Kamala Harris’ candid memoir reveals her ‘ideal’ vice president – and why she thinks she lost
- Written by: Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney
It is downright eerie to read, right now, Kamala Harris’ memoir of her 2024 presidential campaign. These events feel so far away now, when we read them from within the frequent shocks of the Trump presidency, from troops on the streets of Washington to the indictment of former FBI director James Comey. But the chapter titles – beginning “July 21. 107 Days to the Election” – remind us the election was just last year.
“It says a lot about how traumatised we both were by what happened that night that Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reflects about election night: her campaign at an end and Trump triumphant.
The book is not the whole story – not by a long shot. But her words about these events resonate with a ring of truth.
Book review: 107 Days – Kamala Harris (Simon & Schuster)
The first chapter, Sunday July 21, covers the day Joe Biden – who disintegrated before our eyes in his catastrophic debate with Trump – withdrew from the race, with no road to victory.
He did want to endorse Harris, but “not for a day, maybe two”. She told him that would be “ruinous”. She argued that she was not just “the candidate in the strongest position to win”, but “the only person” who would preserve Biden’s legacy. “At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him – and all the good he had achieved – under the bus.”
She draws on her call notes to supply the reactions of various senior Democrats to the news that day, from Bill Clinton (“Oh my god, I’m so relieved!”) to Gavin Newsom:
Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)
Throughout, Harris is relentlessly sharp in recollecting the campaign – and very candid on all the principals, including the love of her husband, Doug Emhoff.
It takes courage to write about such an agonising, devastating defeat – after an historic, exhilarating campaign – so quickly and so personally. Memoirs are rarely written this quickly. (We are still waiting, five years later, for the second volume of Barack Obama’s memoirs.)
In writing this book, she got by with a little help from a “special friend”: Pulitzer prize winning Australian author Geraldine Brooks. Harris’ acknowledgements note her deep appreciation of working with Brooks, whose “ferocious and brilliant artistic insights were indispensable.”
The book fully reflects that. And who knows? Brooks one day might collaborate with Kamala on an inaugural address.
Candid, but loyal about Biden
Harris is candid about Biden’s decline, but still essentially loyal.
“On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump at his best,” she writes. “There was a distinction between his ability to campaign and his ability to govern.”
Bob Woodward, the dean of presidential journalists, reached the same conclusion in his last book, War.
Harris writes:
of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. 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.
The choice, she says, should not “have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
In other words, this was a decision his family and associates did not want to make. But it was imperative the national interest be placed above Biden’s personal interest.
The Harris campaign kept the core of Team Biden. “I didn’t have time to build a new plane; I had to fly the aircraft available.”
One of Biden’s closest advisors, Mike Donilon (criticised in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s recent Biden book, Original Sin) left Harris’ campaign two weeks in.
She describes him, during Biden’s 2024 campaign, filtering poll data and presenting “the numbers in soothing terms […] really there was nothing to see here”. At these briefings (which “made no sense to me”), she writes, “Doug had wanted to stop sitting next to me because he got tired of me kicking him under the table when I asked a question and got a nonanswer.”
Pete Buttigieg ‘too big of a risk’ as VP
Harris delivers the goods on her vice-presidential search. She admits Pete Buttigieg (a personal friend) was her first choice and the “ideal partner” – but the then transportation secretary, with his husband and children, was “too big of a risk” for “a Black woman married to a Jewish man”.
Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, came across to her as wanting a co-presidency. “At one point, he mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision […] I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two.”
Harris admits Pete Buttigieg was her ‘ideal partner’ as vice president.
Jacquelyn Martin/AAP
She viewed senator and retired astronaut Mark Kelly of Arizona very favourably, but was afraid the Trump attack machine would try to take him down on his (excellent) military service record – just like the Republicans did to John Kerry in 2004. The man who led that effort, Chris LaCivita, was now a top Trump campaign aide.
Could a captain, used to deference and respect, adapt to an opponent’s national campaign specifically designed to disrespect him, to cut a hero down to something small?
Of course, the military service slander she feared with Kelly was employed against her eventual choice. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who served in the National Guard for 24 years, was accused by vice president JD Vance of “stolen valor” for his misstatement, while arguing for an assault weapons ban, that “these weapons of war that I carried in war” had no place on civilian streets, though he didn’t serve in combat.
Harris found the chemistry she wanted with the “genuinely self-deprecating” Walz: an all-American decent guy next door, with great values and common sense. “He had no fixed ideas about what the role of vice president would be, saying he would do whatever I found was most useful for him to do.”
She writes that her senior staff favoured Walz, “to a person”, as did her sister – while husband Doug Emhoff, interestingly, leaned towards Shapiro.
We will never know if Shapiro or Kelly would have carried their swing states, perhaps changing the outcome of the election.
Harris judged that Tim Walz ‘would do whatever I found was most useful for him to do’ as vice president.
Will Oliver/AAP
‘Don’t ever let them make you cry’
Trump’s outrages on the campaign trail were rife. Harris takes us behind the scenes to reveal her reactions to key moments, like Trump’s infamous statement to the National Association with Black Journalists: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.” (Her mother is Indian; her father Jamaican.)
To campaign aide Brian Fallon, who wanted her to “punch back with a big speech about my racial identity”, she retorted:
Today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?
Harris takes us into her July 25 meeting with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu during her campaign. She also tells us she believes Israel was right to respond to “the atrocities of October 7”, but criticises the “ferocity” of Netanyahu’s response, including “the number of innocent Palestinian women and children killed and his failure to prioritize the lives of the hostages”. She was tough.
“I interrupted to reiterate the need for an immediate ceasefire and a day-after plan that gave Palestinians some kind of political horizon.” Netanyahu did not like what he was hearing – especially from her. “He wanted Trump in the seat opposite him. Not Joe. Not me.”
When Harris met with Benjamin Netanyahu on July 25, she sensed he ‘wanted Trump in the seat opposite him. Not Joe. Not me.’
Julia Nikhinson/AAP
Harris does acknowledge Biden gaffes, like when he put on the MAGA hat of a Trump supporter he was joking with, who offered it to him. Her internal monologue went: “Don’t take it […] Don’t put it on.” Then: “He put it on.” That photo carried the caption, “Biden endorses Trump over Harris.” A bad day on a trail that had only 107 days.
When Harris talks about being a woman in politics, she sounds a lot like Julia Gillard.
“As any woman in a public-facing job knows, it takes us longer,” she writes about the two hours she needed to get ready on the campaign trail – make-up, hairstyling, “more complicated apparel choices”. Women are still judged on these seeming trivialities, she writes, over “the consequential matters we’re engaged in”.
She relates a conversation with German chancellor Angela Merkel. “They used to call me this – this ugly bird. And at first it hurt me deeply.” Angela leant towards Kamala. “Don’t ever let them make you cry.”
Harris never does.
Angela Merkel told Harris: ‘Don’t ever let them make you cry.’
Andrew Harnik/AAP
‘I know Donald Trump’s type’
Harris’ speeches hit Trump where it hurts. As California’s attorney general, she told crowds:
I took on predators of all kinds […] Predators who abused women, who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own game. So hear me when I say […] I know Donald Trump’s type.
The crowds “exploded” at this line, she writes.
There are phrases in English that do a lot of work for you. “I know his type” is one of them. We’ve all said it about someone of low character whom we’ve personally known.
She had big rallies. And big money. She was fully competitive.
Harris told America what Day One of President Kamala Harris would look like. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities on what I will get done for the American people.”
By contrast: “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list.” Does anyone following American politics today doubt that?
By her own account, the wisest advisor in her campaign was David Plouffe, who ran Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign. But like a Shakespearean ghost, Plouffe’s warnings haunt this play. He counselled her Trump was doing better than in 2016 and 2020, and the assassination attempt had pushed his turnout up 20%. “Whatever you think his turnout will be, add ten per cent.”
Her campaign strategists were not happy about Harris’ continued praise for Biden in her speeches, urging her to stop. Plouffe put it bluntly: “People hate Joe Biden.” Harris quotes those words twice.
Why does she believe she lost?
This is her verdict: “One hundred and seven days were not, in the end, long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency.”
Maybe.
Harris had big rallies and big money.
Jacquelyn/AAP
Trump got three million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. Harris got six million fewer votes than she and Biden did in 2020.
All that Harris was proud of – the landmark legislation on infrastructure, health care and clean energy – would not deliver their full benefits before the election. In the run up to November, she writes, inflation and interest rates were high, and there was no immediate relief.
Harris wanted to talk directly to Trump supporters, but it never happened. She wrote:
I wished I could ask every one of them. What are you angry about? What about me makes you angry? Is it your health care, your grocery bills, a backbreaking job that doesn’t pay what you’re worth – and what can I do to help you?
She did not reach them.
She combated Trump’s strength on immigration and border issues, and the issue of Gen Z facing a future without good prospects. An anti-trans campaign ripped across the country: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” It was reported more than US$21 million was spent by Trump and Republicans on anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ television ads as of October 9 2024.
Harris peaked in mid-September. She never had a lead clear of the polls’ margin of error.
On election day, she believed she would win.
Authors: Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney
Daily Bulletin
