Vice President Kamala Harris raised some eyebrows when she said in an interview with CBS News that democracy is a threat to national security.
It appeared to be a gaffe by the vice president, who it is believed meant to say that democracy was being threatened in her interview on Sunday, The Daily Mail reported.
“What do you see is the biggest national security challenge confronting the U.S.? What is the thing that worries you and keeps you up at night?” Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan said to the vice president.
“Frankly, one of them is our democracy. And that I can talk about because that’s not classified,” she said.
“There is I think no question in the minds of people who are foreign policy experts that the year 2021 is not the year 2000. You know, I think there’s so much about foreign and domestic policy that, for example, was guided and prioritized based on Sept 11, 2001.
“And we are embarking on a- a new era where the threats to our nation take many forms, including the threat of autocracies taking over and having outsized influence around the world,” she said.
The vice president then corrected herself and said that we need to “fight for the integrity of our democracy.”
And she said she agreed with President Biden’s decision to bring troops home from Afghanistan.
“I fully supported the president’s decision to after what was taking on the fact of being an endless war, of pulling American troops out, and I think it’s really important to remember that the previous administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban, did not invite the Afghan government to be at the table, and negotiated a deal that- that required and promised as part of an agreement that we would pull out by the end of May,” she said.
“So, we were saddled with that responsibility based on an agreement between the United States and the Taliban,” the vice president said.
“We made the decision that if we were to break the agreement, it would have been a whole other situation, and right now I strongly believe that had we broken that agreement, we would be talking about the war in Afghanistan,” she said.
“And American troops in Afghanistan, and we’re not talking about that. I don’t regret that,” she said.
This week a New York Times story said that the vice president believes that her race and gender are responsible for her poll numbers.
She has told confidants that if she were white and male that the media coverage of her would be more kind, The New York Times reported.
An early front-runner whose presidential ambitions fizzled amid a dysfunctional 2020 campaign, Ms. Harris was pulled onto the Biden ticket for her policy priorities that largely mirrored his, and her ability as a Black woman to bolster support with coalitions of voters he needed to win the presidency. But according to interviews with more than two dozen White House officials, political allies, elected officials and former aides, Ms. Harris is still struggling to define herself in the Biden White House or meaningfully correct what she and her aides feel is an unfair perception that she is adrift in the job.
Faced with declining approval ratings, a series of staff departures and a drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and the conservative news media, she has turned to powerful confidantes, including Hillary Clinton, to help plot a path forward.
Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, whom she has described as all white and male. (Charles Curtis, who served as vice president under Hoover, spoke proudly of his Native American ancestry.) She also has confided in them about the difficulties she is facing with the intractable issues in her portfolio, such as voting rights and the root causes of migration. The White House has pushed back against scathing criticism on both fronts, for what activists say is a lack of attention.
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