Well, it’s 2024 again.
Democrats have tried to move on from the election and the months of agonizing soul-searching that at times has felt more like self-immolation. The party has struggled to articulate a positive vision for the future, and its poll numbers remain abysmal. But there have been at least a few bright spots, including a series of special elections, most recently for a House seat in Virginia that a Democrat won by a landslide this week.
Instead of celebrating that victory, however, Democrats are once again talking about how old Joe Biden is.
The occasion for the latest round of recriminations is the first excerpt, published by The Atlantic yesterday, from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s forthcoming book, 107 Days. In it, Harris recounts the most breakneck presidential campaign in modern history, one that began after Biden abandoned his reelection effort following his disastrous debate performance in June, and that ended in defeat to Donald Trump last November. In the excerpt, Harris goes there, taking on the issue that has haunted Democrats for more than a year: Why, oh why, did Biden run again?
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in the excerpt. “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.”
Democrats will tell you that no one wrings their hands more than they do. The excerpt predictably lit up old campaign group chats, became the centerpiece of conversation on cable news, and hurtled around social media. There was plenty of agita and loads of “I can’t believe we’re talking about this again.” But of course they couldn’t stop. Privately, some Democrats rolled their eyes at Harris, not necessarily begrudging her a chance to tell her story—and sell some books—but worrying that it would reopen an old wound. Others, though, felt that her telling her version of events was necessary to help with the healing process.
“I know people are not anxious to relitigate 2024 again, but it hasn’t even been a year,” Jennifer Palmieri, a senior staffer for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who advised Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff last year, told me. “This is part of the process of coming to terms with the last election, and she has a right to tell her story.”
For most in the party, their anger remains directed at Biden, not Harris. Democrats whispered for years their concerns that he was too old to run again. But after the party’s surprisingly successful 2022 midterms, Biden decided to run again even though he would have been 86 years old at the end of a second term. With few exceptions, those in his party remained silent, while those close to the president projected confidence, believing that because Biden had beaten Trump before, he could do it again. They privately pointed to their own polling suggesting that Biden was the only Democrat who could do so.
The Biden team’s skepticism of Harris was an open secret, particularly in the early days of her tenure as vice president. Those months were marked by staff turnover in her office and a challenging portfolio, including an assignment to address the “root causes” of migration to the United States. Harris takes that head-on in the book, writing that she “often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me.” She also believed that some of Biden’s advisers tried to blunt her success. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” she writes (though, to be fair, many presidents’ staffers have watched vice presidents warily). Even her skeptics in the West Wing applauded her ability to become the administration’s voice on abortion rights (something Biden was not comfortable doing) after the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Although Biden and Harris were never close confidants, the president liked her personally and asked for her to be in more high-level meetings.
But pushed by First Lady Jill Biden, his son Hunter, and his inner circle of aides, Biden gave no thought to stepping aside, even as he visibly aged in office and polling showed that Americans had doubts about his running again. Biden had good days and bad, people who saw him regularly said. Yes, he tired easily and had grown more forgetful. But he could still rise to the moment, including in his State of the Union address in spring of last year. He’ll be fine, his team said.
Then came the debate in Atlanta, followed by an agonizing three-plus weeks that threatened to tear the Democratic Party apart. Confronted with sinking poll numbers and disappearing fundraising, Biden finally bowed out. Harris, most in the party say, did the best she could with the short runway she was given. Though not previously viewed as the most adept politician, she surprised many in the party with a strong debate and convention and developed a knack for big-arena speeches. But she ducked too many interviews and couldn’t overcome voters’ worries about inflation and their feeling that the Biden White House didn’t understand what Americans were going through.
Within the party itself, the anger toward Biden, his family, and his team has only grown this year. Some of the same people who adored Biden for defeating Trump in 2020 now blame him for enabling Trump’s return four years later. Biden’s inner circle frequently argues, not incorrectly, that the president steered a robust legislative agenda, and that he will be credited for leading the nation out of the pandemic and rallying the West to help Ukraine. Some former aides even believe that, had Biden stayed in the race, he could have pulled out a victory. Most Democrats disagree.
Many would simply prefer not to be talking about 2024 again. “I think it’s time to turn the page. Pivot to the midterms and then 2028,” the longtime Democratic strategist Adrienne Elrod, who worked on the Harris campaign, told me. “The past is past. These books are important and help us move on as a party. She can absolutely write one. But we have got to move on.”
Members of the Biden administration, even Harris’s doubters, have frequently praised her loyalty. They expressed gratitude when she spoke in support of the president in a series of interviews in the hours after the Atlanta debate. She never tried to push him out of the race and never stopped defending him, at times to her detriment; her inability on The View last October to cite a policy matter on which she disagreed with Biden was perceived in the Trump campaign as a political gift and a sign that they were going to win. Even now, her observations about Biden are carefully couched, and she stresses in the book that Biden was capable of being president even if he no longer had the energy to run a presidential campaign. That observation points to the tricky place she is in; she took criticism this week from both the left and the right for not being tougher on Biden and for allegedly covering up his decline.
A spokesperson for Biden did not respond to a request for comment about the excerpt. When I asked Andrew Bates, a former White House spokesperson for Biden, for his thoughts, he pivoted to Democratic talking points about Trump’s “cost-raising agenda and chaos” and past friendship with the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
While Biden’s team believes history will be kind to him, the present is not. Harris, with an eye toward a political future, knows that. As she figures out her next move, she needs to create a little space between her and her former boss. She passed on a run for governor of California, though people close to her have told me that, after initially suggesting to them that she would not run for president again, she is now at least open to the possibility. Although she generated goodwill with many in her party during her historic run last year, she will have to confront Democratic voters’ desire to sever themselves from the Biden years.
“It is going to be a challenge but not impossible,” the Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil-rights activist and Harris ally, told me. “She’s going to have to find something to catch their attention—people are looking for something new. She needs to convince them that she is building tomorrow rather than simply an architect of the past.”
The post Kamala Harris Is Finally Creating Some Distance From Joe Biden appeared first on The Atlantic.
