In their book Fight, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes offer an account of the “Wildest Battle for the White House” – and a scathing indictment of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the losers of that battle.
By 2023, a year before the campaign, Biden’s age and fitness to be president were the topic of conversation among senior aides. He had difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence, yet there was no serious discussion of his exiting the ticket until it was way, way too late. Harris, meanwhile, was isolated in her party and terrified of facing the press. She took the wheel of a badly listing ship. It sank.
Allen is a veteran political reporter, now at NBC. Parnes is a senior political correspondent for the Hill. Both were once with Politico. Together, they have written two books on Hillary Clinton, HRC and Shattered, and Lucky, an account of how Biden beat Donald Trump to win the White House in 2020. Parnes and Allen possess perspective. Their writing is sober, their sourcing solid.
Their message is clear: Biden should never have sought re-election and his selection of Harris as his running mate was a mistake from the start. By 2024, Biden was too old and too unpopular. He appeared feeble, if not outright addled. But his aides came to view Harris as a liability and so did those at the top of the party. The president’s wife, Jill Biden, opposed Harris’s place on the ticket. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi lacked faith too.
At the same time, Jill and Hunter Biden, the 46th president’s wayward surviving son, bolstered the president’s determination to cling on. They could not let go.
“Nobody walks away from this,” Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden adviser, purportedly told one prominent Democrat. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.”
Allen and Parnes add: “That was doubly true for the first lady.”
Pushback could be construed as disloyalty. Biden’s closest advisers were family members or dependent on him for their living. That proved to be a problem. There were no social peers with incomes and lives of their own, figures in the mold of James Baker, secretary of state and chief of staff to George HW Bush, or Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser and confidante to Barack and Michelle Obama. Biden bristled at being challenged but was a schmoozer, not a leader. He owed his comeback to Covid-19.
On 27 June 2024, Biden faced Trump on the debate stage in Atlanta – and gave perhaps the most disastrous display in history. Allen and Parnes describe a reception hosted by Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, two days later. The president’s aides had affixed fluorescent tape to the carpet, “colorful bread crumbs [that] showed the leader of the free world where to walk”.
“He knows to look for that,” one aide explained. Think, President Grampa Simpson. It’s a lousy image, whoever the other side is running.
In 2020, the Trump campaign mocked Biden for hiding in his basement. In turn, Bidenites twitted Trump for his inability to handle stairs. Time passed. By 2023, Trump was approaching 80, but Biden had shuffled past it. In public, he froze. The memes flowed but Biden’s woes were not comedic.
According to Parnes and Allen, Harris aides “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”. Jamal Simmons, Harris’s communications director, drew up a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear his boss in.
After the debate, Obama and Pelosi were distraught. The debacle left Obama shocked, if not exactly surprised.
“The 44th president never had much faith in [the] political ability” of his former vice-president, Parnes and Allen write. “Less than two weeks earlier, at [a] Los Angeles fundraiser, Obama led Biden offstage by the wrist after the president stood frozen for a few moments while staring into the crowd.”
Obama was disturbed. Parnes and Allen describe a post-debate call.
“What is your path?” Obama asked Biden.
“What’s my path? Biden thought as he listened to Obama. What’s your fucking plan?”
He intuited Obama’s endgame. But Obama also lacked faith in Harris.
“Obama already had determined that he didn’t think Harris should take the president’s spot on the ballot,” Parnes and Allen write. “‘That was his position from the outset,’ according to one person who spoke to him at the time.”
Pelosi, like Harris from northern California, unlike her a hardened politico with ruthless instincts, thought the same way.
“She actually was worried when people were panicking the night of the debate, saying ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be her,’” Parnes and Allen quote “someone who spoke to Pelosi”.
Obama and Pelosi applied pressure. Biden caved. Harris generated buzz, but not enough. She bested Trump in debate, but memory of that triumph faded swiftly. Harris would not and could not put distance between herself and Biden. The president, his family and his handlers wanted it that way.
Biden and Harris’s shortcomings had been clear for years. In June 2019, on the debate stage, Harris trashed Biden over his record on race. Less than six months later, having burned through millions of dollars, she dropped out of the Democratic primary. Her place on Biden’s ticket resulted from the threat posed by Trump, the protest-filled aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, and the leftward drift and outsized role of identity politics within Democratic ranks.
His opponents brought to a historic low, Trump openly weighs running for a third term, in defiance of the constitution. Whether the Democrats can respond is in grave doubt indeed.
Fight is published in the US by HarperCollins
