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She feels the Biden team undermined her
Harris says that the Biden team seemed suspicious of her from the start, partly because that is often the dynamic between the president and the VP and partly because she’d gone after Biden about his opposition to federally mandated school busing during a 2019 primary debate.
The former VP writes, according to the first book excerpt published by The Atlantic, that while the White House has a huge comms team, getting “anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.” Harris claims Biden’s inner circle even seemed to encourage negative stories about her:
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.
… when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.
Harris says polling showing that she was getting more popular only made the situation worse with the Biden team:
Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. 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.
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She thinks someone should have told Biden not to run — but not her
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps,” Harris writes in the first book excerpt. But she notes Biden had already defeated Donald Trump once, and at the time, she thought she was the last person who should talk to the president about dropping out:
… 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.
… “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. 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.
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She blames Biden’s staff for his debate meltdown
Harris pushes back on the idea that there was “some big conspiracy” to hide Biden’s age-related problems. In the first book excerpt, she says that “on his worse day,” he was still functioning better than Trump, and she blames White House staffers for tiring him out before the first debate:
Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.
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Biden confronted Harris in a weird pre-debate phone call
Harris reveals that moments before her debate with Trump, an irritated Biden called and accused her of criticizing him to “powerbrokers” in Philadelphia. “Why’s he asking that?” Harris writes, according to Politico.
“My head had to be right. I had to be completely in the game,” she says. “I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself.”
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She wanted Buttigieg to be her running mate
According to a second piece on the book in The Atlantic, Harris reveals that she wanted her friend Pete Buttigieg to be her running mate but thought America couldn’t handle it:
Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes in a passage of her soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that I saw. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
“And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.”
After this leaked, Buttigieg said he was actually “surprised” to learn Harris felt this way and that he doesn’t agree.
“My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” Buttigieg said, per Politico.
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Josh Shapiro lost the VP audition because he seemed too ambitious
Harris says Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was one of three finalists to be her running mate, and her husband Doug Emhoff was leaning toward him. Harris writes that she found him “poised, polished, and personable,” but she was put off by his clear ambition for the White House. Politico reports:
Harris twice describes Shapiro as “peppering” her and staff with questions, not just about details of the job but also life as vice president. He asked the residence manager a number of questions about the home, ranging from the number of bedrooms to “how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.”
She also accused Shapiro of exhibiting a “lack of discretion” in the veepstakes, recalling that his official vehicles with Pennsylvania plates were filmed by CNN in front of the vice president’s residence, despite efforts by her staff to arrange for less attention-getting transportation.
Unsurprisingly, Team Shapiro has already pushed back on that characterization.
“It’s simply ridiculous to suggest that Governor Shapiro was focused on anything other than defeating Donald Trump and protecting Pennsylvania from the chaos we are living through now,” a spokesperson for Shapiro told Politico.