During the election, some of Joe Biden’s questionable decisions, views and acts often distracted voters from the positive legacy of his administration. Harris, half-Indian, half-Jamaican, had energy, ideas, aspirations for herself and her country and understood the dangers Maga posed. She also had the charisma Biden lacked.
Harris’s book about the campaign, 107 Days, could have given us a deeper understanding of why Harris and the Democrats bombed. There are some illuminating fragments, but mostly, Harris fills pages with West Wing-type details of people and policy – some read like memos and minutes. It gives us little of her inner life, avoids going too deep into whether she feels some responsibility for the catastrophic election result. Contrast that with the recently published, open, intimate and knowing memoirs of Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern.
On election day, 5 November, 2024, Democrats were still optimistic Harris would be the next US president (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty)
Here is an example: after a calamitous TV debate between Biden and Trump, she observes: “Trump was using his words like a weapon, but shooting before he aimed, spouting lies, unburdened by truth. Biden, striving for accuracy, often stopped mid-sentence to correct himself, which left him sounding hesitant and garbled.” What were her thoughts after watching the debate? Did she realise Biden was taking the party over a cliff? Did she privately think his time was up? If not, why not? Was she too attached to him?
She would have won if Biden had dropped out gracefully, in good time, and backed his VP with true conviction and real zeal. But he and his coterie delayed the nomination and then stealthily undermined her. Some of his senior staff told Democrats who were getting restive, “If he goes, you get her”. The thinking of Biden’s allies in the West Wing, she claims, “was ‘zero-sum’. If she is shining, he’s dimmed.”
With loud enemies on the outside and hushed enemies on the inside, she needed to own the contest, sideline Biden and build her own base. But time was short and she, as this paragraph shows, stayed too loyal for too long: “All the questioning about his capacity had wounded him badly. He didn’t want to get out of this race; he didn’t want to stop being president. My feelings for him were grounded in warmth and loyalty, but they had become complicated, over time with hurt and disappointment… when I took to the stage, I spent the first third of my speech effusively praising him before I launched my own campaign speech.” The obeisance was cringeworthy. She did this over and over until one of her team reminded her: “People hate Joe Biden.”
Harris recalls how her loyalty to Biden held her back during the campaign, but expresses little more than mild indignation in the book (Photo: Michael M Santiago/Getty)That’s as far as it goes. She won’t or can’t see the rust in the party machine or examine the dysfunctional system that enabled Biden to make decisions that betrayed voters and delivered the country to Maga.
Unforgivable, too, are her reactions to Biden’s sudden decision to quit Afghanistan. She sorrowfully mentions the 13 US soldiers who died during the evacuation. But Afghans, so many of whom were killed or left to rot under the Taliban, count for nothing. Third World humans have never mattered to US politicians, white, black or brown.
Some anecdotes will appeal to Americans but may make British readers queasy. Harris goes to her pastor after getting the nomination. Rev Amos Brown solemnly tells her she is like Queen Esther who “saved her people when they were threatened”. She embraced that endorsement and couldn’t see that a saviour complex would do her no good.
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The homely stuff warmed me to her. She loves being a wife, mom to her step kids, sister and auntie. Dougie, her husband, is a gem. She wears pant suits as a uniform to avoid sexist commentaries, and reduce the number of reasons people find to hate her.
Maybe she is hoping to get nominated again in 2028. It’s a vain hope. Under Trump and co, diversity has been vanquished and buried. It will be a long time before a woman of colour gets into the White House again.
‘107 Days’ by Kamala Harris (Simon and Schuster, £25) is out now
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