Joe Biden has been sidelined by Kamala Harris in the final days of her campaign, with his description of Donald Trump supporters as “garbage” underscoring her campaign’s fears that the outgoing president is an electoral liability.
Since dropping out of the White House race in July, the 81-year-old Democrat has been hitting the trail to support his vice president — and trumpet his own administration’s achievements.
But US media reported earlier this week that Harris’s campaign was distancing itself from the incumbent, and that it had politely rejected his suggestions to make more joint appearances on the stump.
The row over Biden’s latest comments has now crystallized concerns that he is more of a hindrance than a help to her election bid’s final push.
“Harris should obviously avoid many joint appearances with Biden until after the election is over,” said Larry Sabato, a leading US political scientist and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
“Biden is quite unpopular and he’s also rusty and off his game.”
Republicans pounced on Biden’s “garbage” comments as a reminder of the damaging moment when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton called Trump’s supporters “deplorables” back in 2016.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” the gaffe-prone Biden said Tuesday, while addressing a row that erupted after one of Trump’s warm-up speakers at a New York rally referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
The timing was particularly irritating for the Harris campaign as the comments risked overshadowing Harris’s primetime speech in front of the White House on Tuesday night.
Her addressed promised unity and a break from the past — all at odds with the suggestion from Biden’s remarks.
Biden and his aides later tried to clean up the mess — with the White House blaming a missing apostrophe and claiming Biden said “supporter’s” instead of “supporters”, to refer to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe instead of Trump’s base in general.
– ‘Strongly disagree’ –
Harris tried to draw a line under Biden’s remarks as the row rumbled on.
“Let me be clear, I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” she told reporters as she returned to the campaign trail on Wednesday.
The row reflected Harris’s wider dilemma as she seeks to create daylight with a lame-duck president, without trashing the record of an administration that she was part of for four years.
In her speech in front of a gleaming White House on Tuesday, she said that “my presidency will be different, because the challenges we face are different,” she vowed.
Even before the “garbage” row, Biden had already been set to play a minor role in the final days of Harris’s tight campaign against Republican former president Trump.
Biden is only due to hold a few events with unions in battleground states — as Harris headlines huge rallies with political and showbiz stars.
“I’ve done a lot of surrogate stuff,” Biden insisted on Monday. “The fact of the matter is that I’ve also had to be president at the same time.”
For Biden, it caps a painful fading into irrelevance as the commander-in-chief of the world’s top superpower nears the end of his single term.
A proud man for whom the decision to quit did not come easy, Biden has been keen to promote his achievements in bringing the country back from the brink after the Covid pandemic and pushing through record amounts of legislation.
But history’s view of Biden will ultimately rely on whether Harris wins next week.
A Trump comeback would not only be a repudiation of Biden’s own achievements but also reflect the fact that he hung on too long despite concerns over his age.
“She’s very much a legacy project,” for Biden, said Frank Sesno, a professor at George Washington University and former White House correspondent.
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