- Thursday, December 08, 2022
By: Pramod Thomas
A NEW book has revealed friction between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris though the White House worked hard to project a united front between the president and vice president and their respective teams, according to a media report.
The upcoming book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future by New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, said that Harris and Biden have had a ‘friendly but not close’ personal relationship, Politico reported.
The book also alleged that their weekly lunches lacked a real depth of personal and political intimacy, the report added.
According to the book, Harris allies complained throughout the first year that she was handed an impossible portfolio.
The book pointed out that Biden’s communications director Kate Bedingfield blamed the VP when she ‘grew tired of the criticism’ that the White House was mismanaging Harris.
However, Bedingfield, in an email to Politico, has denied it. “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. 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,” she was quoted as saying by the media outlet.
The book further said that after Harris’ trip to Guatemala in June last year to address immigration, reports of dysfunction in her office got leaked.
According to the book, the president hauled senior staff into the Oval Office and warned against ‘stirring up negative stories about the vice president’.
Martin and Burns wrote in the book that Harris’ approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if the president declined to run.
The book revealed that Harris told White House aides that she did not want to be restricted to a few subjects mainly associated with women and black Americans.
When the effort to shore up federal voting rights was stalled in Congress, leaving the White House (and Harris) with not many options, she placed some of the blame at Biden’s feet, the book said.
The book added that Jill Biden was not happy with Harris as a top VP choice after she attacked Biden during the campaign.
Jill Biden’s spokesman, Michael Larosa, told Politico: “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.”
Meanwhile, Harris’ office declined to comment on the excerpts.
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