WASHINGTON—In case you hadn’t noticed, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is a black woman, as she repeatedly reminds readers in her memoir “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.”
Jean-Pierre also is “openly queer”—her words, not mine, scattered like breadcrumbs throughout her 177-page treatment of her two-plus years as former President Joe Biden’s top spokesperson.
If it weren’t for identity politics, Jean-Pierre wouldn’t have any identity at all. She tosses around labels, not arguments.
Jean-Pierre told The New Yorker that the “broken” White House in her book title refers not to the White House of her former boss, but that of current President Donald Trump.
And yet, by her own account, KJP’s defection from the Democratic Party was a reaction to serving in an administration that was burdened with “racism, misogyny, and double standards.”
If you want to know what it was like to work inside the Biden White House, prepare to be disappointed. The book is light on policy and heavy on score-settling.
Jean-Pierre lashes out at the occasional in-house rival, and she never identifies by name then-national security communications adviser John Kirby, who often shared the podium with her. That snub only makes Kirby look better. Again.
“Some of my resentful colleagues,” KJP wrote, thought she was not “fit for the job.” And then there was the “belligerent press corps.”
I’ve read a lot of so-called tell-all books from former political staffers. Everyone has an ax to grind somewhere, but it’s the pros who know how to land a blow and move on.
In her book, “107 Days,” about the high-speed 2024 campaign, former Vice President Kamala Harris writes that on the Sunday before Election Day, “I still believed our campaign of joy would triumph in two days.” Harris also revealed that she and husband Doug Emhoff were “so traumatized” by the reversal of fortune they faced on election night that the couple did not discuss that evening until she started to write her book.
Harris also wrote about stronger answers she should have given during interviews, and other missed opportunities.
Not KJP, who blames the world for things Team Biden could have handled better. Hunter Biden? Jean-Pierre writes he “had been a punching bag for the GOP for years as its members exploited his history of drug addiction, harped on his business relationships, and accused his father of unethically helping him land lucrative deals overseas.”
Jean-Pierre conveniently forgets that Biden’s surviving son peddled his access to his then-vice president father, who was in charge of White House policy on Ukraine.
Jean-Pierre should realize that the Yale law graduate walked away from a plea agreement on charges involving a gun purchase while addicted to drugs because he thought he could win, even though he was guilty.
The former press secretary also neglects to mention that Hunter Biden’s legal problems could have been eliminated if Biden had pardoned his son—which candidate Biden promised he would not do but ended up doing anyway. After the election.
I understand the pardon. Still, I’d love to get some insight into the former president’s oft-uttered claim, “My son did nothing wrong.”
To Jean-Pierre, the worst offense is the Democrats’ “betrayal” of Biden. She does not seem to have figured out that Biden betrayed Democrats when he announced he would run for reelection for an office he probably would not have won in 2020 if he revealed he planned to run again in 2024.
Biden didn’t make it to Election Day, so KJP decided to switch parties. Now she calls herself an Independent. But she’s not. She’s a political animal who picked the wrong horse and wound up in a ditch. And now she’s digging the hole deeper.
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