Vice President Kamala Harris has garnered criticism from at least two former advisers to former President Barack Obama.
Obama, one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures, has been stumping for Harris in the final days of her campaign. Polls indicate the race between her and former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, remains extremely tight and is likely to be decided by the smallest of margins in crucial battleground states.
But while Obama has been rallying voters to turn out for Harris, some of his former aides have criticized the vice president’s’ campaign.
Van Jones, who was once an adviser to Obama, said Harris’ campaign has gone from “brat to flat” since she entered the race in July, referring to the Democrat campaign’s embrace of a social media trend inspired by pop singer Charlie XCX’s Brat album over the summer.
During a recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, Jones suggested that Harris’ loss of momentum is partly because her campaign is now “not as much fun.”
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“When Kamala was rising, she was fun,” he said. “Remember, it was the politics of joy, it was fun… and then we went from brat to flat and it’s just not as much fun.”
Jones, who served as an adviser on environmental innovation and green jobs in the Obama administration in 2009, also praised Trump’s recent visit to a McDonald’s location in Pennsylvania as a “brilliant” move.
“I think we’ve got to acknowledge that this guy is beating the pants off of us with these so-called publicity stunts,” he said.
“It gets into everybody’s feeds and people who are not looking at politics will look at that. I think we just have to be have more fun ourselves. We were having a great time during the Democratic convention. If we have more fun, if our, if the Democratic Party is a party of fun, people will join in. We should we should be doing crazy stuff, too.”
Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns for comment via email. Obama’s office has also been contacted for comment via email.
Jones’ comments came after David Axelrod, a former top aide to Obama, called out what he described as Harris’ habit of going to “word salad city” when answering questions.
Axelrod, a CNN political commentator, said Harris’s town hall with CNN on Wednesday had been a “mixed night” for the vice president.
“I think she was very strong coming out of the gate and she obviously came with a purpose,” he said, adding that she was prepared to seize on comments by Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly that the Republican nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that Trump, while in office, suggested that Adolf Hitler “did some good things.”
“She was very strong, as she has been on abortion rights because she feels passionately about it. She can be clinical on some of these economic issues. She was great on the long-term care for the elderly, to help people.”
“The things that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers.”
He said that Harris had responded to Anderson Cooper’s question about whether she would be stronger on Israel than Trump with “a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking.”
He added: “On certain questions like that, on immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity because she would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies, and that’s a mistake. Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn’t concede much.”
Axelrod on Thursday addressed his criticism, saying that Harris is facing “additional pressure” since she only entered the race in July after President Joe Biden dropped his bid for reelection.
“She’s in a more difficult position because she has basically had to introduce herself to the American people in 90 days (…) Her answers are being scrutinized more closely because people are looking for clues to who she is and where she’s going,” he said.
