Kamala Harris Reveals Old Democrat Truths In Her New Book [Op-Ed]

I hope Kamala Harris’ long-overdue acknowledgment of Joe Biden’s doomed reelection bid doesn’t fade too far from the news cycle. As frustrating as “better late than never” applies in this instance, there are old-head Democrats out there who need to read her words and pre-order the book—especially the Biden loyalists who still refuse to see his selfish and self-sabotaging behavior during his presidency.

Those fans, the Bidennettes as I usually call them, need to stop acting as if Joe Biden was some combination of a political genius and their play uncle and see his selfish and self-sabotaging behavior during his presidency more clearly. 

In an excerpt from 107 Days, the former vice president’s forthcoming book about her historic yet failing presidential campaign last year, she writes that when it comes to then 81-year-old Biden running for a second term: “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.

“The stakes were simply too high.” Harris continued in her book excerpt in The Atlantic. “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.”

Umm, yeah, obviously.

If only she had said this during her rushed campaign, when the enabling of Biden’s ego by his family members and closest advisors caught up with him at the presidential debate last June. 

I understand the difficult position she was placed in – she notes that given their past and her position as his VP, it might’ve looked self-serving for her to suggest he forgo another round. 

Still, the man was 81, and there was a reason why his staff purposely hid him from the press for the majority of his term.  

So, it was irresponsible for all parties involved not to tell that elderly man to his face that he was too old to run for president again – especially when the public said as much over and over again in polls – no matter what his wife, son, and hangers-on wanted. 

Speaking of Biden’s kinfolk and political advisers, Harris also shares her feelings about how Biden’s people treated her as VP. 

“I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me,” Harris writes. “One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a ‘chaotic’ office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.”

And there were columns published at the time that openly discussed the tension between Harris and first lady Jill Biden, who resented Harris for taking issue with Biden’s position on busing and the good old days of working with segregationists back in the 2020 Democratic primary.

This was always stupid in terms of strategy, of course, given that their fates were tied together.

Only Harris appears to have grasped this, though. 

“When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging,” Harris notes. “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.”

“His team,” Harris ends the chapter by writing, “didn’t get it.”

The response from Biden’s camp has been predictably defensive—and in doing so, they’ve inadvertently proven her point. Rather than acknowledging the strategic failures she’s highlighting, they’ve doubled down with the same dismissive attitude that hampered her vice presidency.

“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” one former Biden White House official told Axios. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”

Biden is “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign,” the ex-official continued. “Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”

Another told the outlet,  “No one wants to hear your pity party.”

Separately, one aide told Politico: “I hate that we’re beating up on a man struggling with cancer, and [who] did genuinely serve our country pretty damn well, even if he made a critical error at the end. But maybe what is even more painful is we needed more of this distinction and acknowledgement during the campaign. … I’m most offended by this being too little, too late.”

The best nameless comment comes from a former Biden aide, who asked, “Why didn’t she do this during the campaign,” when her “main imperative would’ve been to distance herself because there was an election going on.”

The whiff of sexism, racism, and projection in these comments is unsurprising given the source. 

Biden appointed some Black women judges, but as Rhonda Elaine Foxx, former Biden campaign director of women’s engagement, wrote on X, she had to email Biden staffers about the dismissive way “women of color were being treated on the campaign.” 

Biden’s political legacy in the 1980s and 1990s alone never warranted him such high regard in the Black community, but the treatment of Harris as a burden versus an asset only affirms what many skeptics like me have made of him and his ilk in the Democratic Party.

That doesn’t excuse Harris’ mistakes in the campaign, but she was set up to fail. 

The Harris-Biden dynamic isn’t just about two individuals—it’s a symptom of a broader Democratic Party problem. While it’s her right to remain loyal to Joe Biden (she reportedly warned him about the excerpt), her experience exposes how the party’s gerontocracy operates: older leaders cling to power while younger voices are marginalized, then blamed when things go wrong. Biden may be out of office, but the same pattern is playing out elsewhere in the party.

Last year, the problem was Joe Biden, and this year it’s people like the 88-year-old D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who, despite her trailblazing legacy, is running for reelection to represent a district that’s 46% Black and has a median age of 34. Like Biden, she’s choosing personal attachment to power over what’s best for her constituents and party. The pattern is clear: Democratic elders would rather risk everything than step aside gracefully. 

Trump is not the only selfish old fool who’s endangering us, and there needs to be a Democrat who can say that before a book release—not after the damage is done.

SEE ALSO:

Kamala Harris’ Economy: Where Working Class Fits In

Op-Ed: Gavin Newsom’s Troll Game Is Strong—But Don’t Let It Fool You