In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, former Vice President Kamala Harris criticizes Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection in 2024.
Harris’ 107 Days is scheduled for publication on September 23 by Simon & Schuster. The book is an account of her run for the presidency after Biden dropped his reelection bid in the wake of a disastrous debate with Donald Trump. The press says the book is “written with candor, a unique perspective, and the pace of a page-turning novel.”
In the book, Harris writes, “During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.”
Harris says that she was “in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” because Biden would see it as “naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty.”
“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” she writes of Biden’s decision to run again. “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.”
Axios quotes a former Biden aide as saying, “I'm not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment about Biden running is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is. If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
