After former President Donald J. Trump had tried several times during the debate to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to President Biden and his policies, she decided to try to make something abundantly clear.
“You’re not running against Joe Biden,” she told Mr. Trump. “You’re running against me.”
Mr. Trump’s aides had hoped he would use the debate to persuade voters that Ms. Harris bore responsibility for the most unpopular aspects of Mr. Biden’s record, which they saw as a potentially potent line of attack at a moment when polls show voters are hungry for change. Mr. Trump repeatedly tried to link her to the president on inflation, immigration and Russia’s war in Ukraine, among other issues, but Ms. Harris largely deflected those attacks as she pressed her case against Mr. Trump.
At one point, as Mr. Trump was speaking about inflation, he tried to make the case again. “Remember this,” he said. “She is Biden.”
“Clearly, I am not Joe Biden,” Ms. Harris responded, “and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”
Sitting vice presidents who run for the top office often face questions about how much they will embrace or reject the administrations they serve. For much of the night, Ms. Harris brushed off salvos from Mr. Trump and questions from the moderators that would have required her to defend or distance herself from the Biden administration’s policies and positions.
Mr. Trump kept trying, though. He called Mr. Biden her “boss” several times, and when speaking about immigration he mentioned “people that she and Biden let into our country.”
But as the debate grew more hostile, Mr. Trump may have unintentionally undermined his efforts to link the two in voters’ minds when he proclaimed, “I’ll give you a little secret: He hates her,” during a digression about the fact that she replaced Mr. Biden as the Democratic nominee after he won the primaries.
The Biden policy that Ms. Harris defended most directly may have been his decision to leave Afghanistan. Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized the chaotic withdrawal as he has sought to sow doubts about Ms. Harris’s foreign policy experience.
“I agreed with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan,” Ms. Harris said. “Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did. And as a result, America’s taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war, and as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”
Since Mr. Biden dropped out of the race, Ms. Harris has been steadfast in her defense of him. But she headed into the debate with the crucial task of not only introducing herself to the American public but also pitching herself as a change agent for the next four years without discounting what she and Mr. Biden have done in the last three and a half.
Mr. Trump, who got the last word of the debate, asked in his closing argument why Ms. Harris had not already carried out her policy proposals — another strategy his aides had been hinting at for weeks, but one that inflates the role of a vice president.
After the debate, Mr. Biden weighed in on his vice president’s performance.
“America got to see tonight the leader I’ve been proud to work alongside for three and a half years,” Mr. Biden wrote on X after the debate. “Wasn’t even close. VP Harris proved she’s the best choice to lead our nation forward. We’re not going back.”
The New York Times