It’s easy to forget the roaring momentum that accompanied former Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascendance to the top of the Democratic ticket last summer. The entire Democratic machine kicked into gear to awesome effect. Hollywood showed out. Brat summer commenced. Time magazine featured a cover captioned “Her Moment,” with a close-up of Harris gazing aspirationally into a sea of placard-waving adorers. The article went on to describe the ways in which “Harris became a political phenomenon.”

But not everyone in the Democratic establishment believed she had the goods to become Obama 2.0 — including Obama himself. In their recent book, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes flesh out what many have long assumed: that Obama doubted Harris’s ability to win and preferred an open primary that would allow a different nominee to emerge. His hoped-for ticket? Rising star governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Wes Moore of Maryland. The combination of a white woman and a black man, he believed, would appease Democratic voters clamoring for a black woman president.