The first excerpt from former Vice President Kamala Harris’ memoir of her 2024 presidential campaign—107 Days—is out.
And, in it, she admits what we all knew: Democrats should have never allowed Joe Biden to run for a second term. Writes Harris of the decision-making process—or lack thereof:
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high.
Whoa boy.
Look, Harris is right. As I wrote—repeatedly—even before Biden’s disastrous debate last June, Democrats were taking a massive risk by nominating an 81-year-old man who a majority of the public had told pollsters was too old to run for a second term.
That risk was more magnified because Donald Trump was the Republican nominee.
It made no sense then. It makes no sense now.
That Harris is finally acknowledging the mistake her party made has, I think, two motivations.
First, Harris clearly felt as though Biden (and, really, the Bidens) treated her as lesser than—never giving her the credit she deserved. Consider this section from the excerpt in which Harris recounts spending the day in Houston comforting the victims of Hurricane Beryl in July 2024, and then tuning in to watch a speech Biden was giving on TV that evening:
It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.
“I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.”
And that was it.
She’s bitter. And pissed. She felt slighted and ignored by Biden. Which, from my sense of things, is pretty accurate. He never held her in particularly high regard, and one of the reasons he kept running in 2024 was because he didn’t think she could win.
Harris’ other motivation here is 2028. Having ruled out a run for California governor in 2026, she is clearly weighing the possibility of running for the Democratic presidential nomination next time around.
And she knows that she cannot be linked to Biden if she wants to have any chance at winning. She’s writing this to put some real distance between her and the former president.
I am not sure it will work. But I get what she’s doing.
To be clear, Harris’ willingness to throw Biden under the bus goes only so far. In the excerpt, she rejects the idea that Biden was increasingly infirm in the White House. She says that his age only really showed when he was tired—as he was during that June debate. (That explanation does NOT explain how bad Biden was in the debate for me, but I digress.)
But even though this isn’t a complete savaging of Biden, I guarantee you the book will land with a thud in Bidenworld. A big thud.
Want more ball and strike calling—no matter what uniform the batter at the plate is wearing? Check out Chris Cillizza’s Substack and YouTube channel.
The post Opinion: Kamala Harris Is (Finally) Throwing Joe Biden Under the Bus appeared first on The Daily Beast.
