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:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
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.”
