Kamala Harris Lost Her Way After ‘The View’ Interview Left Her Campaign Stranded With Joe Biden

variety.com:

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The tricky things about defining moments is that they’re only clear in retrospect. Partisans of Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s election might, before the outcome became suddenly and crushingly clear on Tuesday night, have thought the campaign was defined by her romp over former President Trump in their one debate together, or by her team’s relatively agile response to the late-in-the-race “floating island of garbage” gaffe, or by the vague “joyful” energy of the album “Brat.” But perhaps the key moment — both in and of itself and for what it revealed about where the candidate was willing to go, and where she was not — happened in an October appearance on “The View.” Co-host Sunny Hostin asked Harris whether she would have done anything differently from President Joe Biden over the past four years; Harris responded “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” before saying that she had been a part of most major decisions the administration had made.

It speaks, first, to Harris’ near-impossible position: Running both as an incumbent and a challenger, a member of an administration of which the public had grown weary who had to convey a sense both of continuity and of change simultaneously. (An accidental candidate and, though energetic and thoughtful, ultimately the wrong one for her moment, Harris would not have been in this position had her unpopular boss made the decision not to run for re-election much earlier.) And it gives, too, a sense of a certain congenital unwillingness to take a risk: To have broken with Biden in any meaningful way would have been to endure some short-term discomfort at her current job (she was, and is, still the Vice to his President) in order to make.