No Daylight, Kid

Trump they wouldn't believe.  Harris they wouldn't disbelieve.  But while Trump has already demonstrated his capacity to do the damage to our society that his most ardent and deeply pocketed supporters said he was going to do, we have recently learned that there was a good explanation for Harris's troubling remonstrations about how different a Harris administration would be from the Biden era that no one was particularly crushed to see about to come to an end.

As reported in the upcoming chronicle of the 2024 election, “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, as excerpted at The Hill:

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both understood the importance of being seen as the bigger change agent.  For Trump, that meant continuing to promise an antidote to the Biden-Harris years.  For Harris, there was more flexibility to define her brand of change.  ... [Biden] would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win. But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us. “No daylight” was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush.

The day before Harris’s first interview ... [V]eteran Democratic communications strategist Stephanie Cutter launched into a proposed preamble — a list of all the items that made Harris proud of her work with Biden.  “Wait, wait, wait!” said Sean Clegg, a longtime Harris adviser who was regarded with suspicion by the Biden holdovers running the campaign. “Let’s not do this. Let’s not go down memory lane.”   That was the last time he was invited to media prep. 

Whether she won or lost the election, he thought, she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him — especially during a debate that would be watched by millions of Americans. To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him.  “No daylight, kid,” Biden said.

Nothing about this surprises me.  In fact, this was my assumption -- my hope-- going into election day-- that Harris's mannered insistence that nothing would fundamentally change except the face at the top of the ticket was not the truth but a condition of Joe Biden's surrender to the tide that burned to replace him only after it was too late.  It beggared belief that Kamala Harris was Joe Biden's DEI clone.  There was so much to object to about Joe Biden, apart from his deteriorating mind, that the sheer fact of a switch at the top of the ticket practically screamed relief from the collision course that the geezer rematch was guaranteeing us to be heading for.  By the point at which Joe Biden was nudged aside, the election seemed destined for the worst possible by far of two abysmal outcomes.  Of course Kamala Harris represented a fresh start.  I will confess I could not be dissuaded from my optimism about what a Harris win would mean, especially in light of the alternative.  Not even by Harris herself.  And my solitude at the end of the branch of suspended disbelief in the lack of daylight between Harris and the president who reportedly-- his self-serving ministrations about minimizing daylight between them notwithstanding--kept his vice president at arms' length  set the foundation for an especially steep fall and crash when the polls closed.

Is there a lesson in this? 

Yes, both for candidates who want to win and for those who vote as an act of  seeking power for their cause within a very confining charade of democracy, but is it now too late to learn it?