Former Vice President Kamala Harris says in her new memoir that Democrats’ decision to allow then-President Biden to decide whether he would run for reelection was driven by “recklessness.”
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in a newly-released excerpt of her upcoming book on her unsuccessful presidential bid, 107 Days.
“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” she adds in the excerpt published by The Atlantic. “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.”
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running?” she wrote. “Perhaps.”
Despite months of opinion polling showing growing public concern over Biden’s age and mental acuity, it was only after the then-president’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance that Biden was effectively forced out of the race, with many Democrats and the mainstream media finally acknowledging the octogenarian president’s age as a problem.
Before the debate, Democrats defended Biden through several public moments where he looked lost and confused, and also after special counsel Robert Hur described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in February 2024.
Biden ended up dropping out and endorsing Harris, who was easily defeated by President Donald Trump in November as Republicans won a legislative trifecta.
Harris, for her part, now writes that she believed advising Biden to drop out would be viewed by the then-president “as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty.”
The former vice president went on to say Biden began to show signs of aging when he turned 81.
“Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
“I don’t believe it was incapacity,” she added. “If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
Harris also offered insight into the behind-the-scenes politics of her presidential bid among Biden allies, saying she felt the Biden White House was reluctant to counter negative media coverage around her vice presidency and her presidential campaign.
“And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it,” she wrote. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”
“When Republicans mischaracterized 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.
She argued the White House “rarely pushed back with my actual résumé” when conservative media attacked her “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.'”
Harris alleged she “often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me” and that “getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”
She believed Biden’s close allies believed if she was “shining” that Biden would be “dimmed.”
“None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well,” she said. “That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands.”
“My success was important for him,” she added. “His team didn’t get it.”