Harris' haters: Obama and Pelosi
She doesn't like her. He never thought she should be the candidate.
Alas, I’ve come to empathize with Kamala Harris. The sheer intensity of the clandestine opposition to her leading the presidential ticket, particularly by a pair of the most powerful Democrats in the country, is enough to make you realize she was doomed from the start. As outlined by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in “Fight: Inside The Wildest Battle for the White House,” there weren’t many credible Democrats who ever thought she could beat Donald Trump. And yet she was still preferable to Joe Biden. And she still came pretty damn close. Which makes you take it all a step further back and it dawns on you that Biden’s original sin wasn’t choosing to run again in 2024, it was selecting Harris to be his No. 2 in 2020, perhaps the most consequential vice presidential selection in modern history, since it paved the return of Trump.
The Allen-Parnes tome is called “Fight” but it could aptly be titled “Fear” or “Fold” because the throughline of their story is how most Democrats believed Harris was a loser from the start, and none more so viscerally than Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. Democrats who knew best feared the worst, but folded in their efforts to democratize their process.
From “Fight”:
Pelosi didn’t want Harris, didn’t think the vice president would prevail in a competition for the nomination and didn’t think she would beat Trump. More than that, one Pelosi confidant said, “She doesn’t like Harris.”
…
In private conversations, Obama flat-out told allies she would lose to Trump.
“He did not think she should be the candidate,” said one confidant.
And yet neither party titan was successful in forcing a mini-primary or convention fight that would have spurred a breakneck competition in the ides of August. As powerful as they were, what they lacked was a credible candidate willing to stand up and challenge the sitting vice president, a Black woman.
It’s hard to know if even the top echelon of Harris’ ultimate campaign ever believed.
Consider:
when Biden was on the rocks, the [Jen] O’Malley Dillon-run campaign had argued publicly and privately that the vice president was an inferior candidate. Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager who was particularly close to O’Malley Dillon, had written a memo within hours of the Biden-Trump debate that undercut Harris.
Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager, had sent a memo a couple of days after the debate effectively arguing that Harris couldn’t beat Trump. “We all have our pants down,” one Biden aide said.
And yet Harris still thinks she could’ve won, if only for the man who picked her.
Following a six-day vacation in Hawaii and after returning to Washington for her final month as vice president, Kamala Harris came to a counterintuitive conclusion about her 2024 presidential election loss: She just needed more time. “She could have won, she told friends, if only the election was later in the calendar - or she got in earlier,”
“In other words, Joe Biden was to blame. If only he had not run.”
Continue reading my full story on what Harris came to believe for The Sacramento Bee.
I was one of the people who thought she had a good chance to become the nominee in 2019. Shows you what I know. She's a handsome woman and her views are consistent with today's Democrat party.
IMO, while she may appear to be the frontrunner for the CA gubernatorial nomination I think she will flame out.