Kamala Harris has run out of excuses A thousand days wouldn’t have saved her

In comparing former Vice President Kamala Harris’s new book, 107 Days, to, say, a serious political memoir, one curiosity jumps out: it has no index. This is a breach of wonk protocol; politicians and their publishers know full well that readers are interested in skipping right to the juicy bits. The omission is probably intended to force people to buy the book, instead of just skimming it at a store, but the absence feels symbolic: in refusing to index her own story, Harris refuses to index her failures — so I’ve cataloged them for her. 

The core message of 107 Days is relentless: Harris was doomed from the get-go. She tells us early and often that hers was “the shortest campaign in modern presidential history,” offering far too little time to explain herself to voters: on the economy, on jobs and investment, on undoing “Trump’s demonization of immigrants.” Even an anecdote delivered to Georgia teens about how she quit the French horn “for involving entirely too much spit” is framed wistfully as “another example of how there were so many ways to connect with people — if only I’d had more time.” No doubt the teen would have appreciated more time to dwell on the spit connection.

Harris insists 107 days wasn’t enough time to convey her ideas, but 300-plus more days of writing hasn’t helped matters much. As a piece of prose, 107 Days is sloppy and light on ideas. Given its title, and chronological one-day-per-chapter structure, Harris makes an unspoken promise to crack open her Franklin Planner and dish deets on all 107 days — woefully few as they were. So it’s perplexing how many days are skipped over altogether — including two nearly week-long gaps — leaving readers wondering what transpired during a supposedly every-minute-counts campaign. Surely something relevant happened on those days — and even if not, wasn’t that an opportunity to expound on her thinking? Ten chapters are each shorter than a page; one, for Sept. 29, is only 20 words, including “Hair color. Manicure. Call, and call, and call.” Talk about shrinkflation. 

Too often, Harris also struggles to simply organize and convey information. Her Sept. 26 entry is typical in this regard: she pinballs between a looming hurricane, meeting Ukraine’s president, a ghost-gun task force, and 9/11 heroes. The reader is left grasping for a takeaway. On Oct. 23, she segues from recounting her CNN town-hall performance into a stream of consciousness about backstage conversations she had there, Trump’s absence, and the on-air pundit Van Jones’s non-sequitur declaration, “Your job isn’t to do town halls. Your job is to fight for people.” Sure, this may just be inept editing, but it makes for damned poor cognition optics.

Harris’s gravely deteriorated relationship with her boss, President Joe Biden, is on vivid display throughout 107 Days, but she never demonstrates having asserted herself on their differences while he was in office. Instead, she goes full retroactive “Let’s Go Brandon” — excoriating Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, and their staff. Biden’s White House is “reckless” and driven by “zero-sum thinking”; he refuses to grasp “that if I did well, he did well.” Jill Biden bullies “Dougie” Imhoff to pledge fealty in the White House Blue Room, then later icily declares, “You’re about to see how horrible the world is.” Biden’s debate was a “disaster” and a “train wreck.” When Biden calls Harris minutes before her own debate with Trump, she reveals “I was barely listening” as he “rattled on … all about himself.” When Joe humiliates Harris by donning a MAGA hat for the cameras on 9/11, it was a “debacle.” Lest anyone not get the message that the 46th president was a worthless, crippling albatross, Harris reminds readers twice: “People hate Joe Biden!”

As 107 Days progresses, it grows clear that Harris’s heart just wasn’t in this game — whether at the White House or out on the trail. The vice presidency can be a notoriously frustrating gig, and Harris seems to have hated it. She slyly leans into quotes from other people to seethe over the “political malpractice” of her having been “kept under wraps,” expected to stand around “like a potted plant,” and given “shit jobs” — all in the service of a role that “may not be worth a bucket of warm piss” (quoting one of her veep predecessors, John Nance Garner, who served in the role under FDR). 

Alas, this rings as sheer hypocrisy later, when while interviewing would-be running mate Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris bristles at his galling desire to be in the room for decisions. With the Converse sneaker suddenly on the other foot, she scratches him off the short list, remarking, “Every day as president, I’ll have 99 problems, and my VP can’t be one.” In choosing Gov. Tim Walz, Harris notes approvingly that “he said he had no ambition to be president,” and “he had no fixed ideas” and “would do whatever I found was most useful.” Later, she regrets allowing Walz to appear alongside her in a CNN interview; the contrast in their heights was “not a good look.” 

Given her evident loathing of veep drudgery, you’d expect Harris to relish campaigning. Instead, we get ennui. When radio host Charlamagne Tha God notes that Harris comes off as too scripted on the stump, she snaps that “it’s not especially fun to give the same speech three times a day!” On a campaign swing through Los Angeles, Harris visits her home and notes ruefully, “my herb garden yellowed.” We’re told “I hate my debate team,” who would reward Harris with small bags of Doritos, “which felt like being handed a doggy treat.” Overwhelmed and seeking to “get out of my head,” Harris makes a shopping outing to Penzey Spices, where when asked by a reporter what’s the best part of debate prep, she deadpans “being at this store.” 

While the broad themes of Harris’s campaign avoided identity politics, 107 Days reveals her true mindset, which most voters probably understood. The anti-woke tribe will find much to pillory: Harris leans into progressive word-salad euphemisms like “lived experience” and “irregular immigration,” and explains how high turnover among her office staffers is triggered by “confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove exhausting.” 

Her treatment of Trump’s “Kamala is for They/Them” attacks is regrettably preposterous. First she admits the ads stalled her campaign. Then she describes the enormous trans basketball player depicted therein as merely a large and much older lady, “which hardly gave her the athletic advantage the ad implied.” Two pages later, we’re left cringing as she awkwardly contradicts herself, declaring “I agree with the concerns expressed by parents and players that we have to take into account biological factors such as muscle mass and unfair athletic advantage….” 

As for conventional wisdom that Trump’s “They/Them” campaign was the deciding factor, Harris dismisses this as mansplaining from “middle-aged men who don’t live in battleground states.” She knows full well those ads also targeted millions of swing-state suburban women. And they worked. So why deny it? Instead of admitting that the trans sports issue has been electoral cyanide for Democrats, Harris digs in her heels and huffs, “I do not regret my decision,” and “There isn’t a distinction between ‘they/them’ and ‘you.’ The pronoun that matters is ‘we.’” 

Harris doesn’t completely sugarcoat her performance, and cops to several high-profile stumbles. On her first solo interview: “I needed my A game. I didn’t bring it, and that’s on me.” On infamously replying “there is not a thing that comes to mind” that she’d have done differently than Joe Biden, she confesses, “I had no idea I’d just pulled the pin on a hand grenade.” On the US-Mexico border, she frankly acknowledges, “Immigration had surged, and to some felt like an invasion; we couldn’t gaslight the people who felt that way by denying the problem.”

But elsewhere, Harris is often obtuse. She seems dumbfounded to learn that young male voters prioritized “their perceived economic interests” at the polls. And if, like me, you wondered why Kamala was campaigning in azure-blue Massachusetts and blood-red Texas during a statistical dead heat, or why she chose the negative slogan “Not going back!,” or which savvy genius on her team booked GloRilla to twerk for a stone-quiet crowd in white-bread Wisconsin on Nov. 1, you’ll find no meaningful introspection on these or any other failures.

For all of the profound shortcomings of 107 Days, Harris still comes across as a well-meaning and decent patriot. And whatever your stand on her political beliefs or skills, it’s undeniable that plenty of her campaign warnings about Donald Trump have proved prescient. Which makes it surprisingly magnanimous that Harris includes several private exchanges that humanize Trump, in which his public vulgarity melts, ever so briefly, to private graciousness.

For anyone longing for clarity on the 2024 Democratic campaign, or a cogent strategy for a path forward, 107 Days is not it. Harris offers no real reckoning, no index of where it all went wrong — beyond pointing a French-manicured finger at a calendar. And despite all her best efforts, the unflattering picture that emerges is that no matter whether she’d had 107 or 1,007 days, Kamala Harris is a bit of an empty pantsuit, who’s sadly incapable of leading Democrats out of their howling political wilderness.

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