3 weeks ago
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Top aides to Joe Biden “aggressively” warned Democratic donors last summer that if the then president was forced out of the 2024 election over concerns about his age and fitness, the party would inevitably make the “mistake” of running the vice-president, Kamala Harris, against Donald Trump, a new book says.
“One donor on the receiving end of an electronic message summed up the sentiments of Biden’s top aides: ‘They were aggressively saying that we would wind up with the vice-president and that would be a mistake.’”
Biden was forced out and Harris did become the nominee. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ account of the campaign that followed, will be published next week – as Trump’s second term enters its third tempestuous month. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Published extracts from the book have described controversial episodes from Harris’s short campaign and conclusive defeat, including her inability to land an interview with the influential podcaster Joe Rogan, in contrast to Trump, and her frustration with close control maintained by former aides to Biden.
Long an issue for Democrats, the question of Biden’s age and fitness came to a head on 27 June, when the president performed disastrously onstage with Trump in Atlanta. Parnes and Allen provide detailed and dramatic insights into the crisis.
Amid calls for Biden to withdraw, the authors write, aides to Biden “frantically push[ed] back in phone calls and in text messages, accusing donors of promoting their own agendas at the expense of Biden, the party, and the country”.
Parnes and Allen then switch to using italics, which they say indicates sources describing personal thoughts or descriptions of the private thoughts and conversations of others.
“It all sounded like a serial killer’s conspiracy theory. Donors want to scrap Biden so they can get his wannabe replacements – the governors, with power over state decisions – to beg them for cash, Biden aides argued.
“This isn’t fucking Wall Street financiers versus Ivy League presidents. Our guy isn’t scared of your money. We have grassroots donors. We have the support of the voters. We have the nomination in hand. All you’re doing is fucking yourself and the president. We will remember this. Capisce?
“The last threat, the ace in the hole, was Kamala Harris. Even if Biden did drop out and you got your dreamed-up open convention, you would only succeed in nominating the vice-president. Is that what you want? You want her? Look at her polling. No one wants her. Forget it. It’s never gonna happen.”
Entreaties fell on deaf ears. Donors “cut off hundreds of millions of dollars”. On 21 July, Biden dropped out.
It was a historic moment but the party moved swiftly to avoid further upheaval. There would be no open convention. Instead, Allen and Parnes describe how opposition to Harris, even from grandees including the former president Barack Obama and the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, was beaten aside by figures including Jim Clyburn, the veteran South Carolina congressman who did much to make Biden the nominee and Harris his running mate just four years before.
“There are some powerful folks saying, ‘Off with both their heads,’ Clyburn thought. They’re all planning to pass over Kamala.”
Parnes and Allen also describe how before becoming the nominee, and for a time after, Harris “pined” for Obama’s support. A painful process, it was made worse by Harris never having forged close ties with the former president and his wife, Michelle, ever since being denied access to a VIP area at the Obamas’ election celebration in Chicago in 2009.
“Doesn’t he see what’s happening? she thought. Harris felt hurt that he thought so little of her. That pain turned to anger. What’s holding him back?”
According to Parnes and Allen, Obama never thought Harris could beat Trump but backed her when he saw he was under threat himself, “suddenly in a position where his actions against Biden and Harris could diminish him in the eyes of Democratic elites”.
Obama endorsed Harris and campaigned for her. So did Pelosi, who spoke of her “immense pride” in doing so.
Parnes and Allen report a less positive verdict from the former speaker. According to an unnamed “person who spoke to” Pelosi on the night of the Atlanta debate, Pelosi “actually was worried … saying, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be her.’”
