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Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday that former President Joe Biden should not have sought re-election and that Democrats might have been better off if he had made that decision sooner.
NBC News host Kristen Welker asked Buttigieg about former Vice President Kamala Harris’ new book, in which she described the former president’s decision to run for re-election as reckless.
“He should not have run,” Buttigieg told Welker. “And if he had made that decision sooner, we might have been better off. But it literally was his decision. Nobody else was able to make that decision. And now in front of us, we’re confronted with the decisions that come next, whether that’s inside the political party or movement or as we’re all weighing right now, in our own lives, as Americans, as a country. And that’s where we’ve got to focus.”
Welker also pressed Buttigieg on whether he ever urged Biden not to run and whether it was reckless for the people around him to not do so.
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“I was not included in the process of deciding whether the president should run again,” Buttigieg said. “He made that decision and I think I’m not alone in believing that he should have made the decision not to run sooner.”
The former transportation secretary added, “we are where we are” as a country and a party.
“What matters now is how we build a different kind of future where people — not just politically, but nationally, where people can see themselves in what comes next,” he added.
In an excerpt of her new book, “107 Days,” Harris wrote that the stakes were too high for Biden to run again.
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“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision,” Harris wrote in the book, according to the excerpt released by The Atlantic on Wednesday morning.
Former aides to Biden criticized the book excerpt in comments to Axios.
Several Biden aides told Axios that Harris was trying to scapegoat Biden instead of reflecting on her own failures as vice president.
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“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” a former Biden White House official said. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”
Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
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