Harris admits silence on Biden’s 2024 re-election bid was ‘recklessness’

It was reckless to allow former President Joe Biden to run for re-election last year, former Vice President Kamala Harris admitted in her new book, “107 Days.”

This time last year, Harris was in the thick of her short-lived presidential campaign. With some distance from Washington, D.C., and in retrospect, Harris doesn’t hold back in the first preview of her new book that is set to hit shelves later this month. 

“‘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. 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,” Harris said in the excerpt released by The Atlantic on Wednesday morning. 

While Harris publicly defended Biden throughout his presidency, in the first excerpt of Harris’ highly anticipated account of the shortest presidential campaign in history, the former vice president described how she was often scapegoated by the Biden administration. And for the first time, she admitted that, “perhaps,” she should have told Biden to “consider not running.”

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During her brief presidential campaign, Harris often walked a fine line in trying to defend Biden, for whom she remained his vice president, while also differentiating herself from his unflattering record. 

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“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris infamously said on “The View,” when asked what she would have done differently than Biden. The clip was an instant attack ad for Republican candidates up and down the ballot to pit Biden’s shortcomings on Harris. 

Harris later told Fox News’ Bret Baier that her presidency would “not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” as she sought to distance herself from Biden’s stances on the economy and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. 

“And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” Harris said in the “107 Days” excerpt. “I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.”

Harris said she rationalized her decision to stay quiet by telling herself, “the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup,” and maybe he was “right to believe” he could defeat President Donald Trump again. 

“I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country,” Harris said in the book.

But as described in “Original Sin,” one of several books this year to pull back the curtain on the reality of the Biden administration, loyalty to Biden was wielded as a weapon in the White House. 

“Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a ‘rebuttable presumption.’ I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again,” Harris said in the book. 

In the excerpt, Harris goes on to describe how the “White House rarely pushed back,” when she was criticized for her “gaffes” or when “Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar.’”

Harris explained how she often had to prove her loyalty to Biden, yet Biden’s inner circle “seemed glad” to let her dominate headlines. 

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. 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,” the former vice president argued in the “107 Days” excerpt. 

“His team didn’t get it,” Harris said. 

Fox News Digital reached out to Biden’s office for comment but did not immediately hear back.