“In retrospect,” Kamala Harris writes of letting Joe and Jill Biden decide on their own whether the then-president should have tried to run for re-election, “I think it was recklessness.”
That is the assessment that the former vice president makes in her forthcoming memoir of her abbreviated 2024 run, in a significant break from the dutiful stance she took toward her old boss throughout their time in office and since.
“‘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 first excerpt of “107 Days” published Wednesday morning by The Atlantic. “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.”
Part of the problem, Harris writes, was a Biden team so committed to not helping her that she says it ultimately came at his own, and the country’s expense.
“When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging,” Harris writes. “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,” Harris ends the chapter by writing, “didn’t get it.”
Joe Biden, left, and Kamala Harris during an event in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. Biden returned to the campaign trail a month after ending his reelection bid and endorsing Harris. – Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Harris notes in the chapter that she is a loyal person. That loyalty to the point of timidity about taking on Biden and his record became an anchor to her presidential campaign, most devastatingly during an appearance on “The View” last October when she was asked, “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
Despite preparation and prodding from top aides to make a break, she said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
That comment haunted her through the final weeks of coverage and advertising by Donald Trump’s campaign as she went on to her narrow loss.
She also tackles what was one of the trickiest topics facing her as she set out to put this memoir together: how Biden’s age took a public and private toll.
Harris disputes that there was any serious problem.
“On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired,” Harris writes. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
Harris announced over the summer she would not, as many expected, run for governor of California next year but has left the door open to another presidential run, though multiple people close to her have told CNN they expect her time running for office may be done.
In the meantime, her book, set to be released in two weeks, is another development in an interconnected but sometimes troubled relationship between her and Biden, which stretches back to her friendship with Biden’s beloved late son Beau through the moment in the first primary debate in June 2019 when she attacked Biden as wrong for his 1970s position on school busing and then through the ups and downs of serving together in the White House.
Harris writes about being undercut by Biden and his staff, accusing them of neither defending nor highlighting her and even “adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me.”
Her assignment from Biden to be the point person for migration issues stemming from Central America, Harris writes, was a perfect example.
“When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” adding several paragraphs later, “Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”
The chapter in the excerpt is written about July 24, 2024, a few days after Harris took over as the nominee following nearly a month of Democratic trauma and when Biden finally delivered an Oval Office address to discuss his exit.
Even that came with a sour note, Harris writes.
“It was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address,” she recalls, “before he mentioned me.”
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