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I wondered about that, too. Turns out (when I looked it up) that she served as "as the chief of staff for U.S. vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris during the 2020 presidential campaign."
Kamala Harris is making noises about running in 2028 (after a lot of people thought she was dropping out of politics altogether) so I wonder if this is less about Biden and more about positioning herself for Harris maybe hoping to get another job with the second campaign (if it happens)? And part of Harris pitch is loyalty to Biden so anyone hoping to be onside with her has to repeat the message (as much a signal that she can sell the same message Harris is selling as anything).
From Harris' book:
So the line is Joe was great, but yeah he had to step down, but yeah he was great and while he was president he was fine and that is what matters. It's threading the needle of "was he incapacitated while in office and if so, why didn't anyone speak up about it?" 'No he was fine so I/we didn't have to speak up but later on yeah he got tired and overwhelmed and that's ancient history now'.
To his credit, the interviewer specifically picked up on this:
So basically refusing to even answer the (real, 2029) question. Sadly, not new - that was the whole initial bit, was how the Biden campaign would insist "he's fine now" and then go silent when asked if his trajectory was stable enough to last through 2029. The debate wasn't just a shocker because it was at odds with "he's fine now", but also because it established a clear downward trajectory, you didn't even need to extrapolate that much; you could simply look at the 2020 debates and the difference was obvious.
Kamala, by the way, is deliberately cultivating the "I'm going to drop out of politics" angle, it wasn't accidental. She knows that only after losing she can drop the "our politics is broken" line, and thus attempt to curry favor with the disenfranchised "fellow kids". You're probably right about the Harris angle, and furthermore since Kamala obviously doesn't have a good grasp on what kinds of things are actually persuasive, she might even blithely bring KJP back.
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It seems worth noting that, while this woman will never be in the limelight again, she clearly wants to stay in dem politics. And absolute, unconditional loyalty to the boss, even retroactively, is... something politicians value.
Except Biden isn't the boss anymore, and she's questioning the judgment of the people who are in charge now. If she had just kept her mouth shut then she might have had a future. Then again, maybe she knew she had no future, and figured her only chance was to criticize D leadership for the election loss.
She's trying to sell books likely because she heard (somewhat incorrectly) that it's a good way to earn money. I mean, who is going to hire her? Maybe some kind of lazy progressive nonprofit, but that seems it.
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I mean we can write that off as ‘she’s stupid and bad at her job’.
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I wonder. There does seem to be a power struggle going on between the faction of the party that is, let's take Platner as an example: "we need to ditch the more extreme progressive/idpol/lefty stuff and move towards the centre to appeal to a broader set of voters" versus the "hell no we need fifty Stalins" faction right now, in the wake of Harris' defeat.
Look at what Jean-Pierre was saying in that New Yorker interview about black women being the backbone of the party. I think she's pinning her hopes that the progressivists will come out on top, and she's staking her claim: you guys need the black vote, particularly since the Hispanics/Latinos are ditching you for the other lot. You need the blacks and the LGBT+ set, and if you want to make history by having the First Female President, you need Harris instead of (let's say) Newsom.
So she's signalling her loyalty to the party line about "we did nothing wrong, Biden was great, it was sexism and racism that lost the race for Harris not any flaw on her part, and giving in on any of this is throwing the black and queer vote under the bus and appealing to the Nazi fascist element in the party".
I wonder how much influence Biden (or his inner circle) still have. He had a long career in politics, he made a lot of alliances and presumably has a lot of favours still banked. Crossing him or his faction could be a real mistake, while signalling loyalty may be more of a help than we think. Who exactly is in charge of the Democratic party right now? The old guard are hanging on, even while others are attempting to shove them off the stage, and some of the ones wanting to do the shoving are the progressive elements. "I am a queer black woman and if you try to shove me out of the way I will cry racism sexism homophobia" is still a credible threat.
Biden has very little influence. He has cancer, he's bitter at people, he's blamed by almost everyone in turn, his presidential library (a useful barometer) has been receiving hardly any donations, and he never extended much trust to people outside the inner circle in the first place so it's no surprise as there weren't many true-believers to begin with. And he even managed to dumpster his own reputation in record time with stuff like breaking his promise and pardoning his family (handing an invitation to Trump on a golden fucking platter to abuse the pardon power himself). I'm a moderate, I liked Biden as a person, I even liked some of the stuff about his governance, but that last bit alone was more damning that anything else he ever did, in my eyes.
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