NY’S LATINOS SAY ‘NO MAS’ JOE

Kam-e-not his first choice: book

President Biden knows full well Vice President Kamala Harris is “not up to the job” of commander in chief — and he preferred Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as his running mate in 2020 before caving to public pressure, according to a new book out Tuesday.

Biden chose Harris days before that year’s virtual Democratic National Convention after promising to select a woman and after pro-Harris lobbying from former President Barack Obama, veteran Washington journalist Charlie Spiering writes in his book “Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House.”

While the 59-year-old Harris is just “a brain stroke away from the presidency,” her “many struggles and mistakes during her first years in office were top of mind” for the now-81-year-old president heading into his reelection campaign, Spiering writes.

Those issues included her “bullying” of White House staff and “refusal to be a team player” with the rest of the administration — as well as her “artificial” public presence, her infamous cackle and her near-constant “word salads” that fail to convey any sort of message. A steady drip of resignations from the veep’s staff have come as a result of her “soul-destroying criticism,” one ex-aide griped to The Washington Post at the end of 2021 — event forcing her to stop using her favorite curse word: “motherf--ker.”

The “hilarious, incompetent, trailblazing radical” suffered “disastrous and comical first years as vice president,” Spiering adds, noting her limited authority as the Biden administration’s border czar. But nearly four years later, Biden is in the middle of another campaign with the same running mate and asking a question that has become something of a “popular parlor game in Washington”: “How do you fix Kamala Harris?”

The book recounts that Harris was also not the choice of Biden’s wife, Jill, who favored former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice for the role and had fumed to close supporters after a bitter Democratic primary debate that the California senator should “go f--k” herself.

Harris hit Biden during that June 2019 debate for having touted his ability to work across the aisle with segregationist senators during the 1970s, adding that while she believed the longtime Delaware senator was “not a racist” his remarks were “hurtful” given her personal experience.

“You also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris said, explaining that she had been part of the second class to integrate her public school while growing up in Berkeley, Calif.