What she presents in her book is not a vision for leadership; it is a rationale for failure.
Kamala Harris’s tale of terror, 107 Days, finally hits stores today, and the reviews are already in: Her career as a politician is over, and her career as an author doesn’t seem terribly promising either.
For those who have forgotten — and don’t we all wish we could — 107 Days documents America’s real-life political psychotic break last year, from the perspective of its chief instigator. (Sort of like remaking the recent film Weapons from the point of view of the witch.) I want to emphasize that I have not read it myself, and never for a moment considered doing so. Like nearly every political memoir nowadays, 107 Days is a book designed to be read via extended excerpt and news summary, not purchased — leave that for journalists who can expense the $30 later, and people like me who are hoping to score an autographed copy when she arrives in Chicago in October for her book tour.
In particular, I recommend this excellent analysis from Semafor’s Dave Weigel, which takes the global view of the revelations in Harris’s book and draws at least one undeniable conclusion: Harris has no answers for the entropic forces currently unraveling the Democratic Party’s coalition, only grievances. She ran a cautious campaign that refused to separate herself from the Biden legacy (whether or not it ever could have is a separate matter; the issue is that she did not try). She is not the future, and the hard-branded progressive past that she represents will almost certainly be left behind by the next victorious Democratic administration.
Weigel discusses the political implications of Harris’s book for the Democrats, because that is his job; I instead want to discuss some of the hilariously unfortunate anecdotes that have emerged from it, because that is my job. You’ve probably already heard about the single best story in the book, which isn’t about Harris at all but rather the behavior of the senile, selfish President Joe Biden.
Mere minutes before Harris was about to take the stage to debate Trump in her one and only such foray, Biden phoned her up. Expecting encouragement or perhaps debate advice, Harris was instead on the receiving end of a rant about how Biden had heard she was talking him down to donors and also saying that he had actually won the first debate. In that moment I felt a twinge of sympathy for Harris: about to go onstage for the biggest moment of her life, and getting sandbagged by her resentful boss. (Harris actually won the debate on points; meanwhile Trump won the far more important “attention economy” by getting the entire nation barking about his allegation that Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio.)
At times the account of her campaign reads like a comic tale of Harris reeling from one misfortune to the next on her way to an inevitable end. Her vice-presidential campaign search, for example, plays like that scene from The Naked Gun where OJ Simpson gets shot by gangsters, then bumps his head, smears his coat with wet paint, steps into a bear trap, and finally flips over the side of a boat.
The most impressive pick on offer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, was nixed primarily because he was Jewish, but that is not the reason she prefers to lead with in this book. (To Harris’s credit, she does mention the antisemitic angle, noting that concerns about the Democratic National Convention being besieged by protesters against Shapiro for his pro-Israel views were a factor in her decision.) Instead, Shapiro is characterized as a distanced and somewhat arrogant personality, already measuring the drapes for the VP’s residence. Then Harris turned down Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, an astronaut and the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the former Democratic congresswoman gravely injured by an assassin’s bullet, because — she says — she didn’t want to subject his military record to public scrutiny.
Finally, Harris laments having had to pass on Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (her first choice) because, well, he was just too darn gay:
I love Pete. I love working with Pete. He and his husband, Chasten, are friends. He is a sincere public servant with the rare talent of being able to frame liberal arguments in a way that makes it possible for conservatives to hear them. He knows the importance of taking our case to the people who aren’t usually exposed to it and is magnificent at sparring with opponents on Fox News.
He would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man. 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 a risk.
And I think Pete also knew that — to our mutual sadness.
Leave aside that none of what Harris’s ghostwriter wrote here about Buttigieg is actually true. According to Buttigieg himself, it’s also not true that he knew or accepted this, as he was happy to tell people this week when the excerpts first dropped.
It’s impossible not to laugh about the snake-bitten irony of Harris’s miscalculations: Worried that Kelly’s service record might be attacked, Harris instead chose National Guard veteran Tim Walz, whose own history of representing his record was of course unimpeachable. Worried that Buttigieg might not be manly enough for swing voters, she instead chose simpering manchild Tim Walz, whose vaguely unnerving “overfriendly youth football coach” vibe turned off male voters so badly that Hollywood desperately sought to inject some testosterone into the campaign near its end. (The best joke by far circulating among Washington journos this week is the one I’ve heard in variations from four different people: “Pete Buttigieg carries himself like a straight man only pretending to be gay, whereas Tim Walz represents a much more familiar type.”)
This brings us to Kamala Harris’s appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, which went exactly as well as every other unscripted interview she has ever given: a minor disaster at best, and a legacy-cementing epitaph at worst. (You can watch the entire interview here, but why would you? I suffered through this so that you wouldn’t have to.) For 30 minutes, Harris sat in conversation with Maddow, the friendliest interviewer possible, and failed to adequately address any of the issues she had raised in her book.
Remember the phrase “word salad,” once on everybody’s lips when describing Harris’s campaign performances? She has become no more adept a chef since November, fumbling haplessly as she tosses out gobs of gormless verbiage, her defensive affect and transparent default to pre-set messaging just as apparent as it ever was on the campaign trail. Watch as Harris winds herself into a licorice twist trying to explain to Maddow what exactly it was she meant when she said that Buttigieg’s homosexuality made him too much of a risk as a running mate:
Oh no no no, that’s not what I said. That — that’s — that he couldn’t be on the ticket because he is gay. My point in — as I write in the book — is that I was clear that in a 107 days, in one of the most hotly contested elections for president of the United States, against someone like Donald Trump who knows no floor, to be a black woman running for president for the United States, and as a vice-presidential running mate, a gay man — with the stakes being so high — it made me very sad but I also realized it would be a real risk, no matter how — you know, I’ve been an advocate and ally of the LGBT community my entire life. It wasn’t about any prejudice on my part.
That was an awful lot of words used to say what could have been summarized much more briskly: “It’s not me who’s the bigot; it’s those hateful voters who are.” And it explains well enough why she has no electoral future left either in the Democratic Party or national politics: Somehow, she managed to alienate every political side of the debate with that answer. Elsewhere in the interview, it was impossible not to cringe — but joyfully — at Harris’s impressively half-hearted endorsement for New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani: “I support the Democrat in the race, sure, but let me say this: He’s not the only star.” Her eagerness to change the subject tells you all you need to know about how out of tune she is with the current Democratic zeitgeist.
Each time I have written about 107 Days at NR, I have jokingly framed the book as an experiment in “horror fiction.” That’s an acknowledgment of my lingering resentment toward the insanity of the entire 2024 campaign season and the central role she ended up playing in it. But at least to give Harris her due, she was thrust into this situation by Joe Biden’s reckless vanity, not by her own. She was nevertheless wholly inadequate to the task she was given, and the result was a campaign surrounded by a suffocating reality-distortion field.
Perhaps the spookiest thing about 107 Days, then, is the fact that, while it was assuredly ghostwritten, the ghostwriter accurately captures the reality of Harris’s personality: The excerpts indeed read at times like an “as told to” memoir, a chronicle of her petty resentments unleavened by any proper sense of perspective. Her president betrays her, his staffers undermine her, her own staffers let her down, the cruel realities of politics conspire to keep her from making the right choices — and each time, in her account, it is somebody else’s fault. It is not a vision for leadership; it is a rationale for failure. The book may not be a horror novel, but it ends nonetheless in a graveyard: 107 Days might as well have been etched as Kamala Harris’s political tombstone.