When Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate in August, he was fulfilling a promise he had made in June to pick a woman of color for the job. Yet, a new book reveals how close Harris came instead to being relegated to the dustbin of history.
The book, by The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, is excerpted at Politico. The focus of the piece is Harris’s quasi-emotional rebuke of Biden over busing during night two of the first primary debate and Joe and Jill Bidens’ reaction. I write quasi, because shortly after her nomination, Harris appeared on CBS’s “The Late Show” where she was asked by host Stephen Colbert to explain how she went from “being such a passionate opponent on such bedrock principles” as busing and racism to Biden’s BFF. Her answer — “IT WAS A DEBATE!” — was tantamount to saying, “It was acting.”
As a refresher, here is Harris’s “heartfelt” response to Biden’s boast about having worked well in the Senate with segregationists:
According to Dovere, after the speech, Biden leaned over toward Pete Buttigieg, whom he didn’t know very well at the time, and said, “That was some f*cking bullsh*t.”
But Biden, who is well-known for his foul mouth, wasn’t the only member of his household to drop an f-bomb in reaction to Harris’s comments. His wife, “Dr.” Jill, spoke by phone the following week to high-level supporters. Still smarting from the diss, she said, “With what he cares about, what he fights for, what he’s committed to, you get up there and call him a racist without basis? Go f*ck yourself.”
