Vice-President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech after losing the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump at Howard University in Washington last November. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, The Washington Post
As Joe Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris was a model of discretion and loyalty.
After his disastrous - and, it turned out, politically fatal - debate against Donald Trump in June 2024, she was the first to leap to his defence, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper minutes after it was over: “I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last 3½ years of performance”.
That is why an excerpt from her forthcoming book that appeared today in the Atlantic is so noteworthy.
The headline is that she now regrets not having attempted to dissuade the then-United States President from running for a second term at a time when most of the country was deciding he was too old and frail to continue in office for another four years.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotised,” Harris wrote.
“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.”
But the excerpt also reveals, with uncharacteristic candour, Harris’s own resentment of how she was treated by Biden and his team over the four years that she served as his vice-president.
In her narrative, she was constantly being undercut by them, shoved into the background, and rarely defended when she was under attack.
“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed”, Harris wrote at one point.
At another: “When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging”.
And another: “I often learned that the President’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me”.
Biden’s team disputes that characterisation.
His former White House chief of staff Ron Klain told me in a text that he found the portrayal unfairly harsh.
“The President picked her to be VP even though she slammed him in the first debate, and there were not a lot of party leaders advocating for her selection,” Klain wrote, referring to 2019 when Harris was running against Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Also, he stood by her and made no moves or gave no thought to replacing her in 2024 though many donors and party insiders urged that.”
Klain also argued that Harris had a bigger role at White House events than Biden had been given when he was Barack Obama’s vice-president.
“I think she was an excellent VP and did a great job,” Klain said, adding: “I feel badly that [her] take on the experience was so negative”.
Still, the kind of tension and undercurrent of mistrust that Harris describes is practically a given when a president chooses as his No. 2 someone who is presumed to have political ambitions of their own.
That was the case in Ronald Reagan’s White House with Vice-President George Bush snr, a former rival positioning to be his successor; in Bill Clinton’s, with Al Gore in waiting; and in Obama’s, where Biden felt slighted when the President under whom he had served for eight years picked Hillary Clinton to take the baton in 2016.
“I was well aware of my delicate status,” Harris wrote. “Lore has it that every outgoing chief of staff always tells the incoming president’s chief of staff Rule No. 1: Watch the VP.”
Her personal history with Biden didn’t help, she added. “Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a ‘rebuttable presumption’. I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again.”
Harris was also in a unique and especially vulnerable position, as the nation’s first black and first female vice-president.
The excitement that surrounded her as a trailblazer was one of the reasons she was chosen by Biden, but once in office, she claims, the President’s team was insufficiently supportive as the inevitable attacks arrived.
“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual resume: two terms elected DA, top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the US, senator representing one in eight Americans,” she wrote.
Harris also complained that she was given unachievable assignments - chief among them, grappling with the root causes of migration from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
“When Republicans mischaracterised 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,” she wrote.
So, Harris ended up shouldering the blame for a border that was out of control, a problem where both parties were at fault, she claimed, while “no one around the President advocated, Give her something she can win with”.
But as Klain noted, this was the same assignment that Biden had been given when he was vice-president “so I think he saw that as fair”.
Before becoming White House chief of staff, Klain served in that top role for two vice-presidents, Biden and Gore. So, he would understand better than most the built-in strains.
Harris’ book, titled 107 Days” - a reference to the length of her brief campaign as the Democratic nominee after Biden dropped out of the race - will be released on September 23. Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, is planning an extensive national tour.
She has already announced that she will not be running for California governor next year, as many Democrats had hoped she would. The book will no doubt fuel speculation that she is planning to try again for president in 2028.
Last year, as the Democratic nominee, she was faulted for her loyalty to Biden, and her unwillingness to put any distance between herself and the unpopular president under whom she had served.
That will clearly no longer be an issue.
She is finally, belatedly standing on her own.
In doing so, Harris is doing further damage to Biden’s already tattered legacy.
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