President Joe Biden is deeply unpopular, but even more unpopular is the woman he picked to be his vice president, but he does not want anyone to know that.
A new book penned by two New York Times journalists claims that the president threatened to fire top aides if they leaked any negative stories about Vice President Kamala Harris, Business insider reported.
The warning was issued last year after stories were published about the vice president’s office being dysfunctional and abusive.
“No one was more frustrated by the leaks than Joe Biden. The president had known many of Harris’s shortcomings when he chose her to be his running mate, but he was defensive of her and irritated by the unsightly drama spilling into view,” New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns said in the book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.”
Biden gathered his senior staff to the Oval Office, and told them he would let them go if they leaked such stories about Harris, according to the book.
Harris’s vice president has not been smooth sailing. She’s faced low public approval ratings and a string of top advisors have left her office.
According to the book, when White House chief of staff Ron Klain met last April with Rep. Kathy Manning, a Democrat from North Carolina, he was dismayed to find out that Manning had been left out of parts of Harris’ recent trip to her district. The White House often makes it a point to include lawmakers in top officials’ stops and Biden often notes their presence from the podium.
The book also said that first lady Jill Biden apparently did not want Kamala Harris to be her husband’s pick for vice president and he had reservations of his own.
“There are millions of people in the United States. Why do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe,” Jill Biden said in a conversation after she discovered that Harris was in the lead for the job, Fox News reported.
But there was support for her among some on Biden’s staff, including Ron Klain who is now the White House chief of staff, was in charge of the vetting for vice president and had Harris pegged for the job.
“Yes, Harris had attacked Biden more harshly than any other major candidate in the Democratic primaries. Yes, the Biden family had seen it as a smear and a betrayal. In Klain’s assessment, that would work to Biden’s advantage,” the book said. “Choosing Harris will show people that you are magnanimous and forgiving, Klain told Biden. It will show the country just what a unifying leader you can be.”
The book also said the Biden had reservations about selecting Harris as a running mate, in part because of her “past romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor who had appointed Harris to a pair of minor political positions,” something he thought of “as the kind of thing that should be off limits.”
Others considered as a Biden running mate, as discussed in the book, included New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, as well as activists and members of Congress from across the country.
Another candidate who pushed hard for the role was Stacey Abrams, who, according to the book, did “not pass the test” and was seen by Biden’s advisers as a lost cause after she failed to win the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018.
“Abrams fought hard to win real consideration but never overcame the experience issue” that Biden’s advisers warned him about, the book claims.
Grisham, whom the book billed as a “no-nonsense former state health secretary buried in managing the pandemic on the ground,” told the authors of the book that the vetting process from Biden’s team was “insane.”
“He asked me to sell him on vice president: ‘Why should you be the vice president?’” Grisham said, the book claimed.
“I didn’t ask to be vice president,” she said. “You asked for me to be vetted — you tell me why you think I would make a good vice president. This was not my idea.”
Others who were considered were Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Rep. Karen Bass and Rep. Val Demmings but Biden’s campaign saw them as “compromised or risky” selections.
“You know, white women are incredibly racist, as are white men,” one of Biden’s close advisors said in the book. “None of it was safe. It was a risky thing to do. But it was the safest of choices that we had.”
The book also claimed that White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield questioned the ability of Harris to do the job.
“In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations: Her Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff,” the book said.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
