There are cracks forming in the Biden administration. And the Vice President was already on thin ice.
But now Kamala Harris has gotten a massive wakeup call from Joe Biden.
According to a new book released on Tuesday, President Biden is well aware that Vice President Kamala Harris is “not up to the job” of commander-in-chief and would have picked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as his running mate in 2020 before succumbing to public pressure.
Biden nominated Harris days before that year’s virtual Democratic National Convention after promising to nominate a woman and receiving pro-Harris lobbying from former President Barack Obama, according to veteran Washington writer Charlie Spiering in his book “Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House.”
While the 59-year-old Harris is only “a brain stroke away from the presidency,” her “many struggles and mistakes during her first years in office were top of mind” for the now-81-year-old president as he began his re-election campaign, according to Spiering.
These difficulties included her “bullying” of White House workers and “refusal to be a team player” with the rest of the administration—as well as her “artificial” public presence, her famed cackle, and her near-constant “word salads” that fail to deliver any form of message.
A constant stream of resignations from the president’s staff have come as a result of her “soul-destroying criticism,” one ex-staffer said to the Washington Post at the end of 2021 — and have even compelled her to quit using her favorite curse word: “motherf—er.”
The “hilarious, incompetent, trailblazing radical” had “disastrous and comical first years as vice president,” Spiering continues, emphasizing her limited authority as the Biden administration’s border czar.
However, nearly four years later, Biden is in the middle of another campaign with the same running mate and asks a question that has become something of a “popular parlor game in Washington”: “How do you fix Kamala Harris?”
According to the book, Harris was also not chosen by Biden’s wife, Jill, who preferred former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice for the position and told close supporters during a heated Democratic primary debate that the California senator should “go f—” herself.
Harris chastised Biden at the June 2019 debate for boasting about his ability to work across the aisle with segregationist senators during the 1970s, adding that while she felt the longtime Delaware senator was “not a racist,” his remarks were “hurtful” given her personal experience.
“You also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris noted, noting that she was part of the second class to integrate her public school in Berkeley, California.
Despite suspending her presidential campaign months later, Harris remained the only black woman in the United States Senate and eventually “seized the opportunity to boost her profile” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020.
The protests and riots that followed Floyd’s death and continued throughout the summer of 2020 shifted public opinion toward Biden’s eventual running mate being a black woman rather than just a woman.
“As Biden remained indecisive, a key Harris ally tried to reassure him about the idea of Vice President Harris: his former boss, President Barack Obama, who was already a fan,” Spiering writes.
“Behind the scenes, Obama patiently reminded Biden to let go of the past when making his decision. One of Obama’s political advisors [sic] assured me the former president held off endorsing her entirely, making sure that the choice would be Biden’s to make.”
So there you have it, Barack Obama is still pulling levers behind the scenes.
You would expect Biden to be able to make the decision on his own and even maybe listen to his wife, but no.
The power Obama has over Biden is great, and who knows how deep it goes.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
