Harris slams Team Biden and ‘reckless’ Democrats, cites AUKUS in tell-all book

Washington: Failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has accused Joe Biden and his aides of undermining her success while she was vice president, and said it was “reckless” of Democrats to leave Biden’s decision to recontest up to him and his wife Jill.

In an excerpt from her upcoming book, Harris says the president’s staff often added fuel to negative narratives about her, including that she ran a “chaotic” office with high staff turnover in her first year as vice president.

She also accused Biden’s White House of failing to support her during controversies, citing her visit to France to clean up the diplomatic mess caused by Australia’s decision to cancel its French submarine contract in favour of the AUKUS agreement with the US and UK.

“This had caused tremendous friction,” Harris said, describing the US-France relationship as “tattered”. After meeting French President Emmanuel Macron, she visited a Paris research institute where she was accused by conservative American news outlets of faking a French accent while chatting with scientists.

“This was total nonsense, but the White House seemed glad to let reporting about my ‘gaffe’ overwhelm the significant thaw in foreign relations I’d achieved,” Harris wrote.

The excerpt from 107 Days – a reference to the length of time she had to campaign for the presidency after taking over from Biden – was published in The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday, local time.

Harris said she wondered whether she should have told Biden not to run again during the “months of growing panic” over his capacity to lead. She said she was in the worst position to make such a move, given it would be seen as nakedly ambitious and self-serving.

In her view, Biden remained more knowledgeable, capable and compassionate than Donald Trump, even on his worst day. “But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles,” she wrote.

However, Harris was cutting about the Democrats’ failure to question Biden’s candidacy earlier, having largely felt the decision to run again was one for the then president and the First Lady.

“We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotised,” she wrote. “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.”

Ultimately, Biden quit the race about three weeks after he stunned his party, the country and the world with a horrible performance in a crucial debate against Trump, in which he repeatedly lost his train of thought and made up garbled sentences such as: “We finally beat Medicare.”

Biden came to office saying he would be a transitional figure; that he did not want a second term and would look to hand the reins to a younger candidate. But Harris’ book will paint a picture of a Biden White House that never invested in her success, and was happy for negative stories or narratives to develop around her.

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” Harris says in the excerpt. “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 … His team didn’t get it.”

Even as Biden bowed out of the race and Harris was campaigning against Trump for the presidency, there were examples of Biden failing to give her a boost. She mentions a highly anticipated speech he gave from the Oval Office after dropping out, in which he only mentioned her for three short sentences, after nine minutes.

“I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country,” Biden said.

“And that was it,” Harris wrote.

Previous books chronicling the seismic 2024 election, which Harris lost to Trump, reported that Biden warned Harris not to tarnish his legacy by distancing herself from his agenda.

That was crucial because Biden had negative approval ratings towards the end of his term, and Americans were dissatisfied over high inflation and ballooning unlawful immigration. But Harris was restricted in her ability to differentiate herself from her predecessor and present as a candidate who would bring change.

A spokeswoman for Biden declined to comment on the book to The New York Times and other US media. The book will be published later this month.

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