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President Biden’s ego and ambition cost Democrats the 2024 election, according to former Vice President Kamala Harris, who writes in a new book that her old boss was “reckless” for seeking another term amid public and private concerns over his cognitive decline.
Ms. Harris’s memoir, “107 Days,” publishes on Sept. 23 but is already creating a buzz in political circles. Advance passages from the book do not hold back on attacking Mr. Biden, even accusing his aides of stabbing her in the back.
In excerpts provided to The Atlantic, Ms. Harris describes those surrounding Mr. Biden in the White House as “hypnotized” into buying into his intention to run for a second term. Mr. Biden, who was the nation’s oldest president, launched his bid in spite of low poll numbers and public and private concerns over his mental capabilities.
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision,” Ms. Harris writes. “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. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Mr. Biden, who was age 81 at the time, clung to his reelection plans throughout the summer of 2024, remaining in the race for weeks after his disastrous debate performance against President Trump in Atlanta on June 27.
Top Democrats finally used their influence to push him out of the race on July 21, just a month before the Democratic National Convention. Ms. Harris was ushered in as his replacement at the top of the ticket, in part because of pressure from top Democrats who did not want the first Black female vice president shunted aside.
The move to anoint Ms. Harris as the nominee also preserved millions of dollars in campaign funds that otherwise could not have been transferred to a new Democratic ticket.
Ms. Harris, 60, was never able to gain real traction with voters. She lost the popular vote and Electoral College to Mr. Trump on Nov. 5. She did not win a single swing state.
Many blamed Ms. Harris for failing to connect with voters and for appearing to dodge taking a definitive stand on critical issues.
In one disastrous moment, she told an afternoon talk show, The View, that she could not think of anything she would have done differently than Mr. Biden over the course of his presidency, despite a troubled economy and an illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.
In the book, Ms. Harris exonerated herself from blame for standing by while Mr. Biden, who left office at 82, launched a second-term bid.
“Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win,” she wrote.
Ms. Harris painted an unflattering and, at times, hostile picture of the Biden administration when it came to supporting her as vice president.
The communications team did little to promote her role, she said, and did not push back against claims by conservative media that she was a “DEI hire.”
The White House, she said, “seemed glad” about news reporting on her various gaffes that overshadowed real accomplishments.
Ms. Harris said she learned the president’s own team “was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me,” among them reports about a high quit rate among her own staff in the vice president’s office.
They stuck her with the task of fixing the crisis at the southern border. It was a job made impossible by Mr. Biden’s lifting of Trump-era border security policies. Ms. Harris said Mr. Trump’s policies were “cruel,” and the real problem was a lack of bipartisan cooperation on immigration reform.
“No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with,” Mr. Harris wrote.
Ms. Harris also trashed Mr. Biden’s leadership on abortion.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the ruling that legalized abortion, Ms. Harris said Mr. Biden “was not seeking to lead” and “struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment.”
Ms. Harris said she stepped in to fill the void left by Mr. Biden, and her leadership on the abortion issue, which included a national tour and roundtable events, helped Democrats avoid a midterm shellacking that many had been predicting.
“We defied historical precedent because of our efforts on this issue,” Ms. Harris said.
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