Harris criticises Biden’s late exit from 2024 campaign

When Kamala Harris left the White House, she was trailed by three big questions. She’s now answered two of them. First off, the former vice president will not be running for California governor in 2026. After months of will-or-won’t-she speculation, the Democrat took a pass on a race that was Harris’ to lose because, plainly, her heart just wasn’t into a return to Sacramento. On Wednesday, with publication of the first excerpts from her 2024 campaign diary, Harris answered a second question: What kind of book — candid or pablum-filled — would she produce?

The answer flows directly to the third and largest remaining question: whether Harris will attempt a third try for the White House in 2028. If she does, and the portions published Wednesday by the Atlantic magazine give no clue one way or the other, she’ll have some work to do. That includes mollifying the person who made her vice president, thus vaulting Harris to top-tier status should she run again.

That would be one Joe Biden. Harris’ book — “107 Days” — recounts the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history. It’s no tell-all. Surely there’s a good deal of inside dope, juicy gossip and backstage intrigues that Harris is holding back for political, personal or practical reasons. Still, it’s a tell-plenty. The headline-grabbiest passage is Harris’ suggestion that Biden, felled by a thoroughly wretched debate performance that showed the ravages of his advanced age, should have stepped aside before being effectively forced off the Democratic ticket.

“ ‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision,’ “ Harris wrote. “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.

“This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition,” she went on. “It should have been more than a personal decision.” The relationship between Harris and Jill Biden, which was famously glacial, will surely turn Arctic-cold with Wednesday’s revelations. And Jill Biden’s thin-skinned husband, who still harbors the fanciful belief he would have beaten Donald Trump had he been the Democratic nominee, isn’t likely to be any more pleased.

There’s more. Harris suggests in many ways Biden was more hindrance than helpmate as she struggled to step out from the shadow that inevitably shrouds the vice president. When Biden finally spoke to the nation to explain his abdication and anointment of Harris as his chosen successor, Harris notes he waited nearly nine minutes into an 11-minute address to offer his cursory blessing. She also expresses a deep personal pique toward Team Biden and West Wing staffers who had little faith in Harris or her political abilities and had no hesitation stating so — in private, anyway. “When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it,” Harris wrote. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.

“Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me.”

Fact check: True. But Harris also skates around certain hard truths, suggesting the staff turnover that plagued her early in her vice presidency was just the normal Beltway churn. Harris has a reputation for being an imperious and difficult boss — it’s not misogynistic to say so — and she did suffer a notably high level of staff burnout and turnover that hindered her vice presidential operation. Harris embarrassed herself in some stumbling TV appearances — especially early in her vice presidency — and it’s not racist to point that out. She has no one to blame but herself. Perhaps most critically, Harris bequeathed the Trump campaign a sterling political gift late in the campaign when she appeared on the TV chatfest “The View” and, served up a softball of a question, whiffed it spectacularly.

“What, if anything,” Harris was asked, “would you have done ... differently than President Biden during the past four years?” It’s a question she could have easily anticipated. The separation of a president and the vice president looking to follow him into the Oval Office is a political rite of passage, though always a fraught and delicate one. It’s necessary to show voters not just a hint of independence but also a bit of spine. George H.W. Bush handled the maneuver with aplomb and succeeded Ronald Reagan. Hubert Humphrey and Al Gore did not, and both lost.

Given her chance, Harris squandered a choice opportunity to put some badly needed space between herself and the dismally regarded Biden.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” was her tinny response, and that gaffe is entirely on the former vice president.

It didn’t necessarily cost her the White House. There were plenty of reasons Harris lost. But at a time when voters were virtually shouting out loud for change in Washington, it stamped the vice president, quite unhelpfully, as more of the same. “I am a loyal person,” Harris writes, which is not only self-justifying but has the slightly off-putting whiff of someone declaring, by golly, I’m just too honest. Perhaps behind closed doors she screamed and raged, telling the octogenarian Biden he was old and senile and sure to cost Democrats the White House and deliver the nation to the evil clutches of Donald Trump — though that seems doubtful.

“Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity,” she wrote.

In fact, she said, Biden was “fully able to discharge the duties of president.”

“On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best.”

Fact check: Again, true. “But at 81,” Harris went on, “Joe got tired. ... 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.” Plenty of books have been written offering insider accounts of the White House and presenting far more dire accounts of Biden’s physical and mental acuity. Many more are sure to come. Harris’ contribution to the oeuvre remains to be seen. Her book is set for publication on Sept. 23 and there is a lot more to come beyond the excerpts just published. What has been revealed is Harris’ eagerness to settle old scores, to right the record as she sees it and to angrily and publicly call out some of her perceived enemies — including some still active in Democratic politics. How does that affect her prospects for 2028, and what does it say about whether Harris runs again for president? You can read into it what you will.