The title of Kamala Harris’s new memoir, “107 Days,” is more revealing than it means to be. In its simplest sense, it marks the length of her 2024 presidential campaign, the number of days from July 21, when Joe Biden left the race, through Nov. 5, when Harris lost it. The book breaks down, countdown-style, each chapter covering one day of the campaign. Some chapters span several pages, others a few paragraphs; the shortest is a handful of words. Harris also skips several days altogether. Even when you’re running for president of the United States, I imagine, some days are just more interesting than others.
But the title is not merely the duration of Harris’s campaign; it is also her excuse for losing the election. Throughout the book, the former vice president repeatedly laments that she did not have sufficient time to run the race she would have liked. With more time, Harris contends, she could have better sold her economic vision. With more time, she could have forged a stronger connection with voters. With more time, she could have made clear that she offered Americans a superior alternative to Donald Trump.
“In 107 days, I didn’t have enough time to show how much more I would do to help them than he ever would,” Harris writes. “And that makes me immensely sad.”
It’s a comforting explanation, in part because it eases the burden of responsibility on Harris for her defeat. After all, the calendar is a structural impediment, not a strategic or ideological one. And the person most easily blamed for truncating the 2024 campaign schedule is not Harris, but her former boss, the man who sat atop the ticket for so long that, when push came to shove him out, Harris had only 107 days left.
Biden’s choice to stay in the race so long was based on “ego” and “ambition,” Harris writes. And her own deference to Biden’s intransigence was, in hindsight, an exercise in “recklessness.” The stakes of the race, Harris concludes, were too high to leave it all to a personal decision made by the first family. If she did not say so in real time, it was in part because of how “incredibly self-serving” it would have seemed for her to suggest the president make way for someone else. Such is the price of politesse.
Harris’s book is not as relentlessly damning of Biden as, say, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin.” Still, Harris acknowledges that an aging Biden got “tired” and that he “needed rest,” and that even though she believed that he could still govern — “I don’t believe it was incapacity,” she writes, in a tellingly awkward formulation — his deteriorating campaign skills worried her.
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