First lady Jill Biden voiced her dismay with Kamala Harris being considered to be her husband’s running mate after she attacked him during a debate over school busing, according to a new book.
Newly disclosed details on the early dissatisfaction in the Biden camp with Harris, a primary rival who did end up joining President Joe Biden’s ticket in the 2020 election, appear in excerpts from This Will Not Pass, a book due out in May written by New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin.
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“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?” the book says, according to Politico.
During a debate in June 2019, Harris confronted Joe Biden for touting his work with segregationists during his 36-year Senate career representing Delaware and for opposing federally mandated busing in the 1960s and 1970s. Harris then surged in polling and fundraising, but that momentum did not last. By December of that year, she dropped out of the race.
After locking up the nomination, Joe Biden announced that Harris would be his running mate in August 2020, at which time Jill Biden welcomed Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, to the fall fight.
“Hey @DouglasEmhoff. Are you ready?” she tweeted. Emhoff replied, “Ready to work! Let’s go @DrBiden!”
Jill Biden’s team declined to comment on the new book’s anecdote.
“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,” said Michael LaRosa, the first lady’s spokesman.
Other excerpts from the book include allies of the vice president complaining about the tasks that she was given throughout the first year of the Biden administration and how Biden threatened to fire staffers who leaked negative stories about Harris.
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One particular excerpt from the book says Kate Bedingfield, the communications director for Biden, criticized Harris for the dysfunction within her office, claiming her “Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco.”
Bedingfield disputed this account.
“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 told Politico in a statement. “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.”
