Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s new book, 107 Days, about her short time as the Democratic Party nominee for president, is, by all accounts, illuminating. Early reviews suggest that Harris was frustrated with the hand she was dealt in late July 2024 when she became her party’s nominee. From her standpoint, the decision was made far too late. But as the main subject, Harris is missing the point: She was never presidential material in the first place.
Vice presidents are historically next in line for the highest office in the land. Not just in terms of taking over if their boss is incapacitated, but in terms of running for president in the next open election cycle. The entire country knows why Joe Biden selected Harris to be his running mate in 2020. Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, and the hopes of a female president were all but gone. As a younger woman of color, Harris represented everything Biden was not. And with her, he hoped not only to secure his presidency but to pave the way for a possible Harris presidency in the future. But Biden’s ego got in the way.
In the Atlantic’s excerpt from her book, Harris writes of the decision to have Biden run in 2024, “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.” Certainly, ego played a huge part in Biden’s decision to run. First lady Jill Biden was a huge part of that as well. But the ego Harris speaks of so clearly when looking at Biden was just as evident in her abbreviated run.
The idea that a black woman should be supported simply because of the historical nature of her run is absurd. And despite claims to the contrary, both the media and the Harris-Walz campaign ran with that as a major theme: “I thought, as I often did, of Shirley Chisholm, and I know they did, too. The first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress and the first woman to run for our party’s nomination. She had blazed the path, and now I was standing on it.”
There is nothing wrong with looking at who came before. But being the first to do something does not mean said person should be rewarded with the ultimate prize. In this case, that prize would have been the presidency. Neither Harris’s sex nor race meant she deserved a single vote. But given her opponent’s major win over Clinton, there was pressure directed at female voters, especially, to support her without question. Because somehow, it was time.
It is ironic that Biden was floated as the nominee in 2020 to put a stop to Trump. He did, at least for four years. But Biden’s blindness to his own mental state and his terrible choice for vice president meant that the Democratic Party’s worst nightmare, a second Trump term, eventually came true.
Perhaps that would not have come true if Biden and the Democratic Party as a whole were not so concerned with appearances. Harris has trouble clearly communicating policy objectives or details. This was evident in interviews and even debate settings. She shrugged off the designation of “border czar” as though it were someone else’s duty. She ran interference for Biden for years, even though in her book, she writes, “On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
Would she have said so? Given how much we know now about the media and party cover-up of his true condition, it seems clear Harris said nothing on purpose.
If anything, this book seems like an attempt by Harris to explain herself in a way that shifts most of the blame for a second Trump term to Biden. Just the short excerpt makes that clear.
Still missing is a Harris who takes responsibility for her silence while her addled boss got worse. And an acknowledgment that her run for the White House crashed and burned because enthusiasm and urgency couldn’t make a dreadful candidate great.