In the last few weeks, Biden, thinking about his legacy, has begun making public appearances and asserting that he is indeed the President with keys to the Oval Office and Air Force One, especially as the Harris campaign handlers seem eager to remove him from public view altogether.
Each time Biden makes himself relevant, he draws oxygen away from the Harris campaign. Each time he goes up on stage, Biden shows who is in charge, and with every speech, he reminds Americans that Harris was selected, not elected, to take on former President Donald Trump.
Recent events. A few things have happened on the international stage, where Biden is most comfortable, that brought him back to life from his extended vacation on Delaware beaches.
The United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York was a significant pivot. American Presidents always make the pilgrimage to this most august of meetings where world leaders (friends and foes) assemble under one roof. Biden fittingly went to the UN to address world leaders. His shaky style of delivery didn't matter. The world was bidding farewell to a politician who had been around for over 50 years, including as the Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations, Vice President under Obama for two terms, and now as President.
Ever since Bill and Hillary Clinton created the Clinton Global Initiative, CGI has been inviting world leaders to speak when they are in New York. The event is a far more informal way to rub shoulders and make deals, with the CGI also looking for funding, sometimes controversial. Biden appeared at the CGI and accepted the Clinton Global Citizen Award.
The Bidens and the Clintons have known each other much longer than the Bidens have known Harris, which showed in Biden's remarks. Addressing Bill Clinton, he said:
You're a great friend, and CGI has actually transformed philanthropy. Hillary, I want to thank you—and I maybe shouldn't do this publicly—but thank you personally for the way you have helped me and the way you've spoken up for me with such passion.
The Harris handlers were understandably furious. Why were the Clintons giving Biden an award when the Harris campaign has tried hard to relegate Biden to the heaps of history? Don't the Clintons understand the Harris campaign's "Turn the page" and "The New Way Forward" messages?
When already in New York, Biden decided he could make the best of it all. So he appeared on The View, an ABC News propaganda machine that has been very supportive of Kamala Harris. Biden raised eyebrows by saying how Kamala Harris was integral to his administration.
As vice president, there wasn't a single thing that I did that she couldn't do…so I was able to delegate her responsibility from foreign policy to domestic policy.
It was a powerful statement that threw cold water on the defensive statements made by the Harris campaign that she couldn't do much for America for the last 3 1⁄2 years because she was the Vice President. A few days earlier, Michael Strahan of ABC's Good Morning America, had asked Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris's husband (Clip marker 04:31): "So, for those may criticize and say, well, she hasn't done that for 3½ years when she was Vice President, do you think that was unfair?"
Emhoff: "She is the Vice President, not the President. The Vice President is there as a part of the administration, not leading the administration." Biden took care of that response nicely.
Complicated Biden-Harris relationship since June 27: There has not been much love lost between Biden and Harris since the Atlanta debate on June 27, when Trump soundly beat Biden and ended his political career.
For nearly four weeks after June 27, Biden fought to keep his position as the Democratic Party nominee, having duly won 98% of the delegates. On July 1, Vanity Fair published a cover story featuring Jill Biden. But two interviews with ABC News and NBC News did not stem the tide of the mutiny developing within the Pelosi-Obama-Schumer-Jeffries cabal, urged on silently by Harris.
On July 21, at 1:46 PM ET, a slow Sunday, Biden announced on X that he had decided not to seek re-election and was stepping down as the party nominee. An agonizing 27 minutes later, Biden endorsed Harris as his choice for the Democratic nomination in a separate post on X. If Biden thought so highly of Harris taking over, wouldn’t he have included her name in the first post?
In the initial weeks of the Harris endorsement, Kamala did a lot to prove her loyalty. "We love Joe!" she cried out in one of her appearances. "We love our President!" she cried out at another rally. It was a Hollywood drama playing out in front of the cameras - and the Biden camp detested it. The Biden family knew how Pelosi had threatened Biden with using the 25th Amendment to dislodge him from office if he didn't surrender the nomination. Biden was told that Harris had agreed to sign the petition, an extraordinary mark of disloyalty.
The bad blood only boiled in Chicago at the DNC. President Biden was asked to speak on the convention's opening night, generally reserved for local party chiefs and unknowns. Worse, he was pushed way past his bedtime into a very late speaking slot. It was insult after insult. The President's side took it all in stride and hurriedly left the convention hall to fly to Los Angeles.
Harris had moved on, forgetting that Biden even existed. Whenever asked how she would be different from Biden should she win, her first response, always with a cackle, was, "Well, you can see I am not Joe Biden." She would resort to her standard "Ambitions-Aspirations-Dreams" nonsense and point to how she wanted to "Turn the page" and take the country forward in a new way.
Direct body blow. The Biden team couldn't stand it anymore. And, on Friday, they pounced.
Harris had announced she would go to the border for a photo opportunity. Even before she landed, the acting chief of Biden's Immigration and Customs Enforcement had released a letter to Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican Congressman. Gonzalez’s request for immigrant data had been sitting with ICE for more than six months. Why did ICE release the information to coincide with Harris’s visit to the border?
The letter was explosive, enough to sink any campaign. It said that under Harris, the border czar, America had caught and released into the country over 662,000 migrants with criminal records. Worse, more than 15,000 of them were murderers convicted in their home countries, and 16,000 were convicted of sexual assault. Other crimes included 100,000 assaults, 70,000 drug violations, 90,000 invasions of privacy, and 16,000 weapons offenses.
Trump has been saying for years that other countries have been emptying their prisons to dump illegal immigrants into America and has been, as usual, scorned by the media. Now, Biden's administration was confirming Trump's charge. It was like Biden again wearing the Trump MAGA hat, as he had done at a firehouse in Pennsylvania earlier this month.
In recent TIPP polls conducted in battleground states, Trump has been leading Harris by 20 points on immigration, the second most important issue to American voters after the economy. With the new information, Trump's lead will only widen.
Biden has also signaled he will take a victory lap tour celebrating his legacy, complicating Harris's efforts to distance herself from the Biden record.
The Democratic Party infighting is now running on steroids.
