OK, Now I'm Definitely Reading Kamala Harris's New Book
The former vice president finally distances herself from the former president.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris announced back in August that she was releasing a memoir, 107 Days, about her abbreviated presidential campaign. She said in her video announcement, “I believe there is value in sharing what I saw, what I learned and what I know it will take to move forward. In writing this book, one truth kept coming back to me: Sometimes the fight takes a while.”
I confess I was not that excited about 107 Days, which I feared would be a safe, sanitized account that would take great pains not to offend anyone. I like some dish with a side of hot tea for my beach reads! (I have admittedly strange tastes in beach reads.)
However, it seems like Harris is going full Patti on us. (Watch below.)
The Atlantic published an excerpt from Harris’s memoir last week, and Harris confirms what I’ve argued since about February 2021: The Biden administration set Harris up to fail to the extent they thought about her at all.
Harris writes:
Because I’d gone after [Biden] over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again.
When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans.
I encountered many Harris supporters online who were convinced that Joe Biden had a paternal fondness for Harris and considered her his heir apparent. This was contrary to all observable evidence, but perhaps 107 Days might finally put an end to this fairy tale. The Biden administration clearly marginalized Harris. Consider that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was the face of the administration’s biggest legislative achievement, while Harris was personally saddled with the border (i.e. “irregular migration”), effectively the Vietnam of political issues.
Lorraine Voles, my chief of staff, constantly had to advocate for my role at events: “She’s not going to stand there like a potted plant. Give her two minutes of remarks. Have her introduce the president.”
They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.
[ … ]
Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.
Any objective observer could tell that neither Biden nor his people had any interest in elevating Harris — arguably, JD Vance has received better treatment and his boss is a malignant narcissist. Yes, past presidents have not considered their vice president’s careers a personal priority, but they weren’t 78 years old at their inauguration. Here’s where I will offend some Harris supporters: She was probably a reckless choice for VP. Her 2020 presidential campaign didn’t make it past 2019. She was a California liberal who’d never proven she could carry the key swing states Democrats need to reach 270 electoral votes. Note that past Democratic presidents within my lifetime were from the South (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) or the midwest (Barack Obama). Biden had reportedly wanted Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. He presumably went with Harris — despite some negative feedback — because he felt like he owed it to Jim Clyburn. (It’s weird that a South Carolina representative would push for putting a California senator on the ticket rather than someone from his own region.)
Biden chose Harris and then seemingly regretted it immediately. You’d think the one upside of nominating a 78-year-old for president is that he wouldn’t make impulsive decisions with a longterm impact for short-term gain. Biden and his inner circle were in it for the full eight years, because … well, duh. No one runs for president to help make someone else president some day.
[The White House’s] thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him.
However, it’s more likely that Biden World believed that public efforts to make Harris appear ready to hit the ground running as president if necessary would only fuel the cementing right-wing narrative about Biden’s health. Democrats often claimed that Dick Cheney was running the show instead of George W. Bush, but Bush’s insistence that he was the true “decider” was easier to sell to the average voter. It helped that Bush was in his mid-50s not his late 70s.
Harris also uses the word “reckless” to describe Biden’s choice to run for re-election. I must stress, though, that this choice was technically made when he ran for president in the first place. No matter what people insist they heard or read through tea leaf interpretive dances, people don’t go to all the trouble to win the presidency to just serve one term. Biden’s age wasn’t a surprise condition. He was always going to keep getting older. People just willingly deluded themselves that he’d voluntarily step down. Instead, Harris was given the keys to a flaming car.
Harris admits that she personally wasn’t in a position to convince Biden to give up on a second term.
I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.
Residents of Biden World aren’t pleased with Harris’s candor and rushed to spill some tea of their own with Axios’s Alex Thompson, who co-wrote Original Sin. These are not the best LinkedIn testimonials.
“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job," said one former Biden White House official. "She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration's key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was."
Biden is “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign,” the ex-official said. “Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”
Biden is objectively the reason Harris (or frankly any Democrat) was doomed in the 2024 election. His approval rating was subterranean.
While this Biden White official slammed Harris for insufficient loyalty, another bashed her for not being disloyal sooner. It’s the classic Goldilocks attack.
“I’m not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment about Biden running is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is. If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year.”
No, I don’t know what that last line means, either. I do know that I’m officially sold on reading 107 Days, coming soon to my beach near me.
All politics is at the core, like running for high school student council president. The differences are matters of scale, not of kind. You make promises that you may not be able to keep, or never intend to keep at all. You surround yourself with both true believers and/or ambitious hangers on. You try to project confidence and likability. That's it. That's the whole thing.
If you lose, all concerned will backbite and try to rewrite history. In reality, the whims of the electorate are so inconsistent that no one really knows why one wins and another loses. One narrative wins out over time and another disappears, but this is not an easily quantifiable problem. One candidate wins with a message of hope, while another cannot duplicate that result, or somehow becomes associated with a different message through no fault of their own.
And in the end, we all are stuck with Jimmy or Tracy, who promised better snacks in the cafeteria to get elected.
"You’d think the one upside of nominating a 78-year-old for president is that he wouldn’t make impulsive decisions with a longterm impact for short-term gain"
Like Merrick Garland?