Sometimes, in a political campaign season, one party states the patently obvious — and yet, even so, hands their opponent a nice big cudgel to beat them with. In one such, the White House, speaking ex-cathedra through the personage of Karine Jean-Pierre, stated that there was “no daylight” between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. That presents a rather unpleasant mental picture, but it’s more concerning for the Harris/Walz campaign as it gives the Trump campaign a talking point.
Whoops.
The Trump campaign is rallying around White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying there’s no “daylight” between President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, arguing the comment reflects that “Kamala owns the border crisis” and other issues throttling the country.
“Thank you @PressSec for confirming: there is ‘no daylight’ between Kamala and Joe! Kamala owns the border crisis. Kamala owns inflation. Kamala owns the wars, chaos, and crime over the past 4 years,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted to X on Monday afternoon showing a clip of Jean-Pierre.
Leavitt was responding to Jean-Pierre saying Monday during the White House press briefing that Biden and Harris have been “aligned” throughout the administration and that there’s no “daylight” between the pair.
Thank you @PressSec for confirming: there is “no daylight” between Kamala and Joe!
Kamala owns the border crisis.
Kamala owns inflation.
Kamala owns the wars, chaos, and crime over the past 4 years. pic.twitter.com/RIx4hotNuH
— Karoline Leavitt (@kleavittnh) August 12, 2024
This is a flypaper strip that KJP really should have avoided, coming as it does at a time when the Trump campaign is apparently shifting into high gear.
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Of course, there’s the problem that neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris have any real idea what’s actually going on. Joe Biden has no real idea because he’s senile. Kamala Harris has no real idea because she is willfully ignorant and, frankly, not terribly bright. In that sense, of course, they are two peas in a left-leaning pod. But the tack that the Trump people here have been taking is that, while Joe Biden is no longer the candidate, it is still the “Biden/Harris” administration, and she carries her portion of the responsibility for the mess the nation is in right now. Karine Jean-Pierre’s rather clueless verbal slip-up just gave the Trump campaign a boost in that assertion.
In the grand scheme of things, mind you, this won’t end up being that much of a much. Verbal gaffes by both sides come and go, and both sides will be making more of them. In the end, this verbal screw-up won’t affect the result much. The debates, now debates have, in past elections, really tipped things — in 1980, the Reagan/Carter debates, for instance. The second debate, wherein Ronald Reagan, yes, pounced on then-President Carter with the famous “There you go again” line and pivoted to ask the American people whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier. Reagan grabbed control of the discussion at that point and kept the initiative right up to the election.
That — not in an off-hand statement by the rather clueless KJP — is where Trump will really have the chance to grab the initiative and keep it.
