Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign was apparently doomed from the very start.
An excerpt from the new book “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes details several of the absurd demands from the Harris team and how “no daylight” from former President Joe Biden crippled the Harris campaign.
The excerpt from the book notes that Harris’s first interview was a disaster.
As she watched it unfold in front of a national audience eager to see if she could succeed former President Joe Biden, the newly appointed and unexpected Democratic Party nominee looked uncertain of herself and, worse, small.
Harris’s aides concluded that the chair was the issue, not the fact that she avoided questions and instead allowed running mate Tim Walz to join her on-screen and speak for the majority of the time. Anybody who wanted to interview her would then need to meet a rigorous set of requirements regarding the height, arms, and legs of each chair.
“Leg height no less than 15 inches; floor to top of seat height no less than 18.9 inches; arms on chairs may not be very high, arms must fall at a natural height; chairs must be firm,” read a copy of the staging requirement Harris aides passed to reporters which was obtained by The Hill.
Days after Harris launched her disastrous bid to lead the party, she praised the administration and distanced herself from its most unpopular policies. This was one of the demands made by her campaign. Still stinging from the humiliation of being forced to leave, President Biden kept repeating what he wanted to see from his vice president.
He made it clear to his aides—many of whom later surrounded and took control of Harris’s campaign apparatus in the weeks that followed—that her proposals and his policies should not coincide.
In a one-on-one meeting with Harris on the day of her first debate against then-candidate Donald Trump, President Biden pinned her into the proverbial corner, reaffirming his wish for her to defend and uphold his legacy now that he was unable to do so.
“No daylight,” Biden remarked.
Rather, what the White House witnessed was startling: the vice president’s haphazard, whack-a-mole responses as she made unlikely promises. Harris told Dana Bash of CNN that she would name a Republican to her cabinet. Despite her repeated promises during the Democratic primary to fight to enshrine the Green New Deal into law, Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, would forever allow fracking.
However, Harris’s first interview, which was meticulously prepared, highlighted how her handlers were treating her like a child.
As Americans questioned whether she or Trump would be the more significant change agent they demanded, even allies acknowledged that letting Walz do the majority of the talking helped her get through the moment but left her looking like a shrinking violet who was too eager to let others speak for her.
She, Walz, and Bash met on TV after more than a month of her 90-day campaign had passed. While primarily inciting fear about the Trump “oligarchy” that would emerge if voters didn’t choose their ticket, national reporters had dug into the narrative that Democrats were eager to finish the campaign with a closed-off campaign.
As they and their spouses packed up their belongings and got ready to leave their homes, Harris and Biden were hardly ever spotted together in the weeks following the election. In his last interviews, the 82-year-old president had started to make overt attacks on his running mate.
According to aides who spoke with Harris in those last days, his remarks “saddened” her.