AS THE WORLD MOVES ON, BIDENWORLD BATTLES ITSELF. It’s an understatement to say that much has happened since Kamala Harris‘s short and unsuccessful run for president. But the former vice president appears not to have moved on.
Harris has written a book, 107 Days, about her failed 2024 campaign. A brief excerpt has been published in the anti-Trump journal the Atlantic. Judging by the excerpt, the book appears to be an extended catalog of Harris’s grievances and resentments.
Her story, in brief, is this: As vice president, I accomplished great things, but the Biden circle never highlighted my achievements, nor did it defend me when the right wing attacked. As could have been predicted, Harris’s claim has now set off an angry reaction from Bidenworld. Together, it is turning into just one more bad scene for Democrats in the aftermath of the 2024 election.
Harris writes that the Biden team was suspicious of her. Why shouldn’t it be? After all, in her short and failed 2019 presidential campaign, Harris attacked then-candidate Joe Biden and strongly implied he was a racist. Political loyalists don’t forget things like that. So Harris often found that the president’s circle was not including her in the issues of the day. “They had a huge comms team,” she writes of the White House. “But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”
And what about her performance? Harris writes that she was assigned to work on the massive influx of illegal crossers at the U.S.-Mexico border, a phenomenon she refers to as “irregular immigration.” She was mad when Republicans called her the “border czar,” but “no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back.”
Harris wanted Bidenworld to explain that what she had actually been asked to do was “attack the root causes of the misery that was driving people from their homes and villages in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.” She claims her work was a big success. She “won commitments of $5.2 billion in new investments by private companies in the region.” She “held numerous bilateral meetings with leaders throughout the region.” She “met with activist groups fighting against corruption and for human rights.”
“In the locations where I was able to bring new enterprises and greater stability, data showed it was working,” Harris writes. “Our investments had created 70,000 new jobs, reached more than a million people with training programs, and connected 2.5 million previously unbanked people with banking services and access to credit.”
Harris was eager for the White House to highlight her accomplishments. “I wanted to get that good news out,” she writes. But the White House wouldn’t do it. “Instead,” Harris writes, “I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. … It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time.”
Here’s another way to look at it. Whether she realized it or not, Harris’s real assignment was to reduce the number of illegal crossers at the border. And her plan did not work. Under Biden — and the border mess was Biden’s fault, not Harris’s, although it is unlikely she would have handled it any better — the number of migrants crossing illegally into the United States rose and rose and rose. Harris wanted credit for solving a problem she did not solve. Americans could see the border incursion continuing unabated, and they would have scoffed at Harris’s claims of progress.
Finally, Harris dances around the most damaging issue for the Democratic ticket in 2024, which was Biden’s infirmity. It was clear to millions of people that the president did not have the mental and physical ability to serve four more years. But Harris says the 81-year-old Biden just got tired occasionally.
“Here is the truth as I lived it,” Harris writes. “Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. … But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
In the most dramatic part of the excerpt, Harris describes her party panicking about Biden’s condition. She questions how she handled it: “Should I have told Joe to consider not running?” Maybe, she writes, while saying that at the time she thought Biden might be right to run again. And in any event, she thought she couldn’t intervene because it would seem too self-serving, given that she would benefit most from a Biden withdrawal.
So Harris and everyone else in the White House said the decision had to be left up to the president and the first lady. “We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” she writes. “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.”
In the end, Harris dismisses the idea, the fact, that Biden was not “able to discharge the duties of president” for four more years while at the same time saying “we all” were reckless in not pushing Biden to step down.
You will not be surprised to learn that former Biden White House insiders are not taking Harris’s criticisms well. “Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” one told Axios. “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.” And more, from Axios: “[Biden is] not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign. Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”
And on and on. These two sides are not going to reconcile. But for everybody else, it all seems like a long time ago. The world has moved on from the Kamala-and-Joe drama, and as Harris herself used to say, we are not going back.