Josh Shapiro–Kamala Harris Feud Heats Up | The American Spectator

Both former Vice President Kamala Harris and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro launched invectives at one another this week, adding to the squabbling that is consuming the Democratic Party in the aftermath of their electoral defeat.

Reviews of Kamala Harris’s new book set to be released next week, 107 Days, have reported that she uses the book to paint Shapiro as a power-hungry egomaniac who had the gall to muse on the art he might display at the vice president’s residence when he was in D.C. to be interviewed for the role. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 160: Kamala Harris Promotes How She Failed in 107 Days)

In the book, Harris writes that Shapiro was more interested in how the vice presidency would help him than in how he could help her win. Moreover, she writes that she believed Shapiro could not handle occupying the second-tier spot underneath her. Shapiro, she said, “would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.” Harris even writes that she had to call Shapiro out when he was acting during his vice presidential interview as if they would be equal partners if he were chosen. She proudly writes that she told him: “A vice president is not a co-president.” Harris even said the “vibes” in the interview were not good.

Kamala’s confession that she didn’t think Shapiro could handle being No. 2 vindicates the sources who came out last year to say Shapiro had been passed over because Harris feared he would steal the “spotlight.”

Shapiro fired back in no less aggressive form. In a podcast appearance, he said Harris would “have to answer” for her failure to speak to the American people about former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

“[S]he’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly,” Shapiro told sports commentator Stephen A. Smith.

Shapiro stated that he, in contrast to Harris, hadn’t been “in the room” but that he had still been “very vocal” with Biden and “extremely vocal” with Biden’s staff with “concerns about his fitness to be able to run for another term.” Shapiro said, “I was direct with them. I told them my concerns.”

The bigger deal here is Shapiro’s decision to drop the bomb that Kamala can’t defuse. Harris knew precisely how cognitively incapacitated the president was, and yet she kept silent for the sake of her own ambition, without regard for the fact that her silence endangered the country, if not Western civilization. And now, a key member of the Democratic Party, one fated to face her in the 2028 Democratic primary, is calling her out on it, in no uncertain terms, and demanding answers. (RELATED: The Cancerous Lies of the Corporate Joe Biden)

The strange thing about this feud is that it should never have been this way. Harris should obviously have picked Shapiro to be her running mate over the doddering Tim Walz. Shapiro would have guaranteed victory in the most important state and had the seemingly perfect profile, as a charismatic and popular governor who fared electorally well in more conservative areas.

Yet Harris evidently felt threatened by Shapiro’s confidence and was afraid he would show her up. Ironically, this is exactly what she condemns Joe Biden for. In 107 Days, she faults Biden and his staff for fearing that her success as vice president would make the president look weak. “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” she writes. “None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well…. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.” (RELATED: Kamala and Joe’s Longstanding Feud Reaches Breaking Point)

In 107 Days, Harris begins to make signs of half-hearted regret over what happened with Biden. But she does nothing to really answer the question Shapiro is asking.

“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in her book. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.” She went on to say that Biden’s decision to run for reelection “should have been more than a personal decision.” She continued: “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.”

One of her excuses for why she didn’t tell Biden to drop out is that Biden wouldn’t have listened to her because it would sound “self-serving” coming from her. She writes, “And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out,” she writes.

Of course, Harris is playing a game here. She’s pretending the question is whether she should have, either privately or publicly, called on Biden not to run or told him to drop out. But the sin is not Democrats’ failure to permanently occupy the White House. The sin is them covering up the fact that the president had totally lost it by nearly every cognitive measure. The sin is the fact that they coached him through every word he said from his Botox-altered mouth and every step he made with his shuffling gait — and all pretended together like he was a safe person to have in charge in the event of war with China.

Democrats now acknowledge Biden shouldn’t have run for a second term, but the difference between a first term and a second term is a moment. If Biden could be president the morning of January 20, why couldn’t he be president the afternoon of January 20?

Notably, when Shapiro said Harris was going to “have to answer” for her failure to speak up, he wasn’t talking about Democrats’ decision to get behind Biden’s reelection bid. He was talking about the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline, as he made his answer in response to Smith’s question of how Americans should feel “when we hear something that we suspected but wasn’t acknowledged by politicians who were looking for our support, and then we find out later we were right, and they should have spoken up, and they should have shown more courage.”

Of course, underneath all of this is the question of whether Harris snubbed Shapiro because he is Jewish and has a record of support for Israel. Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf told the New York Post last year that, had Shapiro been picked, “The ticket would have been too pro-Israel. Harris doesn’t need a battle over Israel-Gaza.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson similarly concluded, “[S]he was reluctant to put a vice presidential nominee on the ticket with Jewish heritage because they’re having a split in the Democratic Party. They have a pro-Palestinian, in some cases pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party…. Sadly for Josh Shapiro, because of his heritage, I think that is the reason he was overlooked.”

Kamala Harris has answered why she was too scared to tell Biden not to run. But she hasn’t given an answer for why she hid Biden’s cognitive decline. Unfortunately for her, her claims that Biden hadn’t lost it aren’t exactly believable. Maybe Josh Shapiro will hold her feet to the fire during the primary.

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