Beaten presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has unloaded on old boss Joe Biden in her forthcoming memoir, which appears likely to torch her own political future.
A segment of the book 107 Days, published Wednesday by The Atlantic, recounts a White House inner circle that treated Harris as a liability, not a partner.
In what reads like a self-pitying diatribe and a thin-skinned settling of scores that risks poisoning any potential comeback, Harris, 60, accuses the president’s team of sidelining her.
She also labelled his 2024 presidential bid—eventually derailed by Biden’s physical and mental fragility—“reckless.”
Harris writes that West Wing insiders repeated “like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” the incredible phrase, “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision,” about whether Biden would run.
“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”
The 49th vice president also says she held back from urging Biden—who was clearly in no fit state to serve as president—to step aside, to avoid appearing “self-serving.”
Harris also goes after Biden’s media team for apparently allowing right-wing attacks to define her, saying they sometimes “added fuel” to negative narratives.
“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 resume,” she writes, pointing to her “two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans.”
“They had a huge comms team. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”
Worse than that, she claims, Biden’s team actively worked against her.
“I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.”
Harris adds that her chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, even had to insist she not be treated like “a potted plant” at campaign events: “She’s not going to [just] stand there. Give her two minutes of remarks. Have her introduce the president.”
Their thinking was “zero-sum,” claims Harris, “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital.
“It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.”
While Harris portrays Biden as “a smart guy” who could do the job, she says he “got tired,” with stumbles exacerbated by brutal travel.
107 Days comes out Sept. 23 and chronicles Harris’s sprint campaign after Biden quit the race on July 21, 2024.
The Daily Beast, which has approached Biden and Harris for comment, has not reviewed the whole book, which is published by Simon & Schuster.
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