions said.
“So she has to say ‘I’m not him.’ She can’t say ‘I’m not the president,’ because people will say she’s not ready to do this,” one of them said. “He gets that. It still doesn’t sting any less.”
Harris repeated the line several days after the presidential debate when she was asked in a radio interview how she differs from Biden. “Well, I’m obviously not Joe Biden,” she said. “I offer a new generation of leadership.”
Appearing on ABC’s “The View” last week, Biden insisted he would have defeated Trump had he remained in the race.
“I never fully believed the assertions that somehow there was this overwhelming reluctance to my running again,” Biden said. “The fact of the matter is my polling was always in range of beating this guy.”
Three of the people interviewed for this article attributed any discomfort with Harris’ campaign to Biden’s former inner circle, saying they had done him a disservice by not being realistic enough about his chances of victory even in the face of stubbornly low approval numbers.
Since Biden dropped out after his disastrous debate performance in June, however, polling has shifted in Harris’ favor. While the race between Harris and Trump overall remains tight, Democrats’ map has expanded since Biden’s departure, putting North Carolina in play, as well as Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Enthusiasm has surged across the party since Harris took the reins from Biden on July 21. She’s filling venues like Biden never did across battleground states, attracting tens of thousands of new volunteers and inspiring eye-popping fundraising numbers.
Allies, however, said that in the end, Biden will feel vindicated not just by the unselfishness of his decision to step aside for Harris but by what Democrats see as a four-year term rich with achievements.
“I’m sure reality is hitting him,” John Morgan, a longtime Biden ally and Democratic donor, said of Biden’s watching the Democratic campaign evolve without him. “But the great reality for Joe Biden is when we sort through all of this, his four years were a masterpiece.”
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