The Biden-Harris Relationship Makes Sense Now 

Not being clairvoyant, I can’t tell you how the Democratic primary electorate or the broader public will react to the revelations in Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir, 107 Days, when it hits bookshelves in two weeks. I can’t tell you if it means Harris is planning to run for president in 2028. I can’t tell you if it would help or hurt such an endeavor.  

I can tell you that the excerpt published this week in The Atlantic completes a missing piece of the puzzle that is the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris relationship, and in turn, what drove the Biden presidency. 

An early head-scratching move was Biden’s decision in March 2021 to tap his Vice President to lead a diplomatic effort with foreign leaders to address “root causes” of immigration from Mexico and Central America. As immigration policy is a chronically thorny challenge, the assignment was fraught with political danger. White House aides tried to convey to reporters that Harris wasn’t being asked to own the entire issue, but that didn’t stop characterization in the media that she was now the “point person” on immigration, with conservative outlets glomming on to the notion that she was the “Border Czar.” 

Right after Biden was elected in November 2020, I speculated that Harris would spend an inordinate amount of time on Rust Belt factory floors. This struck me as obvious political logic. Biden wasn’t likely to run in 2024. Harris is the heir apparent, but, as a woman of color from the Bay Area, doesn’t have the bond with swing-state working-class whites that Biden had cultivated over decades in office. What better way to use the next few years than to follow in Biden’s footsteps, forge those bonds, and expand her support? And what worse way than getting tangled up in the immigration thicket? 

Still, I didn’t jump to cynical conclusions when the immigration position was created for Harris. Writing in late 2021 about the harsh media coverage Harris had received, I charitably offered the following:  

Today, some political observers consider Harris’s big policy assignments—voting rights and immigration—as political lemons. “Is Biden Setting Up Harris to Fail?” posed a June headline from Slate. Biden has no incentive to do so. He and she simply are stuck with a political dilemma: Any policy assignment puts Harris in a politically awkward position. 

In 107 Days, Harris comes pretty darn close to saying she was set up to fail. Before recounting her experience with the migration portfolio, she writes, “When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.” After tallying up her successes (which I had contemporaneously reported on for the Monthly), Harris shares her frustrations:  

When Republicans mischaracterized my role as “border czar,” no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved … I wanted to get that good news out. But White House staff stalled. “Not yet. We need more data.” The story remained untold. Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. 

Harris laments, “No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with. [Emphasis original.] Then the Dobbs decision came down. Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me.” She also claims that when she “gave a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” at a time when Biden was “taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza,” even though the speech was vetted she got “castigated” by West Wing aides, “for, apparently, delivering it too well.”  

She concludes that West Wing “thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.” I see a different glaring political omission; the West Wing didn’t construct a four-year strategy to strengthen her standing in Middle America. Deploying her to defend reproductive rights and chide Netanyahu underlined her progressive bona fides, but didn’t do anything to help her connect with the swing voters necessary for electoral success. 

Now, maybe Harris’s side of the story isn’t the entire story. Maybe there was a legitimate reason to be cautious about overselling early migration data. Maybe she’s exaggerating the internal upset over her Gaza speech. But litigating such fine points is not necessary to draw a significant conclusion: by putting Harris in the position to have to shoulder an outsized portion of the immigration challenge from the outset of Biden’s administration, his political team implicitly revealed they never intended to pass the baton in 2024.  

“I don’t think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me,” Biden argued to ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos after his politically fatal debate with Donald Trump. A few days earlier, Biden’s closest ally in the Senate, Delaware’s Chris Coons said, “I think he’s the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump.” In retrospect, these self-serving arguments don’t look like hastily concocted Hail Marys, but part of a long-standing game plan to justify running for a second term.  

Biden surely had to know that Harris retained presidential ambitions when he picked her. Perhaps the flip side is that the rest of us should have known that Biden wouldn’t give up his own decades-long presidential ambitions so easily. After all, this was a guy who ran twice before. Barack Obama picked him to be Vice President with the implicit understanding that he was too old to be the successor, and Obama would not have to be looking over his shoulder. But Biden’s burning desire to carve out a name for himself sometimes bubbled over, like in 2012 when he publicly supported legalizing same-sex marriages ahead of Obama. Biden seriously considered upending the 2016 presidential primary, only backing out under pressure from Obama, pressure for which reportedly Biden retains resentment.  

In many ways, Biden’s enormous ambition and decades of perseverance served him and the country well. That Biden was uniquely positioned and prepared to defeat Trump in 2020 is true, having exponentially more experience than anyone navigating highly charged, polarized electorates. But Biden’s blinkered inner circle had difficulty seeing how fast times can change.  

Hunter Biden recently whined on a podcast, “Just remember, Joe Biden got 81 million votes. And it wasn’t because of Donald Trump that Joe Biden got 81 million votes. Joe Biden got more votes than anybody that’s ever run for president in the United States before by a large margin.” This is very sloppy thinking. Turnout was unusually high in 2020 because the pandemic prompted widespread early voting and mail voting. Biden’s 51 percent of the popular vote was pretty good considering the politically divided era he was running in, but far from historically record-breaking. That Donald Trump had nothing to do with Biden’s victory totally defies logic. An electoral performance in 2020 does not guarantee a repeat performance in 2024.  

I have written extensively against ageism and do not believe politicians and their accumulated wisdom should be prematurely kicked to the curb at a fixed age. But succession always has to be on the mind of any leader of an advanced age. Unless a vice president is an elder statesman, the pick is inherently viewed as a successor, and a president needs to put a vice president into a position where they can succeed.  

Critics of Harris can still point to various mistakes for which she must take responsibility, but no politician ever plays error-free ball—certainly not Joe “Gaffe Machine” Biden—and she shouldn’t be judged by unfair double standards. The clearer conclusion is that Biden expected to run for a second term, which informed his first-term strategy. I wrote in 2021 that Biden had “no incentive” to set Harris up to fail, but I had presumed he understood his legacy was tied to being succeeded by Harris, playing a role in ushering in both the first person of color and the first woman of color into the presidency. Accusing him of outright wanting Harris to fail still strikes me as excessive and implausible, but I can no longer hold the presumption that Biden was primarily motivated by setting up Harris for success. And the consequences of his ego-driven approach to the presidency proved severe.  

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