Former Vice President Kamala Harris is finally admitting the truth behind President Joe Biden’s mental decline as he decided to drop out of the 2024 election.
The former vice president-turned-2024 Democrat presidential nominee unloaded in a first-look excerpt from her forthcoming book 107 Days published in The Atlantic on Wednesday, an account of her brief campaign sprint.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris wrote.
She continued: “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.”
The memoir, out later this month, recounts Biden’s withdrawal from the race on July 21, 2024, just 107 days before voters went to the polls. Harris’s description, however, describes a White House locked in loyalty and paralyzed by the president’s refusal to step aside, despite growing public doubts over his age.
Later in the excerpt, Harris insists she never questioned Biden’s competence but acknowledged the physical toll of his schedule: “At 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
Harris also lamented that Biden’s staff didn’t support her as vice president on issues ranging foreign policy to illegal immigration.
She complained that getting the White House press office, including then-press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, to defend her was “almost impossible” and accused her of even stoking the fire.
“Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year,” Harris wrote, going on to say that some people just can’t hack it in a White House role.
Her account also underscored the delicate balance of power between the president and his vice president.
Harris wrote: “Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.”
The former vice president also said Democrats across the board should have been more aggressive in pushing Biden not to run, saying it was “reckless” to leave the decision in his hands for so long.
Harris’ account of Biden’s public decline come as she considers another presidential campaign.
Early opinion polls tend to put her at the top of the heap but that seems highly likely to be a consequence of name recognition more than anything else.
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