Sir Richard Spirit
Superstar
It was just after 5 p.m. in Houston, and the president would be addressing the nation from the Oval Office later that evening.
I watched it at the hotel that night. It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.
“I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.”
And that was it.
I am a loyal person.
During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.
He was, by some measures, the most consistently underestimated man in Washington. He’d been right about his tactics for pushing his agenda through a resistant Congress.
It was just possible he was right about this, too.
And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.
“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.
I was well aware of my delicate status. Lore has it that every outgoing chief of staff always tells the incoming president’s chief of staff Rule No. 1: Watch the VP. Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again.
When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans.
Lorraine Voles, my chief of staff, constantly had to advocate for my role at events: “She’s not going to stand there like a potted plant. Give her two minutes of remarks. Have her introduce the president.”
They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.
Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.
I was the first vice president to have a dedicated press pool tracking my every public move. Before me, vice presidents had what’s called a “supplemental pool,” as the first lady does, covering important events. Because of this constant attention, things that had never been especially newsworthy about the vice president were suddenly reported and scrutinized.
And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.
“The VP should take on irregular migration.”
Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Even the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family-separation policy hadn’t deterred the desperate. It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time.
No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.
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