When former Vice President Kamala Harris first heard about how poorly Joe Biden’s team was responding to excerpts of her upcoming book, she essentially shrugged, I’m told. She wasn’t surprised.
The response came after years of interactions with Biden staffers who her team thought were undercutting her.
That was obvious even from the outside. As soon as the first excerpt of the book, “107 Days,” was published in The Atlantic, I received a barrage of texts and emails from former Biden White House aides attacking what she had supposedly said about them — though many of them weren’t exactly close enough to the action to be on Harris’ mind.
Here’s a taste of the messages I heard from Biden world: “I’m not sure ‘It’s the Biden’s team’s fault I wasn’t popular’ is the former Vice President’s strongest argument for why she lost 6 states President Biden won while receiving 6 million fewer voters than he did four years earlier.”
But as one senior Harris White House aide told me: “They’re not denying that they undercut her.”
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Losing a presidential race is always hard for both the nominee and the party they represent. Even in the best of times, there will be heated debate among strategists, finger-pointing from campaign insiders and disappointment from voters.
But the 2024 race was guaranteed to lead to bad blood. For starters, you had the incumbent president, the only person to have defeated Donald Trump, running for re-election until it was obvious that his advanced age was too big of a drawback, then handing it off to a younger and more vigorous successor who lost anyway.
That left the Biden team feeling like Harris had fumbled the ball, while the Harris team felt they’d been thrown a bad pass. In a sense, both are right.
At the broader level, Harris has a point. I covered Harris during her vice presidency and her presidential run, and her assessment that some of Biden’s team did not have her back is a fact.
When we’d ask for comment on a story that was critical of Harris from the Biden team, more often than not, there’d be no response, or, at best, it’d be tepid, especially in the beginning. And sometimes, the criticism of Harris came from the Biden world side of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., as if they weren’t just one team.
Part of that was some holdover resentment from the primary campaign, where Harris leveled some criticism at Biden, and part of it was the normal tension between presidents and vice presidents and their teams. Biden staffers had the same complaints about his treatment when he was vice president.
One Biden staffer who did have her back was his first chief of staff, Ron Klain. Klain, who consistently came to Harris’ defense, admitted to me in the past that the Biden team did not sell her successes enough to the American people.
Though the excerpt included a bit of Biden team bashing, folks who have read the book tell me that’s not representative. The book is mostly about the campaign, with just enough about her other experiences to add context.
Here’s how Harris’ longtime senior adviser, Kirsten Allen, put it: “In writing this book, the VP chose to be honest with her thoughts, even when some of what she shares may be difficult to hear. Throughout it, she holds herself to the same standard — candidly acknowledging the unique circumstances, challenges and missteps in the shortest presidential campaign in modern history.”
Other Harris associates who’ve read the book tell me their takeaway was that she wanted to tell her truth about the campaign and keep her options open for 2028. Both choices mean that the book would include a bit of rough-edged honesty about the wisdom of Biden running for a second term and attempts to distance herself from him (albeit a little bit too late to help, I think).
In the end, Harris’ look backward is more interesting for what it says about the future. She’s signaling to the base that she, too, is ready to move on from the strategists and advisers who got Democrats into their current fix.
Folks around Harris say that she believes there is still a lane for her in the next Democratic presidential primary and that she will take steps to make sure she can still run again if she chooses. In this case, that meant she needed to make a break with some parts of her past.
For more thought-provoking insights from Eugene Daniels, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday from 7 to 10 a.m. ET on MSNBC.