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he almost didn't marry, i mean, pick her
www.politico.com
just a little taste:
"The Harris campaign was staring down some hard fundraising math: They had bragged about how well she’d done in the first quarter of the year after her launch, but aides could see she was falling short ahead of the quarterly fundraising deadline on June 30, which would come three days after the debate. She had raised $12 million, and their plan had targeted that number to be at least $15 million. It was also the practical consideration of political math: There was no path to the nomination for Harris—or for pretty much anyone, except for Sanders, and maybe Elizabeth Warren—except through a Biden collapse. Harris had to make a splash to get her political donations up. She had to take Biden down for any of that money to matter.
Then, nine days before that first debate, at a pricey fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, Biden had wandered off in his speech into reminiscing about his early days in Washington, working with the South’s last segregation holdouts in the Senate, when “at least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done.” Like good old James O. Eastland, the rabid segregationist. “He never called me ‘boy,’” Biden said. “He always called me ‘son.’”
When an aide told Harris what Biden had said, she winced. “He did what?” she asked, with an oh no tone that captured the sense of the many people who cared for Biden but felt as if all he was doing was proving he should be out to pasture. When she spoke publicly about his remarks, she went at him with an ax. “If the people he was talking about with such affection had their way, I would never have been able to be a United States senator,” she said to reporters two days later in South Carolina.
Another candidate, Cory Booker, had really wanted to summon righteous, disappointed anger to destroy Biden. He could hear the lines in his head, thought maybe that a star moment at the debates could bounce him into the contention he wasn’t attracting on his own. But the Democratic National Committee had scheduled two nights of 10 candidates each in Miami, and Booker had been stuck on the first night, which had so few of the front-runners that it was treated like the JV stage.
That left Harris.
Her campaign was prepared. Smith, a wizard of the dark arts of opposition research, had already dug through Eastland’s archived papers at the University of Mississippi, and let the letters to him from Biden dribble out in the press. A month earlier, an aide had slipped the Washington Post the file on Biden’s record on busing. The Harris campaign was armed with video clips and related storylines, like Biden’s work with Strom Thurmond on tough-on-crime measures in the 1970s that just reinforced the bad look of the 1994 crime bill Biden had championed. Smith used to tell people he was like Baskin-Robbins, 31 flavors of Biden trouble. He hadn’t expected to be able to start with a sundae."
The Inside Story of the Biden-Harris Debate Blowup
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have appeared so in lockstep that it’s hard to remember how tense their early campaign days were.
www.politico.com
just a little taste:
"The Harris campaign was staring down some hard fundraising math: They had bragged about how well she’d done in the first quarter of the year after her launch, but aides could see she was falling short ahead of the quarterly fundraising deadline on June 30, which would come three days after the debate. She had raised $12 million, and their plan had targeted that number to be at least $15 million. It was also the practical consideration of political math: There was no path to the nomination for Harris—or for pretty much anyone, except for Sanders, and maybe Elizabeth Warren—except through a Biden collapse. Harris had to make a splash to get her political donations up. She had to take Biden down for any of that money to matter.
Then, nine days before that first debate, at a pricey fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, Biden had wandered off in his speech into reminiscing about his early days in Washington, working with the South’s last segregation holdouts in the Senate, when “at least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done.” Like good old James O. Eastland, the rabid segregationist. “He never called me ‘boy,’” Biden said. “He always called me ‘son.’”
When an aide told Harris what Biden had said, she winced. “He did what?” she asked, with an oh no tone that captured the sense of the many people who cared for Biden but felt as if all he was doing was proving he should be out to pasture. When she spoke publicly about his remarks, she went at him with an ax. “If the people he was talking about with such affection had their way, I would never have been able to be a United States senator,” she said to reporters two days later in South Carolina.
Another candidate, Cory Booker, had really wanted to summon righteous, disappointed anger to destroy Biden. He could hear the lines in his head, thought maybe that a star moment at the debates could bounce him into the contention he wasn’t attracting on his own. But the Democratic National Committee had scheduled two nights of 10 candidates each in Miami, and Booker had been stuck on the first night, which had so few of the front-runners that it was treated like the JV stage.
That left Harris.
Her campaign was prepared. Smith, a wizard of the dark arts of opposition research, had already dug through Eastland’s archived papers at the University of Mississippi, and let the letters to him from Biden dribble out in the press. A month earlier, an aide had slipped the Washington Post the file on Biden’s record on busing. The Harris campaign was armed with video clips and related storylines, like Biden’s work with Strom Thurmond on tough-on-crime measures in the 1970s that just reinforced the bad look of the 1994 crime bill Biden had championed. Smith used to tell people he was like Baskin-Robbins, 31 flavors of Biden trouble. He hadn’t expected to be able to start with a sundae."
