A top campaign aide during former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed 2024 presidential run has placed the blame for her loss solely at the feet of President Joe Biden, according to a new book.
David Plouffe, who was drafted into Harris’s campaign after Biden stepped away from the race last summer, didn’t parse words, saying the then-president “totally f***ed us” by not dropping out of the race sooner.
Before working with Harris, Plouffe managed former President Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign and served as a senior adviser in his White House.
He gave his unfiltered opinions in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, a new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
Plouffe is quoted as calling Harris’s 107-day campaign “a f***ing nightmare,” which he said was “all Biden.”
In the book, Plouffe says he received calls from several donors worried about what they saw as Biden’s declining health and cognitive skills, and his ability to deliver speeches. He said he pushed the White House and the Democratic Party on whether or not they really felt hitching their electoral hopes to Biden again in 2024 was the best course of action.
In addition to Plouffe, authors Tapper and Thompson spoke to approximately 200 people, including members of Congress, the White House, and campaign insiders about the campaign. Plouffe wasn’t the only one sounding the alarm about Biden, according to their reporting.
A senior aide, who quit the White House because they did not believe Biden should be running, told the authors that “we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”
The staffer said that they “love Joe Biden,” but also felt that it was ” a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.”
Another prominent Democratic strategist accused Biden of “stealing” a 2024 victory from the American public.
“It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic party; he stole it from the American people,” the strategist reportedly said.
The book also reveals that Biden’s aides had discussed his potential use of a wheelchair if he were re-elected.
“Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election,” Tapper and Thompson write.
Aides at the time believed that putting Biden in a chair during the election would hurt his chances of beating Donald Trump. But Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, reportedly “privately said that if [Biden] had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery.”
The book further claims that Biden did not recognize actor George Clooney — who eventually called for the president to step away from the race, despite his admiration for him — during a 2024 fundraiser.
While questions of Biden’s apparent decline were circulating behind closed doors in the White House and Democratic movers and shakers, the public focus on his cognitive abilities came to a head following his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June of 2024.
According to the book, Senator Chuck Schumer confronted Biden after the debate at his home in Rehoboth, Delaware, and tried to convince him to step aside to preserve his legacy. He reportedly warned that if he continued and lost to Trump, half a century of “amazing, beautiful work goes out the window.”
“But it’s worse than that – you will go down in American history as one of the darkest figures,” Schumer reportedly said.
Biden reportedly replied to Schumer by telling him he had “bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met.”
The former president did eventually heed the calls to step aside, but many of the book’s subjects argue it was too late to salvage an effective campaign.
