Democrats: Harris and Biden’s blame game

Kamala Harris’ memoir “paints a picture of a vice president willing to suffer petty humiliations to maximize Democrats’ chances of beating Trump in 2024.”

(Image credit: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

At a moment when Democrats should be focused on the future, the party is yet again engaged in “self-destructive debates about the past,” said Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. “The latest hop in the DeLorean” comes courtesy of Kamala Harris’ new campaign memoir—titled 107 Days, after her short and failed White House run—in which the former vice president writes it was “recklessness” that led her and fellow Democrats to not question President Joe Biden’s decision to seek re-election at age 81. It wasn’t a choice, she said, “that should have been left to an individual’s ego.” But she dismisses claims that Biden was too frail to serve as president and blames tiredness for his June “debate debacle” against Donald Trump, after which Biden dropped out and Harris took over the Democratic ticket. Biden world has “reacted with rage” to the book, said Alex Thompson in Axios. One former White House official fumed that Harris was “simply not good” at being veep or a presidential candidate, and that her talents were limited to sitting for “stilted photo ops.”

Biden’s late exit isn’t the only reason for Harris’ bitterness, said Max Burns in MSNBC. Her memoir “paints a picture of a vice president willing to suffer petty humiliations to maximize Democrats’ chances of beating Trump in 2024.” Team Biden dismissed her proposals to increase engagement with Black communities and didn’t push back on Republicans’ mischaracterization of her role as “border czar,” which led her to be villainized for surging immigration numbers. “Their thinking was zero-sum,” Harris writes. “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.”

This narrative of “Team Biden sabotage” doesn’t fully explain why she lost to Trump, said Ed Kilgore in New York. It may have been “a handicap as she began her uphill climb to November,” but Harris had done plenty already to damage herself in the public eye. One of Trump’s most effective attack ads—“Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you”— came from her disastrous 2020 presidential campaign, when she endorsed “free gender-transition surgery for imprisoned criminals who were also illegal immigrants.” And if Harris really was treated as dismally by Biden aides as she claims, perhaps she could have talked about it during the campaign “to distance herself from an unpopular president.” Instead, she couldn’t bring herself to say one negative thing about Biden. Maybe Harris thinks this airing of grievances will help position her to run for the Democratic nomination in 2028, but “it all sounds like sour grapes.” Still, “she has every right to tell her side of the sad story.”