Once more, US vice president Kamala Harris is making headlines for something she said in public. Only now, it’s not because of her circuitous rambling about the passage of time, or her passion for the craters of the moon, or for face-planting in a nationally televised interview, or for explaining how context is not like a coconut tree. This time, it’s for seeming to come out ahead of the administration in which she serves on Israel’s war on Gaza, sharply criticizing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign and calling for an “immediate cease-fire.”

“What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating. We have seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed, women giving birth to malnourished babies with little or no medical care, and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration,” a stone-faced Harris, voice trembling with barely contained anger, said on Monday at the Edmund Pettys bridge in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights marchers were brutalized nearly sixty years ago. “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act.”

Harris very nearly made the powerful moment she was grasping for into yet another comical sound bite, in declaring that “there must be an immediate cease-fire” — pause for applause — “for at least the next six weeks.” Besides a perfect comic beat, this and the rest of Harris’s speech were indistinguishable from the rest of the Joe Biden administration and its resistance to calls for a permanent cease-fire. Sure enough, when Netanyahu’s nominally liberal rival Benny Gantz visited Washington the day before the speech, Harris reportedly told him that the White House wished to keep backing Israel’s war but needed Israel to play ball on aid deliveries to be able to do it, adding, “help us help you.”

What’s interesting about Harris’s speech is that it’s a further sign of the rapidly shifting domestic politics of this particular issue, and the fissures widening — gradually, quietly, but unmistakably — within the administration over it.

The speech may not have been a departure in policy, but it was a clear departure in tone meant to set Harris apart from the president on this issue in the public mind: forceful, empathetic, and foregrounding the Palestinian people’s right to “dignity, freedom, and self-determination.” Compare the minimal attempt Harris made to at least look like she was impassioned and outraged about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to the bored, perfunctory way Biden, seated and reading almost the entire time from a card, recently tossed off lines meant to do the same — “The loss of life is heartbreaking”; “Innocent lives are on the line and children’s lives are on the line”; “And, uh, I won’t stand by and we won’t let up” — as if reading aloud instructions for a washing machine.

This impression was only solidified by a leak given to NBC News shortly after the speech, charging that the text had initially been far more scathing toward Israel, but was then watered down by the National Security Council. That report featured “a Democrat who helped elect Biden in 2020” telling the outlet that the vice president’s “hands are tied,” and that “This is Biden’s war. This is Biden’s failure.” It comes on top of well-publicized but behind-the-scenes efforts Harris has made in recent months to urge Biden and other US officials to show more concern and empathy for the carnage being visited on Palestinians.

No one should assume all of this isn’t being done with a healthy dollop of cynicism. But that’s exactly the point: the fact that these are acts of political calculation — and from a vice president who has, until now, conspicuously worked to toe the president’s line, even as he’s dumped a series of thankless jobs on her — is a measure of how drastically public sentiment has moved on Israel’s war and US support for it, and a further signal of how out of touch and isolated Biden is on this issue within the Democratic Party, and even within his own administration.

Biden’s lack of enthusiasm for a cease-fire, and even his funneling of arms to Israel as it continues its campaign of mass murder, is now out of step with the majority of the US public, and even a majority of Republicans. Centrist Democratic hawks, not just progressives, have now called on him to do more to use US leverage to force an end to the war. Other Democratic officials and Biden’s own campaign staffers have repeatedly raised the alarm that his unconditional support for the war is turning into political suicide.

Meanwhile, several reports have now indicated that Biden is just about the singular driving force behind this disastrous policy, with officials venting their frustration that they’re forced to follow his lead. The war has seen unprecedented levels of dissent erupt from within the administration,

The pressure being brought to bear by activists, including the uncommitted vote in Michigan last week that left Biden officials “freaking out,” are clearly striking a nerve within the White House. The president himself seems more and more to be the only one immune to it.