107 DAYS, by Kamala Harris
When Joe Biden phoned Kamala Harris to tell her that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, he said he was just minutes away from announcing his decision to the world. It was a Sunday afternoon in late July — not yet a full month since a wan, feeble Biden had delivered a listless debate performance against a red-faced, fulminating Donald Trump. For more than three weeks, Biden had been bucking demands to drop out, and Harris assumed he was going to persevere. But then he came down with Covid and she got the call.
Harris was initially bewildered by Biden’s sudden switch, including his determination to rush out an announcement. “Give me a bit more time,” she thought to herself. She was wearing sweats and had just served her grandnieces some pancakes. But in another sense she felt ready: “I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win.”
Was she? It’s a question that looms over “107 Days,” Harris’s new memoir about her second presidential campaign, though she tries to dispel any doubts by cutting them off at the pass. The early pages have her making the rounds right after Biden went public, asking Democratic insiders whether she could count on their support. As someone who prides herself on doing “the work,” she reprints the notes she made from those calls, including the few demurrals. Nancy Pelosi thought there should be “some kind of primary, not an anointment.” Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and Harris’s longtime frenemy, ducked the question. Her notes read: “Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)”
“107 Days” takes us through the next 106 days until the night of Nov. 5, when Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College — an evening that Harris says was so awful for her and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, that they “never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book.” She had just come out of “the shortest campaign in modern presidential history.” One refrain in this memoir is how little time Harris had to make her case to the American people. “I was in fight mode,” she writes at one point. “I couldn’t let down my guard.”
Political figures aren’t known for baring their hearts and souls in their books, especially if they are keen to keep their options open. When news broke that Harris had worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, there was speculation that this might be a different kind of memoir. But even Brooks’s estimable talents can’t entirely make up for an obvious reluctance on Harris’s part to let down her guard, even now. Harris, the former prosecutor, seems most comfortable when she is recounting facts and making a case; in the acknowledgments, she admits that she tends “to be task-oriented” and isn’t prone to allowing herself “enough space or time to reflect.”
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The post What Happened in the 2024 Election? Kamala Harris Has Some Thoughts. appeared first on New York Times.
