When former Vice President Kamala Harris came out with her book 107 Days, we knew it would feature her side of the story about what went wrong when she lost to President Donald Trump in 2024.

The only question was to what end. Did Harris plan to run again in 2028? Did she want to just sell some books as she takes a step back from elected office? Did she want to contribute to the historical record about a campaign that has been covered by multiple other books? Or did she simply want to settle scores?

Recommended Stories

• Grenell rips Harris over Buttigieg VP snub for sexual orientation, calls her a ‘hypocrite’
• Kamala Harris's book tour: Six takeaways from her return to the spotlight
• Harris's campaign tell-all short on lessons to avoid future Democratic defeat

Now that 107 Days has been published and she has embarked on her book tour, the answer to these questions is no clearer. But she does want to take a few mulligans.

In her book, Harris is far more critical of former President Joe Biden than she ever managed to be during the 2024 campaign. She recounts real and imagined slights from fellow Democrats she doesn’t think did enough to help her, to the point of pettiness. 

Fans hailed Harris’s book as a move away from the risk-averse, lawyerly evasiveness that has plagued her at times during her political career, perhaps especially during the 2024 campaign.

But having spilled the tea about her vice presidential shortlist, her potential rivals for the 2028 Democratic nomination, and her ex-boss, Harris is at times rather shy about elaborating on these digs when giving media interviews about the book.

Asked by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to expand on the “recklessness” of leaving Biden’s reelection decision purely up to the Biden family, Harris said a few perfunctory things about how in a do-over she would urge the octogenarian commander in chief to “question whether it’s a good idea” to run again and then pivoted to well-worn facts about the “unprecedented” nature of having the incumbent president drop out that late in the campaign and be replaced by the sitting vice president while running against a former president.

Harris punted again when asked about Biden’s ability to serve another term by Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. ​​“My concern about him running for reelection was completely separate from his capacity to serve … which was consistent and never wavered,” she replied.

One of the book’s big revelations is that Harris had wanted to select former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate but feared it would be too risky to have a black woman and a gay man together on the same ticket. But she seems uncomfortable when that rationale for passing Buttigieg over comes up in interviews. “Maybe I was being too cautious,” she confessed to Maddow. “I’ll let our friends — we should all talk about that. Maybe I was.”

“It’s as if it wasn’t a book that she tried to get published, it’s as if it were a private journal that has leaked out and she’s trying to change the subject,” quipped the political journalist Mark Halperin.  

By repeatedly bellying up to the word salad bar, Harris undermines the main thesis of her book: that she simply ran out of time to make the case for herself. Even with no election on the line, she prefers to speak in generalities and try to run out the clock.

“For me, this is really a behind-the-scenes look at those 107 days, seeing people who seemingly had nothing in common coming together by the thousands with a level of optimism and, dare I say, joy about the possibilities for America,” Harris said on MSNBC. “And I hope to remind people about that light that people brought to it and to remind people that that light is still there, and we can’t let that be extinguished by an election or the individual who is in the office right now.”

The above is a description of the sugar high the fueled her campaign, from the euphoria that Biden was no longer the candidate, to the convention bounce, to debate night, with a wave of fawning media coverage — but few media interviews — in between. It is a strategy that requires a shorter campaign window.

CAUTIOUS KAMALA HARRIS DOOMED BY DISTRUST OF VOTERS 

Harris wants a do-over on that strategy, on other decisions she made during the campaign, and, having heard the criticism from fellow Democrats, on some of the spiciest takes in her own book.

It’s all the more reason Democrats are unlikely to give her a do-over as their presidential nominee.