‘The Kamala Excuse’: Tensions between Biden and Harris plagued their campaigns, new book reveals
Former Vice President Kamala Harris had 107 days to convince the American people to elect her the next president.
Tension between Harris’ team and former President Joe Biden‘s inner circle did not do her any favors, a new book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson reveals.
“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” has returned questions about Biden’s cognitive decline and his administration’s alleged cover-up to the national conversation.
The book also pulls back the curtain on the complicated relationship between Biden and Harris, spotlighting the distrust that had been brewing between their teams since Biden tapped Harris as his running mate in 2020.
NEW BOOK REVEALS BIDEN’S INNER CIRCLE WORRIED ABOUT HIS AGE YEARS BEFORE BOTCHED DEBATE PERFORMANCE
The choice for Biden’s vice president came down to Harris or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., according to Thompson and Tapper.
“Many on the Biden team felt that Harris didn’t put in the work and was also just not a very nice person. Several quietly expressed buyer’s remorse: They should have picked Whitmer.”
To Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, Whitmer represented the “next generation of Biden Democrats,” Thompson and Tapper said.
Additionally, former first lady Jill Biden resented Harris after hitting him hard during the first Democratic primary in 2019 for opposing the Department of Education’s busing program to integrate public schools. “That little girl was me,” Harris said on the debate stage.
“Still, Biden’s advisers did not fully trust her. Harris and her advisers felt it. Her aides got the impression that doing more than the bare minium to help was considered an act of disloyalty to Biden,” Tapper and Thompson said of Harris’ involvement in the 2020 campaign. “Some of that culture carried over into the White House.”
Biden privately called Harris a “work in progress” and was not confident she could beat then-former President Donald Trump in 2024.
However, Harris’ team thought building up the vice president should have been a priority for Biden’s transitional presidency as a “bridge” for the next generation of Democratic leadership, as he said back in 2020.
An excerpt of the book reads, “In the eyes of Harris’s team, the Biden White House was setting her up to fail. They gave her assignments her team considered politically toxic, such as dealing with the migration crisis, rarely offered to help, and knifed her to reporters along the way. Harris’s camp didn’t understand the hostility and the reluctance to offer her opportunities to shine.”
The Fox News Voter Analysis in 2024 found that 52% of voters said Trump was the better candidate to handle immigration, while just 36% said Harris. Additionally, it was a top issue for voters, with 20% saying it was the most important issue facing the country.
Harris faced the brunt of criticism for the surge in border crossings during the Biden-Harris administration as the Trump campaign trolled her as the “border czar.”
When Biden dropped out of the race after his disastrous debate performance in summer 2024, Harris inherited his struggling campaign, and her old boss soon became a “liability.”
“From the beginning of her campaign in July to the August weeks of picking a running mate, presiding over the convention, rolling out wave after wave of ads, and on through September debate prep, it was clear that Biden was a liability,” Tapper and Thompson wrote.
Harris was caught in the crosshairs of Biden’s relentless gaffes and missteps as she tried to walk a fine line between loyalty to Biden and distancing herself from his failing campaign, as the journalists described.
While Harris had “great affection for Joe,” her loyalty fired back when she told “The View” she would not have done anything differently than Biden as president.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said – an instant attack ad for the Trump administration as they highlighted the Biden-Harris administration’s record on immigration, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and inflation.
“What is he doing?” Harris asked her team after Biden donned a Trump 2024 hat at a 9/11 memorial gathering at the Shanksville Fire Station, less than a month before the election.
“This is completely unhelpful. And so unnecessary,” Harris told her team, according to the book. “That would be, the Harris campaign decided, the last time she would do a public event with the president before the election.”
However, Biden still wanted a role in the campaign, Tapper and Thompson said, as he saw former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama speaking at rallies on the campaign trail.
“He didn’t seem to understand what a liability he had become.”
When one of Trump’s supporters called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” during a Madison Square Garden rally about a week before the election, what should have been a political layup for Democrats, became another mess for Harris to clean up.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said on a Voto Latino Zoom call.
While Biden was creating a political mess for Harris to clean up, Trump seized the opportunity to claim the narrative, sporting a high-visibility vest at a rally in battleground Michigan and hosting an impromptu press gaggle from the front seat of a garbage truck that was decked out in Trump decals.
“By the end of the campaign, she had helped the Democratic Party, but her own candidacy was barely treading water. And the albatross that was Joe Biden kept getting heavier,” Tapper and Thompson said.
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Fox News Digital has written extensively dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign about Biden’s cognitive decline and his inner circle’s role in covering it up.
Representatives for Biden and Harris did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.