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President Joe Biden told the panelists on “The View” Wednesday the 81-year-old commander-in-chief routinely delegated his responsibilities to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“As vice president, there wasn’t a single thing that I did that she couldn’t do,” Biden said. “So I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.”
The president had been asked what advice he had for Harris on how to defeat former President Donald Trump this fall.
“Be herself,” Biden said, characterizing his successor as the Democrats’ presidential nominee as “smart as hell.”
Biden appeared on the ABC flagship daytime political talk show program just two months after his own cognitive decline forced him to drop out of the race. Concerns about the president’s mental acuity to command the Oval Office had been categorically dismissed by Democrats for years, even after a federal special counsel who investigated Biden’s mishandling of classified documents concluded in February the president was too senile to face felony charges.
Questions that plagued the oldest president to ever hold office about who was running the country under Biden’s frequent absence eventually compelled the Democrat Party to remove him from the ticket. A catastrophic debate performance in June exposed the president’s frailty covered up by White House staffers as he sought another four-year term.
Harris is now running as a “change” candidate despite her status as the incumbent for an administration that even Biden said she ran. The vice president said three years ago she was “the last person in the room” when the decision was made to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.
The ensuing withdrawal ultimately became a defining failure of the Biden-Harris administration after 13 U.S. service members were killed by terrorists who exploited the chaotic pullout with a bombing at Abbey Gate in Kabul. No officials within the Biden-Harris administration have resigned over the fallout more than three years later, and the White House approval rating never recovered.
Harris has meanwhile campaigned as if she were an outsider candidate running to reform Washington, railing against inflation and a broken border even though she’s been the “border czar” for years. Reports say Harris is planning to make a rare visit to the nation’s southern border with Mexico in Arizona on Friday after she does a Wednesday sit-down interview with a host from MSNBC who practically endorsed the vice president on HBO Friday night.
“Kamala Harris is not running for perfect. She’s running against Trump,” said MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
The interview will mark only the fourth time Harris takes solo questions from the press. Harris had previously done a 10-minute sit-down with a local television station in Pennsylvania, a daytime forum with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), and a prime-time special last week with Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed Harris at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August.
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