Former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris will each try to tell their side of the 2024 campaign story in forthcoming books.
The question is whether they will have much interesting to say if they try to keep their stories straight.
Harris will get the first word when 107 Days comes out in September. The title suggests that the brevity of that campaign, necessitated by Biden’s decision to seek reelection in his 80s and then drop out less than a month after a disastrous debate performance, will be a major focus.
It would certainly be an enthralling read if Harris were to dish about how Biden set her up for failure in the 2024 campaign. If not expressed in a way that sounds like blame-shifting or passing the buck, Harris could also address a major failure of her campaign: her inability to separate herself from Biden.
Harris was willing to attack Biden for opposing forced busing to promote racial integration in the public schools during a 2019 debate, though she stopped short of calling him a racist. But that was when they were both seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, before he won the nod and they became joined at the hip as that year’s ticket.
Given repeated opportunities to distance herself from Biden after securing the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris frequently declined, even though some voters were clearly looking for something different. It is one of the reasons she lost to President Donald Trump, who is now serving his second, nonconsecutive term.
Biden had passed the baton to Harris when he dropped out, helping her head to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Despite his obvious displeasure with being pushed aside, he played nice during the campaign. Another account of the 2024 campaign, written by journalists, claimed Biden wanted “no daylight” between Harris and himself. And he remained in the White House to make trouble for the new Democratic ticket.
With that election in the rearview mirror, Harris could finally be unburdened by what has been unless she fears disloyalty or Biden dead-enders telling unflattering stories about her vice presidency and agility on the campaign trail. If Harris negatively writes about Biden in her book, Biden could add such anecdotes to his post-presidential memoir.
Besides self-defense, Biden probably has less reason to criticize Harris. He is aiming for his legacy rather than another campaign. As score-settling goes, he already has compelling, potential villains: former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the old friends who helped depose him as their party’s presidential nominee.
Yet it would be interesting to learn if Biden had misgivings, let alone bitterness, about his understudy usurping him. There is also the question of how much his doubts about Harris’s readiness to be the Democratic standard-bearer factored into his decision to run again and his reluctance to leave the race in the face of an intraparty revolt.
There has always been a contradiction in how Biden has explained his decision to stand down as the nominee. On the one hand, he strongly implied when he withdrew that he had perhaps lost the ability to unite the party behind him. That is, the Democrats who had lost confidence in him over the debate were going to be a problem when it came to beating Trump.
At the same time, Biden has always explicitly said he would have defeated Trump if he had stayed in the race. (He has said the same of Harris, but less convincingly, because he sounded less confident in his Harris prediction and kept offering it after events had falsified it.)
It isn’t obvious if there is a way to square the circle. Hearing what Biden thinks, or thought at the time, about Harris’s electability would be the type of tea he could spill if he wants to earn back that $10 million advance.
Biden and Harris each have an interest in making their books as captivating as possible after everyone else’s 2024 tomes were so chock-full of details that they both looked bad.
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Harris could be too cautious. Biden could have a ghost writer who sounds nothing like Hunter. Or they could offer the readers something more.
In one sense, Biden and Harris’s interests have diverged. When writing a tell-all, they are more on a collision course if that is what they choose to do.