Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren Running for president is hard. But running for president while still serving as vice president is its own unique kind of challenge. And very few people in Democratic politics have first-hand experience with it. KAMALA HARRIS is the first sitting vice president from either party to seek the White House since AL GORE in 2000. So West Wing Playbook called up BILL DALEY — the former chief of staff to President BARACK OBAMA and former Commerce secretary — to talk about what it was like serving as chair to Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity. What was one of the most challenging parts about Gore running while still serving as vice president? There were no major issue differences for us with President [Bill] Clinton. I think back and the only vice president I can think of that had that was Hubert Humphrey in 1968 — where you had the Vietnam War and he had to figure out how to separate from President Lyndon Johnson on that. The only big thing hanging from the Clinton period when Gore was VP, obviously, was Monica Lewinsky — the personal sort of challenge of dealing with that. He had to project who he would be. And part of that was his vice president selection. Because Sen. Joe Lieberman had criticized Clinton over the scandal, there was a sense that Gore was moving away from President Clinton with that appointment. With Lewinsky, how did you navigate that? You don’t want to trash the sitting president. But you also need to acknowledge his mistakes. That seems awkward. There was this whole debate — and it lingered after — about if Gore ran away from Clinton, should he have embraced Clinton. There were negatives carrying over that Gore had to separate from in order to try to get his coalition to win. I don’t see Harris having any of that. She may have to tweak some issues — whether it’s immigration, other issues that are hot right now like economics. And she will have to decide whether she is just going to double down on every position of the Biden-Harris administration and run with that. Part of this will be through their research, part of it will be her gut and what she plans to stand for. POLITICO has reported that there is some daylight between Harris and President Joe Biden when it comes to Israel. But, again, how can she disagree with him on the campaign trail? That’s a tough one. He’s still the president. There’s six months left. I don’t know if she gets more downside by trying to show a separation. She can show that maybe she’ll handle things differently — not by specifically saying that, but by how she approaches things and how she looks at foreign affairs. I assume at some point, she will give a big foreign policy address of the Harris doctrine. And she can lay out a possible difference, if she does believe there is one, other than just saying, "We ought to have a peace agreement." How does the relationship between the vice president and the president shift? It can’t be Harris-Biden. And that’s hard. It’s hard for all presidents, except maybe Ronald Reagan in 1988 with George H. W. Bush. Reagan really did not get involved and gave Bush some running room to do his thing. If President Biden is a negative for some of the voters that Harris needs, then how do you manage that? If he wants to be out there all the time campaigning, then that could be a risk — even though right now he’s so beloved by Democrats. That sounds like a hard conversation that they might need to have. I had to go to the White House, two or three of us, to tell President Clinton that the polling showed we had to use him very judiciously to campaign for Gore. President Clinton and President Biden will always be popular with the base of the party. But it’s really identifying the voters you need to win beyond your base. That’s part of the problem with the president’s persona hanging over a VP’s run. And that has to be managed. I have to imagine that Biden is doing a lot of emotional processing at this moment. I assume the president is going to want to prove — whether he does this through governing or through campaigning — that he’s still very much got it. If President Biden decides that he wants to have an active fall on the way out the door, that could make it awkward when the vice president’s campaign is trying to keep the focus on her and the future. What advice would you give Harris on her VP pick? First, do no harm. Make sure you really vet these people. That’s hard. They’re on a tight timeline. It's very hard. But I don’t care how well people think they know somebody, especially in today’s social media world. You discover some stuff. You come up with a questionnaire to give to people — tax returns, a scrub of their record on policy positions. But then they have to get comfortable with the person. The one-on-one is vital. But “do no harm” is still the first rule. MESSAGE US — Are you AL GORE? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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