Friction between Harris and Biden camps revealed in new book

 

POLITICO Playbook: Friction between Harris and Biden camps revealed in new book

By EUGENE DANIELS and RACHAEL BADE  03/22/2022 06:13 AM EDT Updated 03/22/2022 08:27 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/playbook

 

A new book reveals some frustrations at the highest echelons of the White House between the Biden and Harris camps.

 

The White House has worked hard to project a united front between President JOE BIDEN and VP KAMALA HARRIS and their respective teams.

 

But the upcoming book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future” ($29.99), by NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, reveals some frustrations at the highest echelons of the White House between the Biden and Harris camps, as well as the VP’s angst over the policy portfolio she was given.

 

Playbook got its hands on some juicy excerpts:

 

— Harris allies complained throughout the first year of the administration that she was handed an impossible portfolio. According to the book, KATE BEDINGFIELD, Biden’s comms director, not only grew tired of the criticism that the White House was mismanaging Harris — she blamed the VP.

 

“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,” Martin and Burns write.

 

“The fact that no one working on this book bothered to call to fact check this unattributed claim tells you what you need to know,” Bedingfield responded in an email Monday night. “Vice President Harris is a force in this administration and I have the utmost respect for the work she does every day to move the country forward.”

 

— The Biden White House had been remarkably leak-proof in the first several months. But that began to change after Harris’ trip to Guatemala in June to address immigration, with reports of dysfunction in her office finding their way to print.

 

That ticked off Biden, according to the book. The president hauled senior staff into the Oval Office and warned if “he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice president, Biden said, they would quickly be former staff.”

 

— Meanwhile, Harris was growing increasingly agitated by her predicament. “One senator close to her, describing Harris’s frustration level as ‘up in the stratosphere,’ lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy,’” Martin and Burns write. “Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”

 

— The pair reports that Harris and Biden have had a “friendly but not close” personal relationship, “and their weekly lunches lacked a real depth of personal and political intimacy.”

 

— As for the VP’s portfolio, they write that Harris, wary of being hemmed in, didn’t want to pick a few signature issues. She even told White House aides “in frank terms that she did not want to be restricted to a few subjects mainly associated with women and Black Americans.”

 

Harris did ask to lead the administration’s push to shore up federal voting rights. But as the effort stalled in Congress, leaving the White House (and Harris) with not many options, she placed some of the blame at Biden’s feet, according to the book. “How was she supposed to communicate clearly about voting-rights legislation, Harris asked West Wing aides, when the president would not even say that he supported changing the Senate rules to open the path for a bill?”

 

As calls for Biden to come out in favor of a filibuster carve-out for voting rights and frustration with the White House’s perceived lack of prioritization of the issue grew, Harris told Biden aides that she couldn’t be as forceful publicly as she wanted to be. She told him she couldn’t go all out until “voters knew that Biden himself was willing to back the procedural steps required to” pass legislation, the two write.

 

The VP’s office declined to comment on the excerpts.

 

— Martin and Burns add new details to first lady JILL BIDEN’s discontent with Harris as a top VP choice after she went after Joe Biden over school busing during a debate.

 

“Speaking in confidence with a close adviser to her husband’s campaign, the future First lady posed a pointed question. There are millions of people in the United States, she began. Why, she asked, do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?”

 

Jill Biden’s spokesman, MICHAEL LAROSA, repeated the statement her office has issued in the past on this type of reporting: “Many books will be written on the 2020 campaign, with countless retellings of events — some accurate, some inaccurate. The First Lady and her team do not plan to comment on any of them.”