Vice President Kamala Harris took some time to set the record straight–again–when it comes to officials attacking the president.
Harris addressed comments made by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy regarding President Biden’s age affecting his negotiation skills during the DealBook Summit, The Hill reports. When The New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked the VP about his criticism, she decided to remind the people about McCarthy’s last political drama.
“With all due respect, when anyone who has had the experience McCarthy just had, I don’t think he’s a judge of negotiations,” Harris said. “Age is more than a chronological fact. I spent a whole lot of time with our president, be it in the Oval Office or the Situation Room and in other places, and I can tell you … not only is he authoritative in rooms around the globe but in the Oval Office meeting with members of Congress, meeting leaders in industry, meeting with community leaders.”
Harris’s response refers to McCarthy being ousted from his Speaker post in October 2023 after eight Republicans sided with Democrats to relieve him of his duties.
On Nov. 29, McCarthy told Sorkin that he “could not negotiate the debt ceiling with Biden” and continued, saying the president isn’t “the same person he was when he was vice president.”
“We kind of rammed around him; he said he was going to do it. Schumer then comes in and says, ‘Don’t do anything with Kevin; he can’t pass anything,’” McCarthy said. “And then I went for 97 days, I went to the media every day. And it wasn’t till I passed something that he could start negotiating.”
The Republican California state representative said he would definitely not be jumping party lines and supporting the Democratic president during the 2024 presidential election, adding that even if he were a Democrat, Biden would not be his choice.
“I’m explicitly saying if I had a choice of who I would pick, if I was a Democrat to be my nominee, to run the greatest country in the world, I would not give him — I would not reelect him,” he said.
But Harris is not worried about McCarthy’s nay-saying remarks. While she addressed Biden’s rating dropping in recent polls, she highlighted some numbers voters should pay attention to, like record-low unemployment and falling inflation, according to Deadline. Other issues like the cost of insulin dropping and student debt reduction are still on Biden’s list of things to do.
“These are also macro-economic measures and don’t necessarily connect with the heart and the experience and the feelings of the American people,” she said. “For many Americans, prices are still too high, and we still have work to do to address that.”
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