Vice President Harris was never as flawed as her critics made her out to be. From the onset of her term, she maintained a rigorous and effective diplomatic travel schedule and bolstered President Biden’s fight for voting rights. Unlike Biden, she never got ahead of the president on policy. Unlike former vice president Dan Quayle, she never made a late-night-comedy-worthy gaffe. And she has avoided her predecessor’s cringeworthy fawning.

Some defenders pointed to her eagerness in taking on seemingly impossible tasks (e.g., stemming the tide of Central American migrants); others argued the first woman of color in the job attracted disproportionate criticism. Whatever the cause, she has received harsh and sometimes petty media coverage, which too often simply regurgitated Republican attacks.,,,,,

In particular, she has excelled in her role as Biden defender and prosecutor of the case against four-times indicted former president Donald Trump. She launched a succinct and compelling indictment of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s lapse in prosecutorial judgment. “As a former prosecutor,” she declared Hur’s comments about Biden’s age and memory “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”

Moreover, she explained that during the interview in the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Biden spent “countless hours” with his national security team. She recalled that Biden was “on top of it all, asking questions and requiring that America’s military and intelligence community and diplomatic community would figure out and know: How many people were dead? How many are Americans? How many hostages? Is the situation stable?” She stressed that he remained “in front of it all, coordinating and directing leaders who are in charge of America’s national security — not to mention our allies around the globe — for days and, up until now, months.”

She concluded that “the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and, clearly, politically motivated — gratuitous … We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.” Her delivery was crisp, her tone appropriately indignant and her eyewitness account of Biden’s actual performance the single most effective rebuttal to the age issue......

That said, her work as the tip of the campaign’s spear on critical issues such as abortion and her fiery prosecution of the case against Trump will be gauged by her reception internationally and at home with voters critical to the Biden-Harris victory. So far, she is hitting her marks.