Former Vice President
Kamala Harris’s new memoir sheds light on her abbreviated presidential
campaign, skewering Joe Biden’s decision to remain in the race as
“recklessness” in the process.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all
been hypnotized,” Harris wrote, in an excerpt from 107 Days, her first-person account of her sprint to Election Day, published in The
Atlantic on Wednesday. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In
retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This
wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an
individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Harris comes off as more
bitter and negative toward the Biden administration than ever before here, and
with good reason. Biden maintained his candidacy for 2024 despite accruing
years’ worth of mental slip-ups and gaffes, culminating in an absolutely disastrous
debate performance that made
it clear he was in no state–mental or physical—to run for a second presidential
term.
Even after that, it took
nearly a month for him to officially step down. Harris wrote, rather
transparently, that she stopped short of advising the president to step
down because she felt it would make her look bad, and too
self-serving.
The former vice
president also described feeling forced to constantly prove her loyalty to the
Biden administration, particularly after she essentially called him a segregationist onstage at the Democratic primary debate in
2019. She also felt pigeonholed by the busywork and events she was tasked with, and abandoned in the face of her enemies when she took center stage as the
candidate.
“In Selma, Alabama … I gave a strong speech on the humanitarian
crisis in Gaza.… I reiterated my strong support for Israel’s security and
called on Hamas to release the hostages and accept the cease-fire agreement
then on the table,” Harris wrote. “It was a speech that had been vetted and
approved by the White House and the National Security Council. It went viral,
and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering
it too well.”
She continued, writing, “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s
shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”
A constant theme in these pages is how Harris’s unwavering
loyalty to Biden was constantly unrecognized and unrewarded, making her
decision to stay so loyal (up until now, really) all the more
questionable.
“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone
of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White
House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé,” Harris wrote. “Two terms
elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United
States, senator representing one in eight Americans … getting anything positive
said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost
impossible.”
On one hand, Harris has a right to feel slighted, and set up for
failure. It sounds like senior members of the Biden administration had issues
acknowledging her strengths and working with her, at the very minimum.
On the other hand, it feels quite futile to hear Harris,
who had multiple opportunities to differentiate herself from her predecessor,
parrot the same talking points about Biden’s health that progressives were criticized for, well after the fact. Even if hindsight is
20/20, it might not do Harris any good in 2028.
Her new memoir, 107 Days, comes out September 23.
The post In Shocking Move, Kamala Harris Calls Out Biden’s “Recklessness” appeared first on New Republic.
