Kamala Harris ruled out Arizona senator Mark Kelly as her running mate because she was worried about attacks on his military record, she reveals in her new book. Instead, she went with Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who soon came under fire for misrepresenting his military record.
Harris thought Kelly was “magnetic” but “fretted that he had not yet had an ‘”oh shit” moment’ during his political career,” Politico reported based on an excerpt of the former vice president’s forthcoming memoir, 107 Days. “She worried his military service could be used against him à la the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry.”
The term refers to the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, which cast doubt on then-Democratic nominee Kerry’s Vietnam War record and helped derail his White House bid. That effort was led by GOP strategist Chris LaCivita, who served as Donald Trump’s senior adviser on his presidential campaign last year.
“I realized I couldn’t afford to test Mark Kelly in that ugly grinder,” Harris writes in the book.
Harris instead picked Walz, who sparked widespread backlash on the campaign trail for misrepresenting his 24 years of service in the National Guard.
Walz repeatedly claimed to be a command sergeant major but actually retired at a lower rank. The Minnesota governor also claimed to have carried weapons “in war,” although he never saw combat, and retired from the National Guard as higher-ups were considering deploying his battalion to Iraq. Then-Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, a fellow veteran, on the campaign trail repeatedly said Walz’s military misrepresentations amounted to “stolen valor.”
Walz’s misrepresentation of his military service reached back to as early as 2006, when his congressional campaign’s media kit falsely claimed he served in Afghanistan, the Washington Free Beacon reported last year.
Harris also says in the book that then-transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, not Walz or Kelly, was her first choice for a running mate. She thought, however, that picking Buttigieg, who is gay and married to a man, “was too big a risk,” given that “we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.”
While Harris praises Buttigieg in the book, she attacks two other high-profile Democrats and possible 2028 presidential hopefuls, California governor Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. She describes Newsom as “unreachable in the frantic hours after then-president Joe Biden dropped out of the race,” Politico reported. And, while Shapiro was widely rumored as Harris’s most likely running mate before she picked Walz, she was “put off” by the Pennsylvania governor’s “ambition—and his request to be in the room for every major decision—and worried he would not settle for the number-two job.”
The former vice president’s book, set to be published on September 23, has other striking revelations. In one account, she says that then-president Joe Biden called moments before her first 2024 debate asking if she had been bad-mouthing him to donors. Harris also tears into Biden’s White House team, accusing aides of failing to defend her record and intentionally knocking her down, according to an excerpt released last week by The Atlantic.
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