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In case you missed the exciting announcement back on July 31, failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris revealed in an Instagram post that Simon & Schuster will publish her behind-the-scenes account of her 2024 campaign debacle. The memoir, titled 107 Days in reference to the mercifully shortest presidential campaign in modern history, will be released on Sept. 23, so mark your calendars.
For those keeping score, she had previously published two books under her name: 2009’s Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer and 2019’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. The former book faced accusations of plagiarism of a degree that sank Harvard’s Claudine Gay’s career, but which were shrugged off by the Left-dominated media as a “conservatives pounce” non-controversy. The latter book was panned even by NPR as full of campaign platitudes and awkward prose (Kamala’s prose is awkward? Imagine that).
Mainstream media announcements about her forthcoming book have been muted in tone, reflecting the Democrat Party’s general lack of enthusiasm about the catastrophic choice for presidential candidate who shows every sign of intending a comeback run at the White House. Everyone knows that Harris will never win a presidential election; if she couldn’t beat Trump the first time around, she certainly won’t beat JD Vance in 2028; Vance will wipe the floor with her in debates, and he will be riding a wave of four years of epic Trump successes. It’s hard to imagine a conservative opponent that she could beat. She won’t even win her own Party’s nomination over a white male, Gavin Newsom, whose lust for the Oval Office is white-hot. Kamala is out of her league at the level of national politics, and unlikeable.
About 107 Days, Kamala states in the Instagram video, “Since leaving office, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on those days. I believe there’s value in sharing what I saw, what I learned, and what I know it will take to move forward.” I’m skeptical about the value and the lessons, but what it will take for the Democrat Party, which has sunk to its lowest popularity ever, to move forward is to jettison Kamala – but she’s not going to accept that.
So what can readers, if there will be any, expect from this “candid and personal account of my journey”? “Writing ‘107 Days’ felt like living the campaign in reverse — rewinding each moment and experiencing it all over again,” she says. “Behind every speech I gave, hand I shook, and story I told on the road, there were deeper layers, quiet reflections, and lessons learned.”
Anyone who has seen Kamala attempt to speak off the cuff knows full well that there are no deeper layers to her, and it’s impossible to believe that she learned the right lessons from her loss. In fact, it is pretty clear from her promotional appearance on outgoing host Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, the same night she announced the book, that she did not learn the most obvious lesson of all: that she is not now, and never has been, presidential material.
A creepily fawning Colbert observed that this was the eighth time Kamala had made an appearance on the show (by contrast, JD Vance has made a total of zero appearances both before and after becoming Vice President, although Colbert has mocked him many times in monologues and skits). The full interview was replete with Kamala’s usual cackling, her blather about “our fragile democracy,” and her faux-selfless claim that she’s never going to stop “fighting for the people.” Asked about running for president again, she stated that “for now, I don’t want to go back into the system,” adding, “I think it’s broken.”
Translation: I didn’t lose the presidential election because I was eminently incompetent, unqualified, and unlikeable; I lost because the system doesn’t work. When election-denier Democrats lose elections, it’s because the system is “broken,” or Republicans suppressed votes of color, or Russia colluded, etc. It’s never because the American people managed to overcome massive Democrat voter fraud to assert their democratic will.
This preview on the failed talk show host Colbert’s moribund show, before a seal-clapping audience, tells you everything you could want to know about her forthcoming book: that it is going to gloss over her ineptitude, her dearth of achievements as Vice President, her shockingly incoherent remarks in public appearances, and her unearned privilege within the Party as a “woman of color,” and it is going to lay the blame for 2024 on Republican cheating and lay the groundwork for a 2028 run.
Simon & Schuster, which has published memoirs by prominent politicians ranging from Hillary Clinton to Mike Pence, has not disclosed how much money Harris was advanced for the memoir, although one source suggests the amount was $20 million. If true, that would utterly dwarf the $8 million Hillary received for her 2003 Simon & Schuster memoir Living History, which was considered a near-record advance at the time (adjusted for Biden’s inflation, that would still be less than $14 million today).
“Kamala Harris is a singular American leader,” said Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp in a statement. He’s correct that she is singular, but not in the complimentary way he intended. “‘107 DAYS’ captures the drama of running for president better than just about anything I’ve read… It’s an eyewitness contribution to history and an extraordinary story.” He added hyperbolically, “It’s one of the best works of political nonfiction Simon & Schuster has ever published.”
Not only will it not be one of the best works of political nonfiction, it won’t even be nonfiction. Karp has said Harris’ memoir “is not a typical political tome. It’s closer in spirit to The West Wing or Rocky. It reads like a suspense novel.” To give the “tome” a novelistic feel, the publisher hooked Kamala up with a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Geraldine Brooks. That’s an unusual choice for a collaborator on a political book, because a skilled ghostwriter or co-writer of memoirs wouldn’t cut it this time. 107 Days is going to read as close to fiction as it can possibly get, because the facts about her campaign debacle are too brutal.
On August 21, Kamala announced on X that over the next few months she would be undertaking a nationwide tour to promote the book. “I’ll see you out there,” she threatened. One social media user bluntly summed up what the country’s response will be to both her book and her 2028 campaign attempt: “go away. it’s over.”
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior