JamzNG Latest News, Gist, Entertainment in Nigeria
Kamala Harris’s plan as a running mate was to outdo J.D. Vance as nothing more than a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. But now that she’s the presumptive Democratic nominee, her campaign is seizing on the Ohio senator as a major liability, looking to his own VP selection process and the contenders’ public hearings to drive home the point.
Vance’s rise, despite his relative lack of experience in government, is giving Harris a new opportunity to attack Trump. The message isn’t just that Vance is “weird,” as the vice president said at a fundraiser this weekend, or that he has questionable views, advisers said; it’s that the Ohio senator shouldn’t be an eyeball away from the presidency, and that Trump’s pick raises more questions about the top of the list.
The strategy is also a way to focus on Trump’s age now that President Joe Biden is no longer part of the conversation, highlighting how close Vance could be to occupying the Oval Office if anything were to happen to a 78-year-old president. And poking holes in Vance’s resume, as some potential Harris running mates are doing, is a way for them to argue that Republicans are holding the presumptive Democratic nominee to a different standard when they attack her as a “DEI hire.”
“We have a black woman, we have a white man, and no one asked the white man” to talk about his experience, Harris campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu told CNN.
After Vance was announced as Trump’s pick, and while Democrats were still waiting to see whether Biden would drop out of the race, Harris told several advisers that she saw Trump’s pick as doubling down on his MAGA base rather than expanding the ticket’s appeal. She and her team were excited to face Vance over others on the former president’s shortlist, eager to brand him a hypocrite and Trump sycophant.
But now, as potential running mates take turns criticizing Vance for his controversial comments about childless women and his about-face on Trump, as well as questioning his Appalachian roots, Harris’s team is pitting Vance against people on his own ticket to try to draw contrast.
The 39-year-old Ohio Republican is “one of the least prepared people we’ve ever nominated to be vice president of the United States,” Landrieu said, with qualifications that don’t go much beyond the constitutional minimum of being a natural-born U.S. citizen and 35 years old.
“He hasn’t even run a business. He’s never run anything. And he’s going to be a blink of an eye away from the largest entity in the world, and the one that’s the most important,” Landrieu said. “So it’s a fair question to ask: How would we know if you have the capacity to run national security and domestic security policy for the most powerful country in the world, which you might be called upon to do at the last minute?”
Harris, first elected to the Senate in 2016, spent as much time in the chamber as Vance, first elected in 2022, before she began preparing for her 2018 presidential run. And while Vance has won one statewide office, those on Harris’s shortlist, which includes several governors, a senator and a Cabinet secretary, have served in government longer than Vance and have leadership experience in a variety of previous offices, in business and in the military (and NASA).
Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman and Biden White House adviser who is also a co-chairman of the campaign, said he was “terrified” that Vance could become president any day.
Many people who hoped to be chosen as Harris’s teammates reiterated this message as they fought for the job.
“I’ve done a lot of hiring in my life, in business and nonprofits, in government, and it’s pretty obvious when someone’s resume shows that they can’t hold down a job or haven’t held down a job for more than a year or two at a time, that there’s something wrong with them,” said Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is among those under scrutiny, referring to Vance’s brief stints in corporate positions before jumping into Ohio’s 2022 Senate race.
Pritzker said that not only are potential Democratic nominees more experienced, they are also more consistent in their positions than Vance, who went from privately worrying eight years ago that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” to saying he was completely won over by the way Trump has conducted himself as president.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who ran for president four years ago after serving as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, expressed a similar sentiment in interviews during his public hearing to move up to Harris’s ticket.
“I’m a believer in younger people bringing something to the table,” said the 42-year-old Buttigieg, who argued that his relatively few years of government service were not a problem, since Trump had changed the game for what counts as political experience. “But I think when you have no executive experience, certainly not in public service, and very little experience in public office in general, that’s a real concern.”
Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, called Vance “the best choice to be the next vice president of the United States, while Kamala has been playing that role since Biden picked her.”
He attacked Harris as “the least serious presidential candidate in a generation,” adding: “No matter who Kamala chooses, she can’t erase her sorry record as Biden’s failed border czar, overseeing runaway inflation and releasing violent criminals into communities.”
Harris weighs his past experience in his selection
While former Attorney General Eric Holder is overseeing Harris’s official vetting process, the actual decision-making is limited to a tight circle around the vice president, led by her campaign chief of staff, Sheila Nix, and her vice presidential chief of staff, Lorraine Voles.
They make many of their own decisions, and they receive even more from old and new friends, confident in their own political competence, while promoting their preferred choices.
Harris, 59, has the unique experience of leading a selection process just four years after experiencing it firsthand.
Here’s What a Harris Presidency Could Look Like
That process, and how she has had to navigate the job under intense scrutiny, has been a focus of her conversations with, among others, Biden and former President Barack Obama, people familiar with her thinking told CNN, with Biden’s strong comments about her availability echoed in her as she made that choice.
While it will not only consider the jobs candidates have held but also what they did in those positions, consultants say its process will not be as simple as comparing resumes.
“We’re in a position where someone has done the job of vice president,” a Harris adviser told CNN. “She knows the challenges of this world in a way that you need to have someone who has a deep level of resilience.”
Such considerations intertwine with immediate concerns that she has continued to emphasize in internal meetings: the need to unite the party and remember that, despite her meteoric first week as a candidate, “we are the underdogs in this race,” as she said at a fundraiser in Massachusetts on Saturday afternoon.
As was the case four years ago, when Biden was making his final decisions about her, Harris believes the most important factor should be who will help her win, her advisers say.
“Harris will choose a vice president who is qualified and ready to serve the American people, protect their freedoms and fight for their future,” campaign spokesman James Singer said, again seeking to draw a contrast by repeating a charge made by Harris herself, that Trump chose Vance because he supported her attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Questioning Trump’s age and health
With Biden out of the race, Trump is now the much older candidate. He is overweight, known to love fast food, and has a philosophical objection to exercise. He has never released his full medical records.
For Harris’s aides, that makes choosing her running mate an even more pressing matter.
When then-Arizona Sen. John McCain picked then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, he was accused of recklessness in choosing someone with so little experience, given that she was then the oldest first-time presidential candidate and had already been through a bout with cancer. McCain in 2008 was about six years younger than Trump is now. Palin had a few more months as Alaska governor (and before that as mayor and city council member of her hometown of Wasilla) than Vance has had in the Senate.
What to Expect in the 100 Days Before the Election and Beyond
Trump is the only American president elected without prior government or military experience. And even if he had chosen Vance as a governing partner rather than someone who could advance his political movement, Trump said he believes the Ohio Republican would be a good president.
Asked about Democrats’ emphasis on Trump’s age, his national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made a similar argument to one Democrats were making just a few weeks ago: “It’s not about age, it’s about competence.”
Still, that doesn’t change the actuarial reality that Democrats are much more willing to talk about now that they’re no longer defending Biden.
“It has to make you think about Donald Trump’s judgment. He knows how old he is,” Pritzker said. “And so the idea that he would pick someone so close to being president, with so little experience — and especially so little experience running anything — should just raise a lot of questions in people’s minds.”
“Given the questions about President Trump’s health, as well as his advanced age, the choice of a running mate is as important as anything since FDR’s last campaign, and J.D. Vance is no Harry Truman,” Buttigieg said.
Roosevelt was 62 during his last campaign, in 1944.
“Father Time is undefeated,” Richmond said, “and [Vance] being so close to it, with that amount of experience and with the lack of seriousness or appreciation for the work, that should worry a lot of people.” [CNN]
The post Harris Sees Opening in Vance Pick as She Weighs Her Vice Presidential Pick appeared first on TheConclaveNg.
