Harris shreds Biden for staying in 2024 race, calling it ‘recklessness’ and says he got tired quickly as president
In her forthcoming book, former vice president Kamala Harris takes a swing at her old boss, former president Joe Biden, for not dropping out of the 2024 presidential election early enough, calling it a reckless decision.
Reflecting on her last-minute and short-lived presidential campaign in her new book, 107 Days, Harris admits that Biden’s refusal to drop out was driven by “ego” and “ambition.”
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in an excerpt of her book obtained by The Atlantic.
“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,” Harris continues.
The former vice president was thrust into a national presidential campaign with a little more than three months until Election Day after Biden was pressured to drop out of the race due to his age – which was on display for all to see during his disastrous presidential debate against then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.
The general consensus from insiders is that Biden’s stubborn refusal to drop out hurt Democrats’ chances of maintaining control of the White House.
Biden has taken a different stance, saying he regrets dropping out because he believes he could have beaten Trump, despite polling that showed Biden was trailing Trump significantly.
But in her new book, Harris says she was loyal to Biden and, of all people in the White House, was “in the worst position to make that case that he should drop out” because it would have come across as self-serving.
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again,” Harris contends in her new memoir.
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