It’s the gift that keeps on giving, and will keep on giving right up until 2028 — unfortunately for Kamala Harris.
Perhaps you haven’t had the time to buy or digest all of “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” the book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson released on Tuesday.
While the premise is kind of in the title and it doesn’t tell you anything you probably wouldn’t suspect (Joe Biden was unfit for office and had been for quite some time, “Lady McBiden” was an apt descriptor for Jill Biden, the “politburo” of people that surrounded Joe also did him no favors, and those outside that inner circle — either in the White House or the wider Democratic Party — were completely impotent or unwilling to force reality upon the former president until it was forced upon him on a debate stage) there are still curious and interesting takeaways from the book, should you be on the lookout for them.
For instance, there’s the meta-textual spectacle of co-author Tapper humiliating himself by trying to apologize for not asking more probing questions when he was part of the general media cover-up of Biden’s unfitness.
There are the other stories in the text of media gutlessness; former White House deputy chief of staff Steve Ricchetti reportedly threatened another reporter into dropping a report “that behind the scenes the president was having serious and disturbing moments, forgetting names and facts, sometimes seeming seriously confused at meetings.”
And then there’s former Vice President Kamala Harris, who comports herself in the most Kamala Harris-y way possible during one of the book’s funnier moments.
It mostly slipped under the radar given that “Original Sin” dropped four days after the audio from Biden’s interview with Robert Hur — which, through slurs and numerous pauses, showed him to be more mentally checked out than even the already-bad transcripts did — and two days after Biden announced he had Stage 4B metastatic prostate cancer, something which competent White House physicians should have detected and which he likely had in some form through most of his presidency.
However, let’s take a breather from all that and go back to debate night, 2024 — June 27, to be precise, when Kamala Harris went on TV to defend her doddering, barely alive president, and was livid that CNN’s Anderson Cooper deigned to ask her serious questions.
Specifically, she was upset “this m**********r doesn’t treat me like the d*** vice president of the United States.”
Will Kamala Harris attempt another run for the presidency?
Harris, the book notes, was watching the debate from Los Angeles, preparing for a post-debate media blitz from the Fairmont Century Plaza. “She didn’t say much as she watched but occasionally asked those with open laptops what people were saying.”
She apparently didn’t notice it was a car crash — and was somewhat stunned to learn “that serious people were calling on Biden to step aside,” Tapper and Thompson note.
“Harris appeared surprised that the panic had reached this level so quickly. Some people on the Biden campaign suggested that she cancel her interviews. They argued that she didn’t want to make it look like she was trying to upstage him,” Tapper and Thompson write.
Harris being Harris and having a history of wading into things that are very bad ideas, she decided against this: “She and her team began brainstorming how they could at once address the poor performance and defend the president. They debated so long that they missed Harris’s interview with CBS and were late for the next one.
“Five minutes before going on CNN, Harris herself landed on the line she would use: Acknowledge the slow start but then point to the strong finish,” Tapper and Thompson note.
After what we saw that night, “slow start” but “strong finish” is a bit like saying that in the 2001 soccer match between Australia and American Samoa — where Australia won a 31-0 victory which remains the largest margin of victory at the international level in the history of the sport — that Australia scored 16 of those goals in the first half and American Samoa only let in 15 during the second.
CNN Fact-Checks Kamala Harris to Her Face Live on Air
KAMALA HARRIS: “On substance, on policy, on performance, Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong.”
ANDERSON COOPER: “But I’m sorry, on substance and policy and performance tonight, I mean, the president’s performance tonight… pic.twitter.com/51Lp1o7nSn
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) June 28, 2024
Sure, it was Anderson Cooper 31, Kamala Harris 0 — but at least he only owned her 15 times in the second half of the interview.
Unbelievably, Harris thought Cooper had it out for her:
“After the interview, Harris was visibly angry with Cooper. He had been asking the questions the nation had been wondering, but she took it personally,” the book states.
“This m**********r doesn’t treat me like the d*** vice president of the United States. I thought we were better than that.”
Now, let’s put this into context: This debate performance was so bad that Donald Trump’s campaign put together their most devastating ad featuring 90 seconds of the debate that featured zero seconds of their own candidate talking. It was all Biden. That’s all they had to do:
Needless to say, the drugs didn’t work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024
She watched what we all watched, didn’t get “that the panic had reached this level so quickly,” thought this could get waived away by saying something to the effect of “sure that start was bad, but did you see how he landed the dismount from the trainwreck? Epic!”, and then flipped out in private on “this m**********r” — usually in the tank for team Biden — for not treating that line of thinking seriously.
The rest of the book is just as crushing for Harris, particularly in laying out how she struggled — well, refused is probably the right word — to take positions contrary to Biden so as not to be perceived as “disloyal,” and how the rest of the party heads outside of the Biden “politburo” infrastructure expressed some skepticism that she should automatically inherit the top of the ticket once Biden recused himself in mid-July.
However, if you need one anecdote from “Original Sin” on why everything Kamala Harris did in 2024 should disqualify her from serious consideration in 2028, one need only read that she flipped out on someone for pointing out the obvious — which even she couldn’t see, apparently.
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