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      Harris Says She Has ‘No Regrets’ About Defending Biden’s Capabilities

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      Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that she did not regret defending President Biden against claims that he had declined mentally, saying that she believes he has the “intelligence, the commitment and the judgment and disposition” Americans expect from their president.“No, not at all. Not at all,” the vice president said when asked if she regretted saying Mr. Biden was “extraordinarily strong” in the moments following the disastrous debate in June that led him to abandon his bid for re-election a month later.“He is so smart and loyal to the American people,” she said.In her first prime-time interview since Mr. Biden stepped aside and she became the new face of the Democratic Party, Ms. Harris continued to embrace the president and the record she has been a part of for almost four years. She told CNN’s Dana Bash that the administration’s efforts to help the economy recover after the pandemic and its push to secure the border are part of a record worth running on.But she talked about Mr. Biden mostly in the past tense — fondly, but with a kind of nostalgia that made it clear that he no longer represents the future of the country that she hopes to be leading in January.The challenge for her campaign over the next 67 days, top advisers say, is tricky: She must forge her own political identity separate from the president, who was pushed out amid voter concerns about his age and capacity to serve. But she can’t afford to break from his accomplishments, which remain popular, or to disrespect Mr. Biden, who remains a beloved figure among many in the party.“History is going to show,” she said, “not only has Joe Biden led an administration that has achieved those extraordinary successes, but the character of the man is one that he has been in his life and career, including as a president, quite selfless and puts the American people first.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Floats I.V.F. Coverage Mandate While Campaigning in Michigan

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      The week after Democrats spent much of their national convention attacking him over his position on abortion rights and reproductive health, former President Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he would require insurance companies or the federal government to pay for all costs associated with in vitro fertilization treatments if he is elected in November.Mr. Trump’s announcement — made in an NBC interview, a speech in Michigan and a town hall in Wisconsin — came with little detail about his proposal or how he might address its cost. For one cycle, the treatments can cost up to $20,000 or more. But he has been trying to rebrand himself to voters on reproductive access and abortion rights, issues that have cost Republicans at the ballot box.Mr. Trump, who often on the campaign trail has bragged about his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, last week on social media declared that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” a phrase used by abortion-rights advocates.The post appeared to be an effort by Mr. Trump to cast himself as more of a political moderate on abortion, an issue that could hurt him in November.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign accused Mr. Trump of trying to run from his record on abortion access.“Trump lies as much if not more than he breathes, but voters aren’t stupid,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. “Because Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, I.V.F. is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Defends Ideological Shift to Center in CNN Interview

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      In her first television interview as the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday defended her ideological shift to the political center, saying she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet but promising “my values have not changed.”She also curtly rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claim that she recently “became” Black, according to partial excerpts released by CNN. The full interview will air at 9 p.m. Eastern time on CNN.Ms. Harris, taking questions Thursday afternoon from the CNN anchor Dana Bash in Savannah, Ga., sought to stake out political ground that would appeal to swing voters even as she assured progressive supporters she was still with them.“The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is: My values have not changed,” Ms. Harris said, adding that her past support for the so-called Green New Deal was reflected in the passage of a sweeping climate bill that Mr. Biden signed in 2022.Ms. Harris told Ms. Bash that it was “important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems,” according to CNN.Appointing a nominally bipartisan cabinet would be a return to tradition after eight years of more partisan White Houses. No Republicans are serving in President Biden’s cabinet. But President Barack Obama had a Republican secretary of transportation and two Republican secretaries of defense. President George W. Bush had a Democratic transportation secretary, and before that, President Bill Clinton had a Republican defense secretary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris, Before CNN Interview Runs, Presses Attack Against Trump in Georgia

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      Vice President Kamala Harris, who has spent the last few weeks trying to define herself and her life story for voters, turned on Thursday to describing the version of former President Donald J. Trump that she wants Americans to see, saying his candidacy represented a “full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights.”At a campaign rally in Savannah, Ga., Ms. Harris accused him of wanting to curtail abortion access, cut Social Security and Medicare, and give tax breaks to big corporations and billionaires. She said his plan for across-the-board tariffs on imported goods amounted to an unfair tax on working families.“Unlike Donald Trump, I will always put the middle-class and working-class families first,” Ms. Harris said to a crowd of thousands at a basketball arena. She added, “We’ve got some work to do, because we know Donald Trump has a very different plan.”Her audience broke into chants of “We’re not going back,” which has quickly become a favorite slogan at her rallies.Ms. Harris made her appearance hours before her first major interview since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee was set to be broadcast on CNN. She had faced rising pressure to hold an interview with a top journalist, with Republicans accusing her of hiding from tough questions.In early clips of the interview released by CNN on Thursday afternoon, Ms. Harris pledged to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and curtly rejected Mr. Trump’s recent questioning of her racial identity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

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      Democratic House Candidate Cleared in New York Harassment Inquiry

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      The findings may help the candidate, State Senator John Mannion, in his bid to unseat Representative Brandon Williams in a tossup race.For more than two months, the congressional campaign of John Mannion, perhaps Democrats’ best hope to flip a crucial House seat, has been shadowed by accusations that he created a hostile work environment and berated top aides in the New York State Senate.Now an outside investigation commissioned by the State Senate has ended quietly without reprimand, concluding that Mr. Mannion did not violate the chamber’s harassment and discrimination policy.The conclusion, which can still be appealed, would provide significant relief to Democrats. They are counting on Mr. Mannion, a moderate former teacher, to provide one of the four pickups they need nationwide to take back control of the House. He is facing Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican, in November in a district where Democrats meaningfully outnumber Republicans.The investigation was conducted by Michael Murphy, an outside lawyer hired by the Senate, who completed “a detailed, confidential response” and transmitted his findings clearing the Democrat to the Senate on Aug. 16, according to a previously unreported letter addressed to Mr. Mannion and obtained by The New York Times.Still, the letter was terse and provided little detail about whether Mr. Murphy, a partner at the law firm Barclay Damon, found the accusations to be credible when he interviewed several of the state senator’s former staff members.Neither Mr. Mannion nor Mr. Murphy would comment on the investigation or share a copy of the report on Thursday. A spokesman for the State Senate Democrats declined to comment.The accusations first surfaced in June when a group of former aides published an anonymous letter on Medium accusing Mr. Mannion of a litany of abuses and mistreatment during his brief tenure in the State Senate. The authors wrote that they had been subjected to “out of control yelling” and, in one case, retaliation after reporting that they witnessed a co-worker sexually harass a constituent.“We have come together now to write this letter because there is still time to avoid elevating yet another abuser to high office,” they wrote.Mr. Mannion has denied any wrongdoing. His allies privately dismissed the letter, which was published before a Democratic primary, as a politically motivated smear. Mr. Mannion won the primary anyway. More

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      Democrats Look to End the Electability Question

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      The party is battling a squishy, often self-reinforcing concept about the perceived ability to win.This year, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince George’s County, Md., and a Democrat, sought support for her U.S. Senate bid from an elected official she had known for years.“She said to me, ‘I’m so sorry. I want to be really blunt with you, Angela,’” Alsobrooks, who is Black, said, recalling that the official, a fellow Democrat whom she did not name, said she thought Alsobrooks could not win. “We are not ready to elect a Black woman in the state of Maryland,” Alsobrooks recounted the official as saying.It turned out that Maryland Democrats were ready to do just that.Alsobrooks beat a white man in her Senate primary by more than 10 percentage points. Public polling has shown her leading another, former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, whom she will face in November.But the exchange, which Alsobrooks described in an interview last week during the Democratic National Convention, underscores the way a party that is trying to elect the first Black female president is still battling anxieties about the idea of electability — and preparing to confront them.Electability — a squishy and often self-reinforcing concept about who is perceived as being able to win elections — was a through line of the Democratic primary in 2020, when voters stung by the 2016 election wrung their hands over whether preferred presidential candidates who were female, nonwhite or both could garner enough support in key battleground states. The party ultimately coalesced around Joe Biden.Democrats did not have a chance to air those concerns in a drawn-out primary in 2024, and many suggested last week that identity-based questions about electability should remain firmly in the past. They view the issue of electability as providing cover for racist and sexist notions about white voters being apprehensive about backing Black candidates and male voters being reluctant to vote for female candidates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Are Right: One Party is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’

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      In attacking Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans have been making a legitimate point: One of our major political parties has worked to undermine America’s families.The problem? While neither party has done enough to support families and children, the one that is failing most egregiously is — not surprisingly — the one led by the thrice-married tycoon who tangled with a porn star, boasted about grabbing women by the genitals and was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault.You’d think that would make it awkward for the Republican Party to preach family values. But with the same chutzpah with which Donald Trump reportedly marched into a dressing room where teenage girls were half-naked, the G.O.P. claims that it’s the Democrats who betray family values.“The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” JD Vance said in 2021. Pressed on those remarks last month, he went further in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying that Democrats “have become anti-family and anti-kid.”This is gibberish. Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Las Vegas, Trump Calls Harris a ‘Copycat’ Over ‘No Tax on Tips’ Plan

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      Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday fumed over the fact that when it comes to exempting tips from being taxed, he and his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, are on the same page.Mr. Trump, before a gathering of supporters at a Las Vegas restaurant, complained that Ms. Harris had stolen his idea and sought to cast her as an opportunist who was pandering to service industry workers by cribbing from one of his signature proposals.“She’s a copycat,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s a flip-flopper, you know. She’s the greatest flip-flopper in history. She went from communism to capitalism in about two weeks.”A Harris campaign spokesman declined to comment. This month, while in Las Vegas herself, Ms. Harris said she would seek to end federal income taxes on tips if she were elected. Mr. Trump first floated the idea in June, and it quickly garnered bipartisan support.He has publicly stewed over her embrace of the plan, especially in Nevada, a battleground state that Mr. Trump lost in 2016 and 2020.Before President Biden withdrew from the race in late July, Mr. Trump had appeared to be on a trajectory to end his electoral drought in the desert — where one of his hotels towers over the Strip. Mr. Biden, whose campaign called the “no tax on tips” overture a “wild campaign promise,” had been trailing Mr. Trump by an average of seven percentage points in Nevada.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More