On Friday’s broadcast of NBC’s “MTP Now,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) responded to 2024 Vice President Kamala Harris’ messaging on what differences there are between her and President Joe Biden by stating that he hopes undecided voters aren’t “mulling over the precise degree of loyalty that a vice president should be showing to the president and while acting as vice president” which is “an unbelievably esoteric question compared to” the choice between her and her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump and when the difference between “forward-looking and backward-looking” is “so clear.”
Host Kristen Welker asked, “Vice President Kamala Harris told Fox News this week that her presidency would not be a continuation of President Biden’s presidency. … And she just spoke with my colleague, Peter Alexander, and told him, look, she is not going to criticize President Biden, that she’s loyal and that’s not how she sees the relationship between a president and vice president. What do you make of this messaging, and do you think it is enough and that it will give voters the clarity they need as they make their decision?”
Himes answered, “Call me crazy, but I guess I would hope that undecided voters today wouldn’t be mulling over the precise degree of loyalty that a vice president should be showing to the president and while acting as vice president, how much space you could fit — that’s an unbelievably esoteric question compared to, do we really want to elect somebody who is determined to identify the enemy within, by which he means his political opponents, as the real enemy and to use the military and the Department of Justice against that so-called enemy within. And I could go on on the statements that Donald Trump has made over and over and over again. I could go on on the fact that Donald Trump has no real ideology, right? He devastated the reproductive freedoms of America’s [women]. And now that he’s realized that it makes him a little bit unpopular, he’s running in exactly the other direction. So, boy, I would really hope that undecided people in this country would not use the degree of loyalty of a vice president to a president as the factor in making their decision, when the contrast between decency and indecency and forward-looking and backward-looking and egotism and a commitment to the country, the facts there are just so clear.”
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