Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said former Vice President Kamala Harris will “have to answer” for why she did not speak out publicly about former President Joe Biden’s ability to serve during his term.
Shapiro, widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender, made the remarks in
a new political podcast hosted by sports commentator and personality Stephen A. Smith. Smith asked Shapiro about an excerpt from Harris’
soon-to-be-released book on her
presidential campaign.
“Was it grace, or was it recklessness?” Harris
wrote of the White House’s handling of Biden’s decision to run for re-election, per an excerpt of the book. “In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. 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. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Speaking with Shapiro, Smith asked the governor 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.”
Shapiro said he had not read Harris’ book, adding that “she’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly.”
“I can tell you that I wasn’t in the room, but when I was confronted with engaging with the former president, in looking at it simply from the perspective of, how is he doing in Pennsylvania? Could he win Pennsylvania? Because, I think, Stephen, you understand, if you can’t win Pennsylvania, it’s pretty darn hard to win the national election,” Shapiro continued. “And I was very vocal with him, privately, and extremely vocal with his staff about my concerns about his fitness to be able to run for another term. I was direct with them. I told them my concerns.”
Reached by NBC News, a Harris spokesperson said the former vice president’s words speak for themselves.
In Harris’ book, the former vice president sought to address why she did not make the case for Biden to not run.
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps,” she wrote,
according to an excerpt. “But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.”
“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 added. “I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.”
