Former Vice President Kamala Harris has been struggling to stop the backslide in polling she has suffered since leaving office.
Rather than running to become California's next governor, she wrote a book and will soon be touring the country.
If Harris is ever going to recover from her time as vice president, she will have to toss Joe Biden under the bus, something she just did in a very clever way in her new memoir.
The downfall of Biden's re-election candidacy went into overdrive after his disastrous debate against Donald Trump in late June of last year.
Prior to the event, Biden took a trip overseas, returning home on June 15, nearly two full weeks before the debate occurred.
Biden went to Camp David a week ahead of the debate in order to prepare, yet he still blamed jet lag for his floundering performance, stating, "I didn’t listen to my staff... and then I nearly fell asleep on stage.”
I don’t care who you are, jet lag does not last that long, and there were clearly other factors in play here, but the media at the time did not even question the explanation, and the administration pushed that narrative as hard as it could.
Biden’s former chief of staff, Ron Klain, was part of the former president's debate prep team, and their work started a week before the candidates hit the stage and five days after the European journey had ended, leaving more than enough time to recover.
In one of the many books written in the wake of the Biden administration, Klain revealed that his former boss was "fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged" during debate prep.
"At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin," author Chris Whipple wrote, Klain "was startled. He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.”
This was not about the trip, and I think that Biden’s medical revelations after leaving office have made that abundantly clear. Biden was likely fatigued because he had cancer running through his body, but that was supposedly not diagnosed until after he left office in what now appears to be a clear cover-up, in my opinion.
In Harris’ new memoir, she writes, "Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president.”
She continued, "On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired."
That, in my opinion, is a very careful way of saying that Joe was not capable of doing the job. Harris knows that if she holds Biden under the bus while it drives over him, the former president's family will come after her with everything they have, so she just decided to give him a gentle nudge off the curb as the bus was approaching.
That is the job. A president needs to be able to go for four years on about four hours of sleep a night, fewer during a crisis. He needs to be able to do that while traveling the world multiple times over, doing pressers, and holding countless meetings every single day. Harris just admitted that Biden was not up to the task. I just wonder how many people will read between the lines or continue to defend Biden’s lame excuses.
