In her new book, Harris apparently exudes the condescension that shone through during her run for the White House.

The big news here is that somebody read Kamala Harris’s book. Secondary to that earthshattering revelation is that, in the book, Harris apparently exudes the condescension that shone through during her run for the White House and contributed to her failure to connect with a critical mass of American voters.

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire reports that, in Harris’s campaign memoir, she admits that her “first choice” for vice president was “her close friend Pete Buttigieg.” But she didn’t go with her instincts because “it would be ‘too big of a risk’ for a Black woman to run with a gay man.”

Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes in a passage of her soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that I saw. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”

We must assume that, at every step of the way along the path to you reading those words, not one person intervened to suggest that this represents an insult to the American people. Neither the author, nor her editors, nor her publisher, nor her publicists, nor even the Atlantic’s reviewer encountered a pang of conscience while disseminating this slight. The apparently unquestioned assumption underlying it is that you are either sexist, racist, or homophobic. Maybe all three!

Even more galling is the degree to which this supposition has not encountered any dissent from the commentary class, who, for elusive reasons, appear to think they’re exempt from the ugly verdict Harris rendered on the American people. “Harris may have been right about this,” former CNN host Chris Cillizza wrote of Harris’s assumption that you’re a hopeless chauvinist incapable of rational thought. “But it also reflects a broader risk-averseness that plagued her campaign.” Sure, that too. And yet, among the factors contributing to her loss was her barely concealed contempt for the voters to whom she was trying to appeal.

She didn’t see it that way. Nor, apparently, do her advisors and the press. For the rest of us, however, it’s kind of hard to miss.