Kamala Harris has finally said what were whispers in the power corridor that she was made a scapegoat at the last minute and put up to fight Donald Trump in the presidential election after Joe Biden clung to the race for too long. On several occasions, it looked like Biden was ‘sabotaging’ Kamala Harris’ campaign, though Harris dismissed all salacious gossip at that time. But now, when Harris’s next political step is what people are speculating about, the first excerpt of ‘107 Days’ is out. And it’s evident her step was to confirm those rumors. Harris has now made it clear that she thinks it was reckless to let Joe Biden and Jill Biden decide on their own whether Joe should remain in the fray.
Kamala Harris equally blames Jill Biden
In the excerpt, published by The Atlantic, Kamala Harris holds Jill Biden equally responsible for the ‘recklessness’ as it was Joe and Jill’s decision, she wrote. She wrote that it became like a mantra and everyone acted like they were hypnotized as they repeated the narrative: ‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ But it should not have been, as the stakes were very high, Harris finally gave her opinion. “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,” she wrote. Part of the problem, Harris wrote, was a Biden team so committed to not helping her that she said it ultimately came at his own, and the country’s expense.
Yes, Biden team did not like Harris
Kamala Harris confirmed that people around Biden did not like that Harris was more popular. “When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging,” Harris writes. “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.”
Harris says she got the blame as an ineffective ‘border czar’
The former vice president laid bare how she was betrayed by Biden’s staff who sometimes added fuel to the negative narratives around her. “When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” adding several paragraphs later, “Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”
