NO MATTER HOW MUCH DEMOCRATIC leaders stress the need to focus on the future, the party seems unable to avoid self-destructive debates about the past.
The latest hop in the DeLorean was delivered courtesy of an excerpt from Kamala Harris’s upcoming book—splashed across the Atlantic’s homepage on Wednesday morning—in which she called it “recklessness” for Joe Biden to have initially chosen to run in the 2024 election. A torrent of anger ensued.
Some Biden aides—no longer on the payroll yet still feverishly loyal—texted reporters that it was wrong for Harris to stick it to Biden after all he’d done for her. Others insisted that as vice president she had been out of her depth and not particularly good at her job. “Sad and pathetic,” one former Biden staffer told me on Friday. Harris aides, meanwhile, defended their boss, arguing that she was perpetually underused, chronically underappreciated, and hamstrung not by her own limitations but by the hypersensitivity of Biden world.
Some Democratic leaders have argued that it will be impossible to move on until the party can meaningfully face the failures of the Biden years. But it was hard to see how this particular round of infighting achieved that.
And yet, no one should have been remotely surprised to see it. Tensions between the Biden and Harris factions have long been simmering—starting early in the Biden administration, rapidly heating up when she replaced him on the ticket, and spilling over the surface after the election ended.
I covered the entirety of it, first at NBC News and then at Politico where I coauthored West Wing Playbook. At the time, West Wing Playbook was a definitive newsletter about the inner workings of the White House, the type of insidery dish that readers privately consumed and publicly hated. It was often gossipy (occasionally trivial) and filled with internal dynamics about the administration and how its policies and priorities were set. For better or worse, it gave me real insights into the operation.
Here’s my candid perspective of the current situation.