A new book from NBC News political reporter Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, a senior political correspondent for The Hill, entitled “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” tells the story of the 2024 election and describes a Democratic Party rife with its share of disagreement and disarray.
According to The Guardian‘s review of the book, the pair’s sourcing is solid and their writing about the campaign and its lead up is sober and their message is also unmistakably clear: Biden’s reelection campaign and his selection of Kamala Harris was viewed as a mistake. The book also claims that former President Barack Obama never held much faith in either Harris or Biden for different reasons.
“The 44th president never had much faith in [the] political ability” of his former vice-president, Parnes and Allen write in the book. “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.”
They continued, “Obama already had determined that he didn’t think Harris should take the president’s spot on the ballot. That was his position from the outset, according to one person who spoke to him at the time.”
In an interview on an April 3 episode of The Ringer’s podcast, “Somebody’s Gotta Win with Tara Palmeri,” Parnes told the host that both Harris and her running mate Tim Walz were shocked that they lost the election to Donald Trump.
“She was completely shocked, and [Harris’ running mate] Tim Walz was shocked,” Parnes.
Parnes also said, “He has no words. And people are kind of explaining to him, same thing with her. And she’s like, are you sure? Have we done a recount? Should we do a recount?”
She continued, “They thought that they were going to win. And so, you know, when they come back now and say, ‘Oh, no, we didn’t really have a chance.’ No, that’s not what they were thinking. They thought they were going to win.”
According to Allen, Obama had his doubts that Harris could defeat Trump, and his efforts to create a mini-primary or an open convention ended up working against her, as he told MSNBC.
“He didn’t think that she was the best choice for Democrats, and he worked really behind the scenes for a long time to try to have a mini-primary, or an open convention, or a mini-primary leading to an open convention, did not have faith in her ability to win the election,” Parnes’ co-author Jonathan Allen told MSNBC on April 1.
“As it turned out, she didn’t win, but he was really working against her,” he added.
Parnes, meanwhile, told The Ringer that Harris allegedly “bought the hype” concerning her chances of winning the election.
“Kamala Harris was looking at her crowd size, and they felt like the vibe was strong and people were saying, ‘Oh, we have more boots on the ground. We’re doing better in fundraising,‘” Parnes said on the podcast. “And she bought all of that. She bought the hype, and so did a lot of people in the campaign.”
In a conversation with Vanity Fair, the authors stopped short of calling attempts to hide aspects of Biden’s deficits a cover up, but they did, however, describe Democratic leadership that in their estimation, failed to meet the urgency of the moment.
“What we saw was a lot of bad decision-making and, perhaps at the very top, people putting their own interests, and what they believed were Joe Biden’s interests, above the interests of the Democratic Party and the country. And so that’s a failure. That’s a moral failure, but maybe not a criminal one, which is what the term cover-up sort of implies, a criminal conspiracy, and we didn’t reach that threshold,” Allen told the outlet.
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