We all remember the moment. In 2019, then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) decided to go for the jugular in a debate with the 2020 Democratic candidates for president. Joe Biden was the top target. The attack line was linking the former VP to his past relationships with segregationist senators. Her team found the letters from these men, the photos with Joe, and his past remarks about them. They had the opposition research. Now, it was time to execute the delivery. Yet, Politico’s lengthy piece about the swipe noted how Harris didn’t hate Biden and didn’t want to make this attack personal. She did like and respect the aging Democrat, but this was a debate. It’s a primary. And when has friendship ever trumped political ambition?
It was a devastating attack made worse by Biden’s inability to hit back in real-time:
“I’m going to now direct this at Vice President Biden: I do not believe you are a racist, and I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground,” she said, looking over at him. “But I also believe, and it’s personal—it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
There was some panic among political consulting circles. The publication noted that an operative stated the Biden camp was trying to run out the clock, but the game hadn’t started. At Biden’s campaign HQ, there was an acknowledgment that Harris delivered a hard punch, but it wasn’t a knockout. National elections are a marathon, not a sprint. The Biden surrogates at the debate site, however, all had the same feeling: addressing the media that night was going to suck.
And then, things fell apart, which was not a shock since Harris' campaign was an overall disaster. When the dust settled, both Harris and Biden really didn’t have much disagreement about federal busing policy. The core issue regarding busing was a bit of an anachronism to begin with, and the fact that the main crux of her attack was neutralized…by Harris herself made this into a massive nothing burger. Harris got the first down-conversion, which later became a safety on a bad snap into her own endzone.
Joe took the attack somewhat well. I mean, he won the 2020 Democratic nomination. He outlasted everyone, even people some thought would outlast him given the changing stripes of the Democratic base, which has an unhealthy obsession with diversity. It’s one thing to encourage it. It’s another to bean count this, that, and the other regarding racial backgrounds to determine if an institution needs canceling. Politico added that Biden told Pete Buttigieg that Harris’ attack was “some f***ing bull****” during a commercial break that night. One person who was not happy with Harris was Jill Biden:
Jill Biden didn’t have to worry about being so politic, and never had. She had watched the debate from her seat in the opera house, about ready to jump out of it. She’s small and a community college professor. Most people forget that she’s proudly still the Philly girl who likes to tell the story of when she showed up at the door of a boy named Drew who’d been throwing worms at her 9-year-old sister, and, in Jill’s telling, “pulled back and punched him in the face.”
The aides could do the political maneuvering after Harris’ attack. Jill was and is the guardian of the Biden honor, the Biden id. She couldn’t bear to watch a woman who called herself a friend of her son’s—although Beau was not her biological child, she’d raised him his entire life as if he were—try to tear her husband down, to score a point at a debate.
“With what he cares about, what he fights for, what he’s committed to, you get up there and call him a racist without basis?” she said on a phone call with close supporters a week later, according to multiple people on the call. “Go f--- yourself.”
But that was then. Now, Jill is in the news for stuff like butchering the pronunciation of Sí se puede