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Kamala Harris has revealed she was left “angry and disappointed” when Joe Biden called her hours before her US presidential debate with Donald Trump to suggest powerful associates of Biden’s brother refused to support her.
The former vice-president and Democratic nominee recounts the episode – and other criticisms of Biden – in her campaign memoir 107 Days, obtained by the Guardian before its publication next week.
Harris writes that in September she was in a hotel room in Philadelphia, poised to take on Trump in a potentially decisive debate, when the then president called to wish her good luck – and to ask if she would be back in Philadelphia before the election.
Harris wondered why Biden would ask such a non sequitur. According to the book, he told her: “My brother called. He’s been talking to a group of real power brokers in Philly.” He offered several names and asked if Harris knew them. She did not.
Harris writes: “Then he got to his point. His brother had told him that those guys were not going to support me because I’d been saying bad things about him. He wasn’t inclined to believe it, he claimed, but he thought I should know in case my team had been encouraging me to put daylight between the two of us.”
The then vice-president asked Biden to put the group in touch with her directly. But he was not done with the call. He sought to rewrite the history of his own disastrous debate performance against Trump three months earlier.
“Joe then rattled on about his own former debate performances. ‘I beat him the other time; I wasn’t feeling well in that last one.’ He continued to insist that his debate performance hadn’t hurt him much with the electorate. I was barely listening.”
Harris goes on to reflect that her debate against Trump would be like “a big prizefight”, with huge consequences for America and the world, and she needed to be at the top of her game.
She writes of Biden: “I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself. Distracting me with worry about hostile powerbrokers in the biggest city of the most important state.”
Her husband, Doug Emhoff, “could see how angry and disappointed I was. ‘Let it go,’ he said. He knew I had to redirect my focus. ‘Don’t worry about him. You’re dealing with Trump. Let it go.’”
During the campaign and in its aftermath, Harris had avoided criticism of the president she served beside and defended him amid questions about his mental acuity.
But in 107 Days she lays bare tensions between the two. When the supreme court overturned the Roe v Wade decision on abortion in 2022, for example, “Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment.”
Harris acknowledges there was a distinction between Biden’s ability to govern and to campaign, and that she had concerns about the latter. “His voice was no longer strong, his verbal stumbles more frequent,” she writes.
There was an awkward meeting on 4 July, when Biden was facing growing calls to step aside in the wake of his feeble debate performance. Harris hugged him and notes that “he felt so frail”, while Emhoff was led away to see the first lady at the time, Jill Biden.
Harris reports: “She seemed tense, even angry. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded. ‘Are you supporting us?’ Of course, Doug said. Of course we are supporting you. ‘OK. That’s really important. We need to know that.’
“When I joined him,” Harris continues, “Doug was wearing a grim expression. Doug runs cool. He’s slow to anger. But I could tell something had gotten to him.
“Later, he unloaded. ‘They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterised, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them. Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people.
“And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?”
Harris had felt similar frustrations, recalling how she was once castigated by Biden’s team for apparently delivering a speech too well. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.”
Biden bowed to the inevitable and dropped out of the election race on 21 July, then endorsed Harris. Campaign advisers urged her to distance herself from the president. David Plouffe, a senior aide, eventually told her: “People hate Joe Biden.” Harris admits: “It was hard for me to hear that.”
She had just over three months to fight Trump and his army of rightwing influencers. At the end of July, the Republican nominee falsely claimed that Harris, whose mother was Indian and father is Jamaican, “happened to turn Black” a few years ago, a remark that blew up all over the media.
Harris told campaign aide Brian Fallon that she was not going to take Trump’s bait. She writes in the book: “‘Today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?’
“Brian, on the other end of the phone, fell silent. I imagined the deep crimson of his blush.”
