Harris steps into the spotlight with Biden at the beach
Haisten Willis
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Kamala Harris is taking advantage of her shot at the limelight.
With President Joe Biden off at the beach, the vice president is looking unusually aggressive as she gives a series of speeches this week and lobs criticism at Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
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“I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact,” Harris said during a Tuesday appearance in Orlando. “There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”
Critics deride Harris as listless and frequently off message, with some listing her potential ascension to the presidency as a reason not to vote for the octogenarian Biden. But she’s been much more assertive of late, picking fights with top GOP hopeful DeSantis and filling the void left by the president with a week of high-profile speaking engagements.
“They want to replace history with lies,” she said during a speech in Jacksonville last week that also attacked the state’s governor. “Middle school students in Florida to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
While detractors point out that Harris’s comments stem from a single bullet point in a semester-long course and that she had even praised courses making a similar point in the past, her speech made major waves. Some prominent Republicans, including Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), both black lawmakers, echoed her concerns.
DeSantis hit back by calling the attacks misinformed and inviting her to Florida to discuss the state’s black history standards with one of the educators who helped create them.
Harris responded by heading right back to Florida, where she criticized DeSantis again before a cheering church convention in Orlando and vowed not to debate.
“This seems to be the undercard to the Biden-Trump fight — Harris vs. DeSantis,” University of Central Florida professor Jim Clark said. “It seems as though the administration has assigned her the job of jabbing at DeSantis, who always fights back.”
But the DeSantis jabs have hardly been her only headline-grabbing remarks of late.
Harris stood in to defend her boss from impeachment talk, dismissing it as nothing more than political games and even insisted she has great approval ratings.
Her schedule itself is noteworthy. This week Harris did a television interview Monday, the Orlando speech Tuesday, then a meeting with the prime minister of Mongolia on Wednesday, a speech on infrastructure spending and two campaign stops Thursday in Wisconsin, and remarks about Jobs Day on Friday.
“It’s good for her to make her case for a future presidency,” Florida-based Democratic strategist Sasha Tirador said. “I don’t know why she didn’t do it sooner.”
Of course, Harris has plenty of critics as well.
The vice president’s approval ratings are not great by most people’s standards, sitting at 40.7% approving against 52.7% who disapprove, per the RealClearPolitics average. That’s worse than the numbers for her beleaguered boss.
Conservatives in particular point to an early assignment Harris got to address migration at the southern border, derisively calling her the Biden administration’s border czar.
DeSantis mentioned that in the pair’s recent spat.
“I am prepared to meet as early as Wednesday of this week, but of course want to be deferential to your busy schedule should you already have a trip to the southern border planned for that day,” he wrote in a letter challenging her to debate Florida’s black history education. “Please let me know as soon as possible.”
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But even if it’s later than they’d like, Democrats like Tirador welcome the newly invigorated Harris they’re seeing right now.
“Everybody, all her fans have wondered, ‘Where have you been?'” Tirador said. “But better late than never, absolutely.”