The Kamala Harris Book

Post Reply New Topic

Former aides to Joe Biden reacted with rage Wednesday to an excerpt from Kamala Harris' upcoming book in which she said the ex-president was "reckless" to run again and accused Biden's team of sabotaging her during her vice presidency.

Why it matters: The Biden and Harris camps publicly have claimed they were united through the four years of Biden's presidency, but now Harris is trying to distance herself from him — after not doing so during her short run for president.

The release of the excerpt from her book, "107 Days" — due out Sept. 23 — has exposed years of hurt feelings and frustrations.
"Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job," said one former Biden White House official. "She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration's key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was."
Biden is "not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign," the ex-official said. "Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides."

State of play: In Harris' book excerpt published Wednesday morning in The Atlantic, she criticized Biden and his team's decision to run for re-election at age 81.

" '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," Harris wrote.

"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."

Harris notes that in retrospect, she "perhaps" should have spoken up at the time but didn't because it would seem like a power grab. "I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out," she wrote.

She also said Biden's team repeatedly undermined her during her vice presidency and didn't see her success as his success.

Harris added: "When the stories [about her] were unfair or inaccurate, the president's inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more."

What they're saying: Former Biden White House officials argued that Harris is trying to scapegoat Biden to try to mask her own failures and shortcomings, according to interviews with a dozen former aides.

"I'm not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment about Biden running is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is. If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year," said one former Biden aide, a nod to a longtime Biden saying.

The same aide, referring to Harris' duties in trying to reduce unauthorized migration, argued: "On the border stuff in particular I'd also say, if she had spent a fraction of the time and energy doing the work that she did on complaining, about how she was perceived, she would have been perceived a whole lot better."

As for Harris potentially running for president in 2028, another ex-Biden aide quipped: "We're not going back!," a line Harris used on the 2024 campaign trail.

Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain was more conciliatory.
"I thought she did a good job as [vice president] and I feel badly that she found the experience negative," Klain said.
Other former Biden aides said he made a mistake picking Harris as vice president in the first place and fumed that Harris was now using Democratic Party resources to sell a book that could divide the party.

Between the lines: Harris was not only silent internally about Biden running again, but also publicly attacked people who raised concerns about the president — including special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden's handling of classified documents.

After Hur wrote a report that called Biden's memory "hazy," "fuzzy," "faulty," and "poor," Harris said the report "could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous."

Harris wrote in her book that she didn't believe Biden was incapacitated but allowed that "at 81, Joe got tired. That's when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles."

The other side: The anger at Harris is not universal among Biden aides. Some said they're glad she finally spoke out about how the Biden White House didn't always have her back.

"We all know that the Biden folks treated her and her team like sh*t. We never thought she would actually say anything," said one former Biden aide. "The staffers across a range of ages and positions that I'm talking to are proud of her."

A former senior Biden White House official said Harris was right that Biden shouldn't have run for reelection, and that not enough aides appreciated Harris.

The official, however, added: "There were others on the Biden team, though, who really tried to help her thrive as VP. But she and her team did not seize that support and make the most of it. It is all a tragedy."

Former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris sharply criticized senior advisers to former U.S. President Joe Biden for objecting to her tougher stance on Israel during the Gaza war, according to an excerpt from her upcoming book on her presidential campaign published in The Atlantic on Wednesday.

"Joe was already polling badly on the age issue, with roughly 75 percent of voters saying he was too old to be an effective president," she writes in her book "107 Days," scheduled to release later this month. "Then he started taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza."

"When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn't like the contrast that was emerging," she adds. "In Selma, Alabama, at the commemoration of Bloody Sunday, when civil-rights marchers were attacked and beaten once they'd crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I gave a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza."

The speech Harris writes about, delivered in March 2024, marked the most explicit condemnation of Israeli actions from Gaza up to that point. It preceded her meeting with then-Israeli Minister Benny Gantz, whom U.S. officials both wanted to position as a potential successor to Netanyahu and an Israeli official whom they could directly castigate over crossing the White House's supposed red lines.

Desperate people had been shot when they swarmed a food truck, and I spoke of families reduced to eating leaves or animal feed, women prematurely giving birth with little or no medical care, and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration," she continues. "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. I also called on Israel for greater access to aid."

"It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council," the former vice president writes. "It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well."

Their thinking was zero-sum: If she's shining, he's dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well," she adds. "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," she says.

When Harris became the Democratic nominee several months later, progressive Democrats were hopeful her ticket would propose a more forceful stance toward the Israeli government. While her campaign included rhetoric seemingly more empathetic toward Palestinians, she failed to differentiate her policies from Biden's in any meaningful way.

Harris' positions on Israel-Gaza not only led to a shift in Arab voters in key swing states toward Donald Trump, but a growing number of Jewish voters (the significance of which is still hotly contested within the Jewish community), motivated by the Democrats' perceived lack of support for Israel, to refrain from voting for the Democratic ticket in the 2024 election.

Beating a dead horse...(no pun intended)

The way that situation went down is a very underreported factor in Trump's victory. It looks like she is going to run again. If she does run again, it will be a factor again.

She says in the book that if she said something, it would look like a power grab. While she is right about that under the 25th amendment, she had the duty to report that he was unable to serve. Every Trump outrage reminds me it is not a dead horse.

It's the reason why I blame Democrats and the far-left for Trump's rise back to power almost as much as I do the Cult of MAGA.

If they could accept blame for their own mistakes I wouldn't be so disillusioned with "both sides".

It's the reason why I blame Democrats and the far-left for Trump's rise back to power almost as much as I do the Cult of MAGA.

^^^^
This

^^^ If you want to blame anyone for the rise of trump, there's 77 million Americans who voted for him twice with their eyes very wide open.

I am allowed to have my own opinion about the left that doesn't line up with their anti-white racist agenda.

I can't speak for others but I have a anti-white racism agenda.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said former Vice President Kamala Harris will “have to answer” for why she did not speak out publicly about former President Joe Biden’s ability to serve during his term.

Shapiro, widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender, made the remarks in a new political podcast hosted by sports commentator and personality Stephen A. Smith. Smith asked Shapiro about an excerpt from Harris’ soon-to-be-released book on her presidential campaign.

“Was it grace, or was it recklessness?” Harris wrote of the White House’s handling of Biden’s decision to run for re-election, per an excerpt of the book. “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.”

Speaking with Shapiro, Smith asked the governor how Americans should feel “when we hear something that we suspected but wasn’t acknowledged by politicians who were looking for our support, and then we find out later we were right, and they should have spoken up, and they should have shown more courage.”

Shapiro said he had not read Harris’ book, adding that “she’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly.”

“I can tell you that I wasn’t in the room, but when I was confronted with engaging with the former president, in looking at it simply from the perspective of, how is he doing in Pennsylvania? Could he win Pennsylvania? Because, I think, Stephen, you understand, if you can’t win Pennsylvania, it’s pretty darn hard to win the national election,” Shapiro continued. “And I was very vocal with him, privately, and extremely vocal with his staff about my concerns about his fitness to be able to run for another term. I was direct with them. I told them my concerns.

For example an indigenous conservative (yes they do exist) stated she is not comfortable with current levels of migration due to the stress its putting on the country. As an indigenous Australian she is entitled to be concerned as a steward of the land about issues of overpopulation and wildlife/nature.

I was waiting to see how long it would take you to blame the left faction of the democrat for trump. Did you know that's the same argument the far right use today, blame victims for the rise of certain regimes that specifically targeted them.

the tea party, MAGA and qanon all arose in response to seething anger and frustration in conservative circles having to "endure" two straight terms of Obama. It coincided with conspiracies and lies being spread on social media about democrat cabals and George Soros spreading wokeness and immigrants destroying the fabric of America and a threat to patriotism. I remember it well. It's going to take a generation or more to remove the MAGA mind virus.