The Resumé Thing

107 Days is a well-padded resumé disguised as a 320-page memoir. It is filled not with insights but the opposite: the prevarications of a politician who stumbled into the vice presidency by accident and whose total lack of self-awareness allowed her to believe she never had to actually convince American voters why they should vote for her, only that the other guy was worse.

Harris has never been the most magnetic politician or particularly well-regarded even within Democratic circles. In 2019, she had to abandon her primary bid against Joe Biden because literally no one would support her. Now given her own bully pulpit to lay waste to her naysayers, Harris boasts of her “powerful personal contact list” and insists that Joe Biden’s team never let her shine on her own merits or defended her from attacks in the press. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more,” she gripes.

Harris, alas, was not the smartest person to have been blessed with the office. Bafflingly, she gives us all the evidence we need to prove that she was a terrible candidate and that voters grew to dislike her more over time. For instance, she notes that a third of the country voted for her, while a third stayed home, and concludes that “two-thirds of our country did not elect Donald Trump.”

But this also means that two-thirds of the country did not vote for Kamala Harris.  They chose to either sit out the election that featured her, or voted for Trump, despite a massive initial surge in the polls showing support for her. This fact could have prompted her to ask why her candidacy fizzled out so quickly. Could it possibly be that voters rapidly began to distrust her? Could it be that the policies she offered them, to the extent that she had any, failed to meet their needs and concerns? Yet, throughout, Harris pouts that she simply did not have enough time.

In a July entry, she writes, “I didn’t have time to build a new plane; I had to fly the aircraft available.” This is a great metaphor, but it soon becomes evident that “not enough time” was her excuse for a lot, including her inability to connect to several different groups of voters. In explaining away her lack of focus on climate change, she acknowledges young voters’ “fear that my generation’s failure to act was robbing them of a healthy planet, a healthy future. I knew I risked leaving those votes on the table by not talking more about this issue. In this short campaign, I just didn’t have time. I had to triage issues so that key information could sink in.” About her inability to make inroads into the young Black male demographic, she writes, “In a longer campaign, I might have had time to better bring the message home.” And on immigration, she writes that she “did not have time, in 107 days, to undo ten years of Trump’s demonization of immigrants.”

Harris: Trump Is a ‘Tyrant’ Killing Capitalism to Stroke His ‘Fragile Ego’

107 Days may well have attracted many readers eager for bits of gossip. Of that, there is some, but none of it is interesting: in a by then characteristically bizarre fashion for the rapidly deteriorating president, Biden called her just before her debate with Trump to huff that he had heard rumors of her backstabbing him; Josh Shapiro was too ambitious to be a vice president; Pete Buttigieg was her first choice on the ticket but lost out because he is gay. On the last, more later.

Many of the chapters read like a candidate scrupulously detailing the work she has done in her previous positions. Take, for instance, her description of meeting President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), ruler of the United Arab Emirates: “With my national security adviser Phil Gordon beside me, we discussed these two conflicts and what steps MBZ might be willing to take to de-escalate in Sudan and support humanitarian relief in Gaza. In both conflicts, I stressed that our priority was to get the warring parties to the table and allow unfettered humanitarian access.” One gets no sense of Harris as an individual, but more of her as the deputy to the president, conveying official stands to a head of state. On a LinkedIn page, this might have read as:

In my position as vice president, I was tasked with meeting important heads of state and letting them know what the president was thinking.

Also lending to the resumé vibe are the many dollops of praise she transcribes for the reader who may have missed them during the campaign, as when she repeats the words of CNN’s John King describing her investiture as the candidate: “I think one of the greatest acts of political malpractice I have seen in my life-time doing this is that they kept her under wraps for three years[…] She also has potential star power. And on issues like reproductive rights and in the Black community, she is a great asset to this team, and they have kept her under wraps.”

Kamala Haris has a magnetic personality, and is an excellent asset to any team she joins.

Kamala Harris recounts Wall Street standoff in Gold Coast address

The Bathtub Thing

It was Harris’s 60th birthday on October 20. Both she and her husband Doug Emhoff had been campaigning, together and separately, crisscrossing the country to cover as much ground as possible. They managed to sync their calendars so that they would both be in Philadelphia, and her staff arranged for the two to spend the night in a nice hotel. Too tired to do much, Emhoff was unenthusiastic. His gift to her was a necklace he had originally bought for their anniversary months ago, with that date engraved on the back. The room was a dingy affair.

With all of this on her mind, Harris climbed into the bath to destress. As she prepared to get out, she realised that all the towels were “hanging on the far side of the room and unreachable.” She called out to Emhoff to bring them to her, but he was too preoccupied with a game on television. She finally called him on her phone. When he answered with an overly casual “What’s up?” she lost her temper, and they got into a fight.

That argument was quickly resolved, and Harris casts the anecdote as one about their “unconditional love” and how they make it as a married couple. But it accidentally provides a metaphor for her campaign and perhaps her career.

A curious reader wants to know: why not just get out of the tub and simply walk over to what she calls the “far side of the room,” like we mere mortals do? Unless this was the kind of bathroom you find in luxury residences featured in Architectural Digest, it’s unlikely that “far” meant more than a couple of feet.

It may seem petty to use this incident, but it does illustrate Harris’s expectation that the world should conform to her needs. Towels on the far side of the room? Someone else must fetch them. A slot as the Democrat presidential candidate that party leaders conveniently made sure would be uncontested by anyone else, a massively well-funded campaign that raked in over a billion dollars and the support of celebrities like Oprah and Beyoncé, a popular vice presidential candidate, a huge boost in the polls as soon as she stepped into the campaign… and, yet, somehow, her loss is still anyone’s fault but her own. Why are my towels on the other side of the room? Who will fetch them for me? 

The Buttigieg Thing

In one of the most controversial parts of the book, Harris reveals that she decided to remove Pete Buttigieg from consideration as a vice president on the ticket because he is gay. She writes,

He would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk. And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.

In interviews since then—and following much outrage, including Pete Buttigieg’s stunned response—Harris has insisted that she did not remove him from consideration because he is gay, but because it would be a “real risk.” She genuinely seems to think this exonerates her. Her rationale is similar to that of the storeowner who keeps his Black employees behind the scenes, claiming that it would make white customers uncomfortable. But the problem is not the fictional customer or voter: it’s the racism of the businessman and the homophobia of the presidential candidate whose vision of her country does not include gay men in power.

Harris tries hard to prove that she loves the LGBTQ community, but she clearly only sees them as potential voters and as instruments through which to virtue-signal her inclusiveness. When she writes about how it took a while to get her husband on the phone to tell him about Biden’s decision to drop out, she points out that he “was catching up with a partner at his former law firm who’d come out as gay during the Covid pandemic,” thus dropping a non sequitur to make sure we know that the Harris-Emhoffs have gay friends. To emphasize this even further, she continues, “After their workout, Doug was grabbing coffee with Mitch and his boyfriend, Bob,” in case a careless reader had not surmised by then that this was a gay friend of theirs. (Italics mine.)

The Buttigieg matter does raise a serious question: Did she decide against Josh Shapiro because he is Jewish? After all, she has already made it clear that she thinks Americans are suspicious of her as “a Black woman married to a Jewish man.” (We know now that Bernie Sanders, a Jewish man, could easily have become president: this is not 1956.) If Pete Buttigieg, a midwestern white Christian gay man—who is as close to Tim Walz as any gay man can get—could not be considered because of his sexuality, is it likely that she dismissed Shapiro because that would make her a Black woman married to a Jewish man, with a Jewish vice president? We may never know, but given how much thought she appears to have given this particular triangulation, it seems likely that Shapiro’s religious identity was a factor. Claiming he was too ambitious may be a distraction.

Obama and Harris publicly rebuke Trump’s second-term actions

As with the gay Buttigieg, Harris is careless about the trans community and subtly hints that they were part of the reason she did not win. In the October 15 chapter, with 21 days to go, she is asked by a reporter about the stagnation in her numbers which were not budging despite the initial bump. She confesses to being puzzled. “And then,” she writes dramatically, “Doug started seeing the trans ads.”

These were the ones that blared, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” As attorney general of California, she had supported gender-affirming surgery for prisoners, and the Trump administration used that against her. She now has an entire book in which to unequivocally stand by trans people and call out the ads for their bigotry. Instead, Harris first points out that there are very few trans Americans: “A tiny minority of less than 1 percent of the population.” The ads focused on the presence of trans athletes in women’s sports, spreading the canard that they were not women but men with an unfair advantage. Harris does not offer a firm rebuttal, but writes that “I agree with the concerns expressed by parents and players.” Likewise, on the issue of providing medical support for trans prisoners, she does not take a principled stand, but explains that California law had required her to do so. In other words: of course she supported trans healthcare but only because she had to; it was “what the law says.” She simply happened to have supported them, in a legal way, not because she actually stands by them.

The Biden Thing

For months after the election, voters and commentators speculated about how much Harris knew about Biden’s capacity to lead, and what her responsibility was in letting people know that he was in cognitive decline. She writes:

“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. 

The distinction between grace and recklessness is a false binary that sets up Harris as an ethical person, struggling with a decision. There was a third option, the one she chose but does not mention: cowardice, which she exercised when she decided not to challenge someone more powerful than herself.

She goes on to claim that she never believed he was incapable of governing, only that he did need more rest and that she “had never, in three and a half years at the White House, in the Oval Office or the Situation Room, witnessed anything remotely like the level of confusion, incoherence, and debility we saw on the debate stage.”

But if a politician cannot perform at his peak and is the oldest president in history and, as she points out, was clearly befuddled and confused just days after his decision: how does she also claim that he just needed rest?

“The View” and the Vision Thing

Harris was handed all the ingredients for success, but she had no idea what to do with them, and was always one sentence away from being discovered as a fraud. This was never more evident than in her many disastrous interviews.

On October 8, Harris made an infamous appearance on The View, the leading daytime talk show, where she was asked by one of the hosts, Sunny Hostin, what she would do differently from Biden. Her answer was that “not a thing comes to mind.” Harris had her chance to offer her new vision for the years ahead to a multigenerational and multiethnic audience, and offered nothing.

Addressing the fiasco in the book, she reveals that she had in fact practiced a response, one that she was very proud of and eager to share. Her team, standing horrified on the sidelines, quickly passed her a note reminding her to bring up her point. After the commercial break, she attempted to recover lost ground and triumphantly trotted out a major difference between her and Biden: she would have a Republican in her cabinet. That did not earn her any points anywhere.

Even now, after months of criticism, Harris fails to understand that voters wanted a Democratic president to actually espouse Democratic principles and politics. In her retelling of the incident, she tries to explain why she said that “not a thing” came to mind: “I felt I owed him my loyalty.” But she also writes that she did in fact have a response she wanted to trot out. So, which is it? That her “loyalty” compelled her to say there were no differences, or that she flubbed her lines? Neither fact excuses her failure to deliver a prepared response, and retelling the incident in this jumbled way allows her to (try and) erase the fact that her move to include Liz Cheney in the campaign has been widely criticized. In the Nation, John Nichols wrote that “the Cheney strategy was an abject failure that added few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienated voters who have no taste for the former GOP representative’s neocon extremism, and stole precious time from an agonizingly short campaign schedule.”

Clooney says Harris replacing Biden was a ‘mistake’

This inability to define herself would show up in all her media appearances. Later, in a CNN town hall with undecided voters moderated by Anderson Cooper, she again could not respond to questions except to keep pointing out that Donald Trump would be a menace: participants afterwards pointed to her inability to make a case for herself.

As I wrote at the time, Kamala Harris was always the Boy Band of politicians, a conglomeration of loosely knit ideas that make up a catchy tune at first, but whose popularity ebbs over time. She even refused to put any policies on her website at first, instead relying on meaningless fluff about a “politics of joy.” After Biden’s departure, she made sure that there would be no “mini primary or some other half-baked procedure.” (Both Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama thought there ought to be a primary, to prevent the appearance of a coronation, and Obama allegedly opposed Harris’s selection altogether and worked hard behind the scenes to prevent her from being the nominee) She writes about the “zero suspense” of the nomination, since “no other candidate competed to get the three hundred signatures required by party rules to challenge me,” but she was largely responsible for making sure she would be the only candidate. Boasting about “no other candidate” is a bit like King Charles boasting that he beat hundreds of other contestants in line for his hereditary throne.

The Voter Thing

Barack Obama, Kamala Harris campaign for Democrats, as Donald Trump’s political operation invests in turnout

A recurring theme in the book is that Harris did not have the time to connect with crucial voting blocs. She writes, “It was devastating to learn after the election that I lost some ground with voters under thirty, especially young men.” Her reasoning as to why this should have been the case is predictable: “In 107 days, I didn’t have enough time to show how much more I would do to help them than he [Trump] ever would.”

In fact, she had ample opportunities to connect with a range of voters—and the money and machinery to help her. When Harris and Walz stepped out together for their first official rally on July 30, in Atlanta, they were greeted by no fewer than 10,000 people, all screaming wildly in enthusiasm. She writes, “By the next day, national polls revealed we’d made up all the ground lost since Joe’s debate. I was in a statistical dead heat with Trump.” Polling data shows that support for the ticket rose steadily while Trump floundered, with over 50 percent of voters in her favor in mid-September. The money flowed in like a waterfall: by July 27, only a week after Biden’s announcement, they had raised $200 million. By the end of the three months, she had raised nearly $1.5 billion.

The decline in support began at the end of September and continued downwards. After the election, David Plouffe, former senior adviser to Barack Obama and a consultant to Harris, acknowledged that the internal team never saw polling that indicated Harris could win. We now also know that while the country was being pummeled with statements and appearances from celebrities like Beyoncé, Oprah, and Taylor Swift, the campaign was burning through its giant, record-breaking reservoir of cash. As Nathan J. Robinson pointed out in this magazine, the money was squandered on pointless strategies and tactics including: $900,000 on an ad projected on the Las Vegas Sphere from October 29 through November 4, seen only by perhaps a few thousand tourists weaving in and out of casinos and restaurants (all of whom had probably either already voted in their home state via mail or were too busy holidaying to care); $350,000 on YouTube host Roland Martin, whose interview with the candidate brought in 130,000 views (a piffling number in the influencer world); and $500,000 to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit in exchange for a softball conversation on MSNBC.

None of this made a difference—Harris lost Nevada by a little over three percentage points, Martin’s viewers could not have made much of a difference, and the MSNBC audience already skews liberal. As for the celebrities: it now appears that the campaign was so starstruck by all the famous names it was able to host at various concerts (singers included Bon Jovi and Lady Gaga, along with Cardi B and Megan thee Stallion) that it happily accrued a $20 million debt over their appearances. Harris was also the first Democrat in twenty years to lose the popular vote.

The more Americans saw of Kamala Harris, the less they liked. Her supporters claim that voters were not ready for a Black and South Asian woman as president, but the massive groundswell of support for her candidacy in the first several weeks and the poll numbers indicate otherwise. Those of us reporting on and watching the candidacy as it took shape were struck by the palpable sense of hope on the part of many, and even Trump, who dragged his feet on entering a televised debate with her, seemed initially shaken by her presence on the scene.

The “Harris fish.” Enthusiasm for Harris grew and then wore off and diminished as voters saw more of her, suggesting that Harris actually would have benefited from a shorter election cycle in which people got to know her less, not a longer one in which they got to know her more. Source: Wikipedia.

The harder truth that Harris and her supporters cannot seem to grasp or accept is that the problem was not that voters of all ages and backgrounds could not connect with her, but that they didn’t like what they saw. Like most people on the left, I did not have great respect for Harris, but I also worried about the alternative: a second Trump presidency. And, at first, there were signs that the campaign was doing everything the right way: galvanizing the youth vote, gathering the funds necessary to effectively launch quick counterattacks against a vicious opponent, (presumably) paying for well-run campaign outposts in areas traditionally hostile to Democrats. There was a political vacuum that existed, between hardcore Trumpists who could never be persuaded to vote for anyone else and vast swaths of people who disliked his politics but felt betrayed by Biden and the Democratic party. We on the left hoped that Harris would fill that political space and give us a chance to continue fighting for better solutions on issues like economic inequality, abortion rights, and trans rights. That hope soon dissipated. She seemed overawed by celebrities and less inclined to hone her political messages for a larger audience of voters, many of whom were clearly yearning to be heard.

Kamala Harris Still Facing Criticism for Trump’s Second Term Stemming From Her Defeat

By the time she made her acceptance speech at the convention, I knew she would lose, and I said so, explicitly, in an August 23 article titled “Kamala Harris Will Lose.” I take no pleasure in having been right.

The Celebrity Thing

As the campaign progressed, the preoccupation with celebrity endorsements overshadowed any meaningful connections to voters. Celebrity names are dropped throughout the book. In a peculiar non sequitur, Harris writes of a 2017 incident where Oprah Winfrey, unbidden, sits down and chats with her as a friend. She often emerges as a starstruck fan asking celebrities for their autographs more than a calm and assured politician who was the leading face of the ticket.

At first, celebrities seemed like an easy way to grasp a younger demographic. Early on, the British singer-songwriter Charli XCX posted “Kamala is brat,” and Harris’s team quickly adopted that as a catchphrase to relate to a younger demographic. As Harris writes, with more than a touch of glee, “Brat was the title of her latest album and identified me with her brand: edgy, imperfect, confident, embracing. From then on, our rebranded Kamala HQ social media site was awash in her signature color, lime green, and posts supporting us used that color.” By August, “Brat” and that hideous green were everywhere, and Harris mistook Charli XCX’s fans for an actual demographic of voters. (The singer could not vote for her anyway, since she is British.)

The Brat campaign was sustained by hordes of perennially online internet denizens, people with the time and resources to stay online. Taylor Lorenz has written about the murky ethics of influencers working with the Democratic machine. There is the additional fact that they were, on the whole, quite useless. (To be clear, we would still have to question their ethics even if they won.)

The Harris campaign thought that all of this pandering to a presumed youth demographic would result in votes. But their image of “youth” was skewed by much of mainstream media’s reporting on a largely fictional category of people who, according to aging columnists and writers, eat too many avocados and won’t marry and reproduce. The truth is that young people nowadays are more likely to be working multiple jobs, and even college degrees don’t lift them into well-paying employment with healthcare. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that “roughly 8.9 million workers held multiple jobs in February.” These were not the people being reached by the “edgy, imperfect, confident, embracing” persona Harris tried so hard to cultivate. When you are struggling to pay rent, being told that a politician “is brat” is unlikely to convince you to vote for them.

Not all celebrities receive Harris’s praise. She seems to still be furious with Charlamagne tha God, whose radio show hosted her twice. The Breakfast Club reaches 8 million listeners a month, many of them young Black men, the very demographic she wishes she could have reached. She begins her account with a misrepresentation of what happened:

When I appeared on his show, he lit right into me: “You come off very scripted. You stick to your talking points.” “That would be called ‘discipline,’ ” I retorted.

In fact, anyone who listened to the show will recall that he put his point across quite politely: “One thing they’ve been saying is… You come off very scripted. You like to stick to your talking points…” He went on, “some people say you have an inability to fearlessly say who you are and what you believe. I know that’s not true, but what do you say to that criticism?”

During the course of the interview, a number of Black men came to the mic and asked her thoughtfully prepared questions, most of which she handled by echoing what they said and then reverting to how bad Trump would be. Towards the end, Charlamagne asked her directly about Obama’s controversial finger-wagging at Black male voters: the former president had suggested that their reluctance to support her had to do with misogyny. When, Charlamagne asked, would white women like Liz Cheney start finger-wagging at the white women who had been among Trump’s biggest voters?

Bizarrely, Harris completely avoided the question, with a smirk on her face, and instead responded, “Well, thank you for highlighting that I do have the support of over 200 Republicans who worked for various administrations…including Liz Cheney and I’m very proud to have her support.” And she continued on with “reminding people what was at stake.” The message was clear: All that matters is that we win, we’ll take care of these issues that are important to you later on, and, yes, I’m very proud of being associated with those white women you criticize. 

Money was thrown around on narrow strategies and rambling appearances where Harris failed to connect with people and even alienated them. The vibe was just that, a vibe. Everyone needed to vote for her or face the end of the world. On October 31, she recalls, the giant Las Vegas ad went up: “As we drove past the Sphere, I glimpsed my face—far bigger than I’d ever imagined—in the rearview mirror as we sped on.”

The Sphere is an apt metaphor for the whole campaign: needless, useless, and filled with a lot of nothing. Sure, it piqued the interest of passersby, but by November 4, it had become a sign of failure. Voters like the ones at the town hall or on The Breakfast Club were still left wondering what Harris would do for them, and what she stood for. In 2016, Hillary Clinton said to the New York Times, “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.” The arrogance was palpable then: voters didn’t need a reason to vote for Clinton, they just needed to know that voting for Trump would be a disaster. This threat spoke of contempt for their everyday lives and aspirations, and it meant that the only people who mattered would be the ones in charge. “Don’t worry your pretty little heads,” Clinton seemed to say, “Just leave it all up to me.” In 2024, Kamala Harris’s approach was similarly vacuous, with a message of doom: Vote for me, or the other guy wins.

Harris: Trump Is a ‘Tyrant’ Killing Capitalism to Stroke His ‘Fragile Ego’

The Gaza and Immigration Thing

That imperiousness spilled over into Harris’s brusque and heartless response to protestors over Gaza, clearly heard when she responded to demonstrators at a rally, “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” The point was clear: if you criticize me on this issue, you’re just asking for a Trump win. When she mentions genocide, it’s only twice, in reference to protestors, like the time they showed up at a Detroit rally as what she describes as a “noisy group” (well, yes, they were protesting!): “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide. We won’t vote for genocide.” She paints their opposition to her on the issue as “reckless,” and otherwise avoids mentioning them. They were there, and it was annoying, but what can you do? is the attitude.

Like most liberals and Democrats, Harris assumed Gaza would not matter to enough voters. She seems to have assumed that the issue would never have a reach beyond, perhaps, Dearborn, Michigan, which has a high concentration of Arab Americans. She speaks of pity for dead children, which is a standard liberal response, but stakes her political position close to Israel. She did not allow even the anodyne Uncommitted group of pro-Palestine voters to speak at the convention, but praises herself for having received praise from the Washington Post’s David Von Drehle for how she tackled the issue: “And, behold, she had her boat through the impossible strait.” Yet, she maintained complete silence on the matter of genocide. As with gay men and trans people, she banked on the idea that no one would care about insignificant numbers of people.

In 2016 Dearborn voted 63 percent for Clinton. In 2024, Harris got 36 percent, while Trump got 43 percent. Meanwhile, Rashida Tlaib, a vocal critic of Israel and a staunch advocate for trans rights, won her seat by 63 percent.

Even now, with an entire book at her disposal, Harris does not bother to address the concerns of disillusioned voters, and gives no indication that she has even bothered to reach out to them. Nor does she seem to realize that her repellent refusal to break with Biden over the genocide was an important factor in her loss, with a substantial number of non-voters citing Gaza as their reason for sitting out the race.

A similar carelessness is apparent in Harris’s stance on immigration. As with everything else, Harris complains that she was too rushed to make the case that she had an agenda on the issue. “All I could do was show that we had taken measures that were working, and that I took the issue seriously and would continue to press for the comprehensive reforms we needed.” Yet, she gives no indication what those comprehensive reforms might have been. Were there efforts to provide a pathway to citizenship? What of the Dreamers, the tens of thousands of now formerly young people who had come out under the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program?

Instead, she writes glowingly about the border fence built by Obama. In September of 2024, she visited it for a photo op to emphasize that she would be much tougher than Trump on enforcement. Here, again, she is contradictory, pointing out that Trump “had four years to increase the number of border agents, to boost the number of border judges. He did neither. All he did was fan flames of hate and division, highlighting rare, tragic cases of violent crime while smearing the overwhelming majority of hardworking immigrants.”

But she offers no suggestions beyond tougher enforcement: “I was the one who’d walked through tunnels that traffickers used to smuggle contraband and broken up a heroin trafficking ring connected to Mexican cartels. I’d done the hard work to bring criminals to justice and relief to the families of their victims.”

Nowhere in this discourse is there anything that might appeal to the nearly 37 million Latino voters in the country or to their friends and allies, and she has little to say to immigrants from any part of the world. Meanwhile, as Harris tacked right on foreign policy, immigration, and climate change, liberal pundits were insisting that “the centrism is working.” It wasn’t. Instead, it was slowly deflating popular enthusiasm for Harris, as voters realized she sounded like she stood for nothing except her own right to succeed her boss.

The End Thing

By now, there is a mountain of evidence that Joe Biden was not capable of carrying on as president, let alone moving into a second term. Harris’s excuses and prevarications on that matter are no longer worth taking into account. The more pressing question is: what kind of a candidate did we get in Kamala Harris? 107 Days shows us a great deal of who she was and is, and it’s a disconcerting sight. Harris does not emerge as a gifted and visionary politician, or even a moderately skilled one. The book confirms what many on the left have known for a long while: that Harris has neither the qualifications nor the expertise to lead the world’s most powerful country.

Vast amounts of money and resources and hopes were pinned on a candidate who had neither the talent to take on a critical political position nor even the personality to pretend that she could carry it off. Even now, she boasts about matters that she should try to forget. She writes, for instance, that Trump won the narrowest of victories, as if she should be given an “E” for effort, when all that matters is who won. (She received nearly 6.3 million fewer votes than Biden won in 2020.)

LAPD Ends Short-lived Protection for Kamala Harris

107 Days is a testament to the failed candidacy of Kamala Harris, but it also demonstrates the hollowness of a  Democratic Party that insisted on propping her up despite her many inadequacies. The loss was inevitable, and Democrats are now increasingly under attack even from their base of liberals and progressives. Seven million people spent a large part of October 18 marching in several No Kings parades. The country has shifted leftwards on Gaza: polls indicate that even among older Americans, “negative attitudes towards Israel increased from 43 percent to 66 percent,” and by July of this year only eight percent of Democrats approved of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. On immigration, the persistence of raids and their sheer brutality have meant much less support for Trump, even in his Republican base. The election of democratic socialist and anti-Zionist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York indicates that more voters are open to leftist principles, stated unequivocally and clearly.

None of this indicates that the country is moving towards a socialist paradise. Even the No Kings parades still demonstrated what John Ross and Nathan J. Robinson point to as a “worrying Democratic tendency to build an entire platform around opposing Trump.” Still, there are signs that conventional liberal pieties and calls to “vote blue no matter who” are no longer sustainable in a country that is watching so much break apart, and so quickly.

Kamala Harris’s book tour is selling out everywhere, but I predict that hers will be among the most remaindered books of the year. Just as fewer people are willing to hold on to all the “anti-racism” books they bought to line their background bookshelves during Zoom calls at the start of the pandemic, Harris’s particular brand of clueless Nice Lady politics will not stand the test of time.

In the 1980s, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoon strip portrayed George H. W. Bush as invisible under hats and headphones, signifying his lack of presence. In later years, his vice president Dan Quayle, renowned for his nothingness, was depicted as a solitary feather. Trudeau has mostly retired, but if Doonesbury were to run today, Harris would be a perennial ellipsis… signifying nothing.

Kamala Harris opens up about ‘complicated’ relationship with Biden, including when he ‘greatly disappointed’ her

Barack Obama, Kamala Harris campaign for Democrats, as Donald Trump’s political operation invests in turnout

Former Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview out Thursday, said a frustrating phone call with Joe Biden ahead of her debate with Donald Trump showed her that the former president wasn’t focused on her success – citing it as an example of why she has a “complicated” relationship with Biden.

“My takeaway is his motivation was all about himself,” she said on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast. “It wasn’t about my performance at the debate.”

Harris recounted the call, moments before her high-stakes confrontation with Trump, in which Biden told her “a group of people” were speaking poorly of her in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, “because they heard I was saying bad things about him.”

“I was told that he wanted to call so that I’d be ready,” Harris said. “‘I was so sure it was to buck me up and (say) ‘go get ‘em’ … When I hung up the phone I was just – it was unbelievable, and I was – yes I was angry, and deeply disappointed. It was so unnecessary.”

The podcast appearance, part of Harris’ media tour promoting her book “107 Days,” marked the former vice president’s latest candid conversation rehashing what happened during her brief and unsuccessful bid for the presidency, as well as the fallout from her loss.

Harris said she is still friends with Biden, who she said had called her two days earlier for her birthday.

“I have a great deal of affection for him, and there were times, that I’ve been quite candid about, where he greatly disappointed me and, frankly, angered me,” she said.

Harris also discussed her perception of Biden’s mental state leading up to his disastrous June 2024 debate against now-President Trump. Harris said in the interview that she didn’t think Biden actually wanted to hold the early general election debate, but was talked into it.

“It’s like any competition you go in, whether it’s you’re bidding for something, if it’s sports – you gotta want it, right?” Harris said. “If you don’t want to be in the competition it will absolutely have an impact on your performance, and I don’t think he – I’m pretty sure he did not want to debate.”

The former vice president also suggested that she is open to running for president again.

“I think the case for running again is if I can make a difference,” she said. “If I feel that I can offer something as president of the United States that would be not only uplifting to the American people, but would be about getting us on a correct trajectory.”

Harris was asked if she thinks she can offer such a message to the country.

“I mean, that’s why I ran the last time,” she said. “We’ll have to see what happens over the course of these next few months, several months.”