President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming climate chief John Kerry wasn’t always a loyal campaign foot soldier.
While Biden appears to be rewarding loyalty as the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator forms his administration, appointing longtime aides to plum White House posts, the opposite is true of Kerry.
Kerry, Biden’s Senate colleague from Massachusetts for 24 years, and former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, was overheard in an Iowa hotel lobby discussing a last-minute White House bid the weekend before the disastrous February caucuses. At the time, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination.
Kerry, then a high-profile Biden campaign supporter, denied the report in an expletive-laden tweet.
“As I told the reporter, I am absolutely not running for President. Any report otherwise is f—ing (or categorically) false. I’ve been proud to campaign with my good friend Joe Biden, who is going to win the nomination, beat Trump, and make an outstanding president,” the 2004 Democratic standard-bearer wrote.
Biden finished fourth in Iowa, but his dominance in South Carolina revived his flagging White House aspirations.
But 10 months later, Biden seems to have forgiven the embarrassing episode, praising Kerry Monday after naming him the first special presidential envoy for climate to sit on the National Security Council.
“Secretary Kerry elevated environmental challenges as diplomatic priorities, from oceans to hydrofluorocarbons. He was a key architect of the Paris Climate Accord, and signed the historic agreement to reduce carbon emissions with his granddaughter on his lap,” the transition team said in a statement.
