I know from my experience managing Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000 that running for president as vice president is an underappreciated challenge. A vice president is expected to never disagree with the president in public and must make the president look good without claiming personal credit for accomplishments. Yet when running for president, a vice president gets no credit from opponents for administration successes, but instead is blamed for supposed administration failures.
As a former vice president, President Biden understands the importance of the job and has empowered Vice President Kamala Harris. Yet because some of the most important work of a vice president takes place outside of public view, as a top confidential adviser to the president, it is difficult to differentiate the V.P.’s achievements from those of the president. The two function as a team, with the president as the final decision maker. This has created tensions for Ms. Harris: Some voters say she has been “invisible” as vice president and are skeptical or even ignorant of her abilities and accomplishments, while some political strategists say she needs to differentiate her policy priorities from Mr. Biden’s so that she puts meat on the idea that she is “turning the page” on the past and is a change candidate.
Ms. Harris has played a key role in the top achievements of the Biden-Harris administration to: cut health insurance and prescription drug costs; fight climate change; impose a minimum tax on multibillion-dollar corporations; crack down on wealthy tax cheats; fund free Covid vaccinations and treatments; send checks to most Americans and small businesses to help them deal with the pandemic; improve roads, bridges, mass transit, rail services, airports, ports, waterways and energy systems nationwide; reduce unauthorized immigration in July across the U.S.-Mexico border below the level when Mr. Trump left office and invest almost $53 billion to expand U.S. manufacturing of semiconductor chips.
The vice president has worked with Mr. Biden to reduce inflation and create almost 16 million jobs. Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic resulted in the loss of about three million American jobs during his term of office — the most job losses of any president since record-keeping began in 1939.
When a vice president running for president expands on the administration’s plans — like giving all first-time home buyers $25,000 in down payment assistance or increasing the tax deduction for start-ups from $5,000 to $50,000 — opponents ask why the vice president didn’t pursue the idea earlier. Mr. Trump and his campaign are leveling this attack against Ms. Harris today.
How absurd! President Lyndon Johnson gave us landmark civil rights and voting rights laws, Medicare, Medicaid and many other outstanding measures. Should Johnson have been attacked for not doing all this when he was President John F. Kennedy’s vice president? Of course not. Creating a more perfect Union is a never-ending task. Presidents build on the achievements of their predecessors.
Elections are about the future and what candidates will do to improve the lives of voters. But Mr. Trump has his eyes firmly locked on the past, still falsely claiming he was robbed of a re-election victory in 2020 and hypocritically attacking Ms. Harris for changing some positions she took in her brief campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019.
Yet Mr. Trump has a long record of flip-flopping on issues, even including his signature issue of immigration. The former president, who favored reproductive rights before he became a leading opponent, has changed his position on abortion 15 times in the past 25 years, CNN reported. He even changed his position on a Florida ballot measure on abortion access literally from one day to the next in August. He also unveiled a new position on in vitro fertilization treatments.
Abraham Lincoln once believed slavery shouldn’t be abolished. Lyndon Johnson was a segregationist before becoming a civil rights champion. Revisiting one’s views in response to new information and experiences, rather than stubbornly holding onto old opinions, is the mark of a seasoned leader.
As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
For almost four years, Ms. Harris has not been a senator from California, as she was in 2019, but a vice president charged with forging consensus and finding common-sense solutions for all Americans. Her challenge isn’t just to get credit for what she and President Biden have achieved in office but also to offer an accurate understanding of where they have fallen short. She must also persuade voters of her very humanity, which includes learning on the job and from her experience in and out of office.
That can be a tough sell: Most Americans want candidates to earn their vote and want to see candidates prove themselves and show what they are made of by being tested, as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Mr. Biden were during long and hard primary campaigns and in office where their humanity was on display. Many voters still don’t have a good handle on Ms. Harris. It’s incumbent on her to show them who she is and how she has changed.
I realize that many Americans will vote to make Ms. Harris our next president because they are disgusted by Mr. Trump’s incompetence, ignorance, failed leadership, erratic and extreme positions, raging temper, lies, sexism, racism, narcissism and criminal convictions, and the crimes he has been charged with, civil judgments filed against him and his refusal to accept his 2020 re-election defeat.
But Ms. Harris is more than the anti-Trump. She is offering America a vision of a better future and she has pledged to govern not based on ideology or partisanship, but on finding practical, realistic solutions to the challenges facing the American people. Ms. Harris is an outstanding public servant and candidate who has selflessly dedicated her life to building a better future for the people she serves. She has the experience, expertise, competence, clarity, compassion, character and integrity to make her optimistic vision for our nation a reality.
The New York Times average of national polls gives Ms. Harris a narrow lead of 49 to 47 percent against Mr. Trump. The average of polls in battleground states shows the candidates tied or nearly tied. Ms. Harris and her campaign have described her as an “underdog.” She cannot risk the American public not understanding the breadth of her experience.
If elected, Ms. Harris would enter the presidency with more government experience, a more impressive record and more talents than many of the men who have been elected president. The challenge before her is to fully own her talents and experience, as well as her intentions and vision to lead the United States.
Donna Brazile is a former interim chair and current at-large member of the Democratic National Committee and is a contributor to ABC News. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.