Two prominent female White House press secretaries, including the nation’s first, clawed to shreds the new tell-all from former Biden administration spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, who said she left the Democratic Party because it wasn’t doing enough to fight President Donald Trump.
At a Harvard University forum, former President Bill Clinton’s spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers, and Jean-Pierre’s former boss and former President Joe Biden’s first press secretary, Jen Psaki, both ripped the former flack and her book.
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Psaki called Jean-Pierre’s whining “outdated,” and Myers, the first woman to be White House press secretary, said she should have waited before venting.
In her highly criticized book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, Jean-Pierre complained that Biden was mistreated by being pushed out of his reelection bid, and she announced her departure from the Democratic Party because it had bowed out of fighting Trump.
Neither of her Democratic predecessors was buying that during their recent forum, emceed by New York Times White House Correspondent Peter Baker.
Psaki, who now hosts an MSNBC show, said that the book and Jean-Pierre’s complaints about the Democratic Party are outdated.
She reasoned that the recent national protests against Trump and the Democratic Party’s fight against the Republican congressional plan to reopen the government proved that liberals have put on their boxing gloves.
“The book is outdated,” she told Baker. “I don’t think you can look out at the country and see that 7 million people just showed up to protest across the country, peaceful protests, or you see people who are activists in the streets and their communities, with the military showing up and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] showing up, and think that the country is asleep or the Democratic Party is asleep. I just don’t believe that. I do think there is more work that needs to be done, and I mean that by elected officials and a range of people, but I think that it’s sort of a misread of what the reaction has been,” said Psaki.
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Myers said her advice would have been to take a deep breath before writing.
“You come out of the White House. It’s a white-hot, red-hot, whatever-hot environment, and you have a lot of feelings. And I just think to write a book that quickly is probably not well advised for anybody. You need to take a minute. You need to process your experience. You need to kind of settle back into how the rest of the world views what’s happening. And you know, I think waiting for people that choose to write books about their experience is very well advised,” said Myers, an adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).