‘Simply Not Good at the Job’

‘No one wants to hear your pity party,’ one ex-official said, while another said the ex-veep ‘had basically zero substantive role’

Joe Biden’s ex-aides have unleashed on Kamala Harris after she claimed in her new book that White House staff intentionally tried to knock her down, accusing the former vice president of scapegoating Biden to cover her own failures.

“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” one of a dozen former Biden aides interviewed by Axios 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.”

Biden is “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign,” the ex-aide went on. “Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”

Harris goes after Biden’s White House team in her forthcoming book 107 Days, accusing Biden aides of failing to defend her record and even sabotaging her at times, according to an excerpt published Wednesday by The Atlantic. “Getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible,” Harris writes in the excerpt, saying that “it seemed as if [Biden aides] decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”

Harris in the excerpt even goes after Biden’s decision to seek reelection, suggesting that it was “recklessness.”

“Their thinking was zero-sum,” Harris says of Biden aides: “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital.”

Other aides complained that Biden “made a mistake picking Harris as vice president in the first place and fumed that Harris was now using Democratic Party resources to sell a book that could divide the party,” according to the Axios report.

“On the border stuff in particular, I’d also say,” one former official said, “if she had spent a fraction of the time and energy doing the work that she did on complaining, about how she was perceived, she would have been perceived a whole lot better.”

“No one wants to hear your pity party,” one former Biden official told Politico one day before Axios published its report.

Biden aides are not the only people to criticize Harris. Democratic donors have recently blasted her presidential campaign last fall as “pathetic” and “traumatizing.” She ended her campaign with more than $20 million in debt, which the Democratic National Committee quietly paid off while leading donors to believe their money was going toward future elections. The party itself has been in turmoil for months, beset by financial troubles, bitter infighting, and sinking approval ratings.