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Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel disagreed with former Vice President Kamala Harris’ reasoning for not selecting former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate on CNN Tuesday.
In Harris’ new book “107 Days,” the ex-vice president revealed that Buttigieg was her first choice for running mate ahead of the 2024 presidential election. However, she wrote that the potential pairing was too risky, saying he “would have been an ideal partner – if I were a straight white man.”
“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, ‘Screw it, let’s just do it.’ But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk,” she added. “And I think Pete also knew that – to our mutual sadness.”
Emanuel acknowledged her “political” concerns but took issue with her failing to “trust in [her] gut” as his old bosses, former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, did.
“They all have pluses,” Emanuel said on CNN’s “The Arena.” “They all have minuses. If it was 100% here and everybody else was 80, that’s a computer. This is a judgment call. This is a call about who are you comfortable when you are having, and there are going to be plenty of those cabinet meetings…Who‘s the one person who you can totally trust as copilot? And even though you‘re angry and frustrated, you respect their opinion enough and their judgment enough to keep talking at you and to you.”
He continued, “To me, she was right about the political pieces, but she was wrong about the biggest question that comes to picking a vice president. And that is what I call the cabinet room test. You‘re going to walk from the cabinet 50 feet, 25 feet into the Oval Office, and you want to be alone, but you trust the judgment of your copilot enough that you let them talk to you and talk with you and keep a conversation going that you really want it to end and throw things at the wall about.”
On MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday night, Harris insisted that she did not reject Buttigieg because he was gay but reiterated that it would have been a “risk” to pick him.
“My point is, as I write in the book, is that, I was clear that in 107 days, in one of the most hotly contested elections for President of the United States against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor, to be a Black woman running for President of the United States, and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man. With the stakes being so high, it made me very sad. But I also realized it would be a real risk,” Harris said.
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