Vice President Kamala Harris’s political career shows how an ambitious individual “can fail upward” and find herself just a heartbeat away from the presidency, veteran Washington reporter Charlie Spiering explains in his new book Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House.
Spiering joined Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater Tuesday for an extensive interview about Amateur Hour, which hits bookstands today.
Kamala Harris is “a very ambitious politician” who is “willing to do or say or change however she needs to be to achieve levels of power. She’s kind of a story of how you can fail upward even though you’re not succeeding in every single job,” Spiering said.
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“If you’re cautious enough, if you’re careful enough, if you have that ability to reverse yourself on key positions and position yourself, then you might just find your way failing up,” he added. “And certainly, that’s what she did throughout her whole career.”
Spiering’s book details Harris’s political odyssey through the San Francisco and California political scene – from her relationship with San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to her stint as a district attorney and California Attorney General to her winning “a pretty easy Senate race in California” that ultimately positioned her to launch her doomed 2020 presidential campaign and become Joe Biden’s running mate.
Spiering also delves into Harris’s upbringing as the daughter of left-wing academics (her father was described as a “Marxist”) in the very progressive California Bay Area.
“Her father was an economics professor, and her mother was a cancer researcher,” he said, adding that Harris’s parents divorced when she was very young, which meant “she was mostly raised by her mother.”
Joe Biden’s promise to pick a black woman as his running mate paved the way for Harris to become vice president, Spiering explained. The other top candidates were President Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former California Congresswoman Karen Bass.
“I reveal in the book that Susan Rice was Jill Biden’s favorite [for vice president],” Spiering said. “Conservatives would think, ‘Why would you pick Susan Rice? She’s the face of the Benghazi disaster.’”
Karen Bass, who is now the mayor of Los Angeles, was similarly ruled out because of her past associations with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
That left Harris, who had Obama hyping her to Biden, according to Spiering.
“President Obama himself was like, look, this is the person you want. She’s nice. She’s a woman. She’s black. She’ll connect with voters. She’s been through a race… She’s already been vetted. But, really, she wasn’t. And she ran a sort of lackluster campaign. She dropped out before voters even got to deliver a verdict,” Spiering said.
Spiering sees Amateur Hour as providing the full vetting that Harris did not get, especially considering that the only thing separating her from the Oval Office is Joe Biden’s 81-year-old heartbeat.
He explained that he wants his readers to “look at Kamala Harris, her career, what she’s done, why she is a heartbeat away from the presidency, and I want people to understand exactly who she is because the national media hasn’t done a very good job of explaining who she is.”
“She hasn’t been thoroughly vetted,” he continued. “And if she was ever to run for president herself … in actual campaign where she would actually be competitive, maybe there will be a little more scrutiny on her record. But at this point, it’s important for Americans to know exactly who she is because she may not have to win an election to be your next president.”
Kamala Harris “could very well be the next president United States,” Spiering warned. “With Joe Biden and the current state that he’s in, it’s important for all Americans to understand exactly who Kamala Harris is and how she got there.”
Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House is available now from Simon & Schuster. You can purchase it in hardcover, e-book format, and audiobook.
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