President Biden knows full well Vice President Kamala Harris is “not up to the job” of commander-in-chief — and he preferred Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as his running mate in 2020 before caving to public pressure, according to a new book out Tuesday.
Biden chose Harris days before that year’s virtual Democratic National Convention after promising to select a woman and after pro-Harris lobbying from former President Barack Obama, veteran Washington journalist Charlie Spiering writes in his book “Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House.”
While the 59-year-old Harris is just “a brain stroke away from the presidency,” her “many struggles and mistakes during her first years in office were top of mind” for the now-81-year-old president heading into his re-election campaign, Spiering writes.
Those issues included her “bullying” of White House staff and “refusal to be a team player” with the rest of the administration — as well as her “artificial” public presence, her infamous cackle and her near-constant “word salads” that fail to convey any sort of message.
A steady drip of resignations from the veep’s have come as a result of her “soul-destroying criticism,” one ex-staffer griped to the Washington Post at the end of 2021 — event forcing her to stop using her favorite curse word: “motherf—er.”
The “hilarious, incompetent, trailblazing radical” suffered “disastrous and comical first years as vice president,” Spiering adds, noting her limited authority as the Biden administration’s border czar.
But nearly four years later, Biden is in the middle of another campaign with the same running mate and asking a question that has become something of a “popular parlor game in Washington”: “How do you fix Kamala Harris?”
The book recounts that Harris was also not the choice of Biden’s wife, Jill, who favored former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice for the role and had fumed to close supporters after a bitter Democratic primary debate that the California senator should “go f—” herself.
Harris hit Biden during that June 2019 debate for having touted his ability to work across the aisle with segregationist senators during the 1970s, adding that while she believed the longtime Delaware senator was “not a racist” his remarks were “hurtful” given her personal experience.
“You also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris said, explaining that she had been part of the second class to integrate her public school while growing up in Berkeley, Calif.
Though Harris suspended her presidential campaign months later, she remained the only black woman in the US Senate and later “seized the opportunity to boost her profile” in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The protests and riots that followed Floyd’s death and continued throughout the summer of 2020 began to swing opinion to the fact that Biden’s eventual running mate pick would be a black woman, not just a woman.
Whitmer had lobbied for Harris in the wake of the Floyd unrest — but Biden reportedly “called her and urged her to remain in the mix as he weighed his options.”
“As Biden remained indecisive, a key Harris ally tried to reassure him about the idea of Vice President Harris: his former boss, President Barack Obama, who was already a fan,” Spiering writes.
“Behind the scenes, Obama patiently reminded Biden to let go of the past when making his decision. One of Obama’s political advisors [sic] assured me the former president held off endorsing her entirely, making sure that the choice would be Biden’s to make.”
As a former vice president himself, Biden was aware Harris “lacked” the necessary political skills but ended up making “one of the most pandering decisions of any vice-presidential pick in modern history,” in Spiering’s words.
In return, “Harris barely suppressed her impatience and disdain for the president” during their time together in office, he adds, while “reading platitudes from the teleprompter” during her own public events.
With fewer than 300 days until the general election, Harris “is still in the same place despite multiple attempts at narrative resets and on-the-job training” and “in no position to take over for Biden and lead the Democratic Party into the future.”
There’s also “no way” that the Biden-Harris ticket can be reshuffled without the president’s campaign “admitting to a huge mistake,” according to Spiering.
“Once you are found unworthy, there is little you can do to change people’s minds,” he writes.
“Mistakes compounded on mistakes only cemented her reputation and there is little room for sympathy when you reach that level of power. There’s plenty of negative chatter behind the scenes, but few dare speak publicly, for fear of being branded a racist or sexist.”
