The opening scene of Kamala Harris’ campaign memoir sums up the entire disaster of the Biden-Harris era: two selfish narcissists focused entirely on their own needs and insecurities, trapped together in an alliance with no regard for each other and no concern for the American people.
It is the morning Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, July 21.
Harris is in her kitchen watching the cooking channel and making pancakes for her grandnieces when the president calls from his Rehoboth Beach house in Delaware, where he’d hunkered down with his family after his disastrous debate performance.
“I’ve decided I’m dropping out,” Biden tells her, promising to endorse her as his successor.
She writes that he sounds exhausted.
No wonder, considering at age 81 he had been diagnosed with COVID four days earlier, and was suffering from advanced prostate cancer, a fact Harris didn’t know at the time but certainly knew when she was writing the book and somehow doesn’t mention.
Her response to his declaration is completely self-absorbed: “Really?” she thought.
“Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants, and the two people staffing me right now are under four feet tall.”
The rest of the book, as with the title “107 Days,” is about how selfish old Joe didn’t give her enough time to win.
She’s not wrong that Biden is a profoundly selfish person. Nothing ever got between him and his ambition.
But it is nonetheless galling that Harris is so ungrateful to the man who resuscitated her political career and gave her the exalted job of vice president, a role for which she was not qualified and could not be bothered to perform competently.
She knew, as we all did, because Biden told us, that he only chose her as his VP because she was a black woman.
For her to overcome that handicap, she needed to work hard and excel at every task she was assigned.
Instead, she carried on like a spoiled princess, rejecting assignments Biden gave her like “border czar,” botching the easy tasks, refusing to have a single press conference, whining that Biden’s staff treated her like a “potted plant” and imagining that Joe was jealous of her speechifying prowess. She never had the humility to recognize her shortcomings.
She had four years as vice president to carve out a clear identity with the American people.
But her laziness and poor communication skills rendered her a blank slate from the start.
Even faced with the “shortest campaign in modern political history,” a real superstar might have pulled it off.
But Harris was woeful.
She flubbed even the friendliest interviews.
Every time she opened her mouth, she sounded inauthentic and dumb.
Parade of failures
She even botched her most important decision, choosing a running mate.
She had a number of palatable, competent choices, but instead reached into the very bottom of the barrel to find a candidate even less impressive than herself.
“Tampon Tim” Walz, the weirdo Minnesota governor, whose main claim to fame was installing tampons in boys’ school bathrooms and lying about his military service.
She writes that she chose him for his “loyalty,” a term that appears 16 times in the book.
In my experience, people who feel the need to tell you how loyal they are tend to be among the most disloyal people you will meet.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here!
Her reproach to Biden is threaded through the book: She was loyal to him, but he did not reciprocate.
Yet the entire act of writing the book was disloyal, with its digs at him and his family.
She complained that when Biden was being urged to drop out, his senior staff were “talking me down, saying, ‘If Joe goes, you’ll get her,’ strongly implying I wasn’t up to it.”
Ya think?
She complains that Jill Biden was cold and hadn’t forgiven her for attacking her husband as a racist in the 2019 presidential debates.
Her biggest rant against the Bidens she expressed by proxy, through her husband, Doug Emhoff.
On July 4 festivities at the White House, she writes that Jill summoned Emhoff into an empty room and berated him.
“She seemed tense, even angry.
“ ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded. ‘Are you supporting us?’ ”
Emhoff complained later to Harris: “They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, s–t jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them . . . And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?”
Harris claims there was no “big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity . . . At 81, Joe got tired . . . I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
Sure.
She knows that as vice president, it was her constitutional duty to step in if the president was unable to fulfill his duties.
When it was clear Biden was not capable of doing the job, at least for part of his presidency, she shirked that responsibility.
On the other hand, her book blows up the false notion that Biden was so cognitively incapacitated that he was not responsible for the atrocities on his watch, like the open border and the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Birds of a feather
To the contrary, when it was in his own self-interest, Biden knew precisely what he was doing, as shown by the fact he strategically undermined Harris, right to the bitter end.
A few hours before her all-important presidential debate with Donald Trump, Biden called her to menace her into not distancing herself from him.
He told her that his brother Jim had been talking to “a group of real power brokers in Philly [and] that those guys were not going to support me because I’d been saying bad things about him. He wasn’t inclined to believe it, he claimed, but he thought I should know in case my team had been encouraging me to put daylight between the two of us.”
Typical Biden.
All he cared about was preserving his legacy and the myth that he had been a competent president.
He was willing to rattle Harris at a crucial moment just to save his ego.
They deserved each other.
But it’s important not to treat Biden’s disastrous presidency as a mere aberration.
It represented the death throes of a dying party.
The entire purpose of installing Biden was to buy time for the Democratic Party to postpone the inevitable internal civil war between a dwindling group of sensible moderates in denial and a revolutionary faction of hardcore leftists hellbent on remaking America, even through violence.
Retiring West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin told CNN last week, after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s anti-Charlie Kirk rant on the floor of the House: “The Democratic Party has lost more than 160,000 Democrats that have basically left the party since the last election. So if that’s the way the Democratic Party’s going, it’s getting worse, not better.”
Acknowledging what went wrong with the Biden-Harris administration is key to the future health of the Democratic Party — and therefore the health of the entire country.
We all have a stake in ensuring that one party’s internal power struggle doesn’t spill over into the rest of the country.
Kamala’s campaign memoir is a step toward understanding.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
