Kamala Harris's new book, 107 Days, details how she rose to the Democratic nomination and how the bottom eventually fell out of her presidential campaign.Andrew Harnik/The Associated Press
- Title: 107 Days
- Author: Kamala Harris
- Genre: Biography
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Pages: 320
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
It was about time. Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States, was on the line. There was no more endangered political figure on the planet, no more besieged world leader, no person more vulnerable, more desperate, more angered.
He had muffed – that is a very polite way of saying it – his June, 2024, debate with Donald Trump, who had pummelled, humiliated and diminished him. Everywhere – on newspaper editorial pages, throughout the internet, on Capitol Hill – there were calls for him to drop out of his re-election bid, now considered beyond repair. Doomed, actually.
Books we're reading and loving in September
It was the call that told Vice-President Kamala Harris he was heeding the demands to drop out. It was the call that initiated the 107 days of the Harris campaign, doomed in its own way. It was the call that confirmed what so many already believed, that despite it all – two impeachments, a riot he stirred at the Capitol, nearly 100 criminal indictments – Mr. Trump, whom Ms. Harris calls “an opponent who majored in malice,” was possibly headed back to the White House.
Those 107 days provide the title of Ms. Harris’s campaign memoir, which is a chronological account of how she rose to the Democratic nomination (without a test or a challenge), how for a time she soared, how things went sour and how the bottom fell out.
Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press
It’s a brisk read about a relatively short period of time. American presidential campaigns aren’t short, six-week affairs like national elections in Canada; they stretch on for months. By the end of this November, the field for the Republican contest to succeed Mr. Trump will start to take form. The Democrats are approaching the starting gate, too, which may be why the whole process is called a horse race.
Mr. Biden wanted Ms. Harris – reared partially in Montreal – to be the candidate, but as this account makes clear, he didn’t exactly make things easy for her. A standing start 107 days before a U.S. election is a huge disadvantage. Another disadvantage was the help, much of it grudging, that she got from the Biden team. So was the mess – inflation, primarily, but also immigration – Mr. Biden had left behind. All this provides the story line of her memoir.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
None of this will surprise careful, or even cursory, followers of the news. But there are some intriguing nuggets here – the kind of telling details that Time magazine editors, who in the publication’s glory days were hungry for such items and sprinkled them liberally in their weekly servings of turgid prose, used to call “nuts on the fruitcake”:
How Team Biden, slow to acknowledge the hopelessness of their own campaign, also wanted to delay the President’s endorsement of his understudy, thus potentially creating a vacuum that governors Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania would rush to fill.
How David Plouffe, who ran Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign, told her bluntly, “People hate Joe Biden.”
How Mr. Biden tired easily and how his inner circle “should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” How “it seemed that the worse things got, the more they pushed him [and] the more they pushed, the faster and more visibly his energy seemed to drain.”
How Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, recoiled at how the Biden team and family mistreated and used her, “and still, they have to ask if we are loyal?”
How Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted Mr. Trump to win the election because he would “acquiesce to his every extreme proposal.”
How she had been prepared to ask Mr. Trump if he took Viagra or had ever paid for an abortion, but didn’t pop the questions.
How Mr. Trump responded to her telephone call after he was the target of an assassination attempt, telling her, “You’ve done a great job, you really have,” adding, “How do I say bad things about you now?” Moments later she reflected: “He’s a con man. He’s really good at it.”
Ms. Harris shakes hands with Mr. Trump during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Sept. 10, 2024.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
Ms. Harris, whom the Secret Service gave the code name “Pioneer,” regrets that she didn’t separate herself enough from Mr. Biden, a failure that hurt her at the polls. She regrets that when the Trump team said she was worried about “they and them” while he was concerned about “you,” she didn’t fire back and say that “the pronoun that matters is ‘we.’”
She regrets that voters didn’t recognize that when Mr. Trump’s “ravings were becoming increasingly unhinged,” he was demeaning the office of the presidency more than he was demeaning her. She regrets that she fell into a trap in a CNN town hall by agreeing with Trump critics who called him a “fascist.”
Regrets, she has a few. But she took the blows and did it her way. In 107 Days, she said the things she truly feels – or at least a lot of them. Many political autobiographies do far less.