Former Vice President Kamala Harris has now reportedly taken the unusual step of openly criticizing former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., suggesting in her new memoir that his decision to run for reelection last year was less an act of service and more an act of “recklessness.”
In an excerpt from 107 Days, published Wednesday by The Atlantic, Ms. Harris reflects on the chaotic period leading to Mr. Biden’s eventual withdrawal from the 2024 race after a disastrous debate performance that magnified longstanding concerns about his age and cognitive health. “And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” she writes. “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.”
Ms. Harris recalls a White House culture of deference to Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, describing how aides repeated a refrain to shield themselves from responsibility.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” she writes. “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.”
Her judgment, shared nearly a year after her own short-lived presidential campaign ended in defeat to President Donald J. Trump, represents a candid admission that the Democratic Party failed to confront the consequences of Mr. Biden’s evident decline until it was too late.
The memoir, set to be released Sept. 23, recounts Ms. Harris’s brief campaign following Mr. Biden’s withdrawal. She is scheduled to promote the book on a 15-city tour, including stops in the United Kingdom and Canada.
The former vice president pushes back against theories that aides deliberately concealed Mr. Biden’s condition, insisting that “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.”
But Ms. Harris concedes that age and fatigue took a toll. “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,” she acknowledges. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.” She attributes his calamitous debate performance to “two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser.”
Her comments arrive as Democrats continue to reckon with the fallout of leaked audio from special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Mr. Biden, which highlighted his memory lapses and renewed questions about his mental fitness more than 100 days into Mr. Trump’s return to office.
For conservatives, Ms. Harris’s remarks confirm what critics of Mr. Biden had long argued: that his decision to run again was driven by personal ambition, enabled by a party unwilling to confront his frailty, and ultimately ended in electoral disaster.
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