President Joe Biden characterized Vice President Harris in politically derogatory terms during the 2020 campaign, Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, two Politico heads, recounted in a 2022 book.
Biden’s reported comments contradict his statements that Harris is a viable candidate to defeat former President Donald Trump and is “ready for the job” of president. It also lends credence to speculation that Biden endorsed Harris to enact revenge on party bosses who threatened to oust him from the race with the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
“Strange,” “messy,” “uneven,” “fallen short” and a “fiasco,” is how Biden spoke about Harris leading up to selecting her as his running mate, according to multiple excerpts from Burns and Martin’s book.
Biden also “privately” and “repeatedly” trashed Harris as inauthentic, the authors recounted. “During the primary, Biden privately and repeatedly shared visions of a common observation about Harris: She doesn’t seem to know who she wants to be,” Burns and Martin reported.
“Harris was neither a candidate who most greatly impressed Biden’s vice presidential search committee, nor the person his advisers saw as the most immediately prepared for the presidency,” the authors continued.
“In focus groups,” the Politico heads wrote, “they found voters asking why Biden had not concerned male options, if his ultimate goal was to choose the best person for the job?”
Biden selected Harris anyway, to the reported consternation of First Lady Jill Biden, even though Harris essentially called Biden “racist and a segregationist” during the 2020 debate, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) revisited Thursday on CNN.Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.