Donald Trump emerged a big winner in the last US elections against Kamala Harris. Democrats were devastated.
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.
An ocean away, many Brits had cheered her on. At the CNN election night party I attended, the guests were upbeat, the vibes good. We Black and Asian invitees thought she was one of us. (Foolish, I now realise.) A few hours into the evening, gloom seeped in, rooms became chilly and quiet. I left, dreading what her defeat would mean.
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.
The format is partly to blame for that. Neither a political diary nor memoir, the book is a strange third breed. It is a day by day record of her recollections from before she was nominated to the election. That chronological propulsion limits how much of her remarkable personal story she can share with readers, and constrains contemplation and meaningful post-election analysis.
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?
This is not to lay the full blame of the result on her. But readers need to understand her psychological state during this intense, turbulent period. There are some brief moments of self-reflection, but we do not really get to know Harris.
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.”
But even when she is aggrieved, you get a dribble, not a gush of indignation.
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)Feminism has cracked many ceilings, yet, even now, incredibly successful women yield to lesser men. Harris did move on from that unhealthy adulation as her campaign progressed. And she has become more self aware. In a recent interview with MSNBC, she admitted that team Biden and she herself had been reckless. And unforgivably complacent.
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.
Just as depressing is the truth that Harris didn’t use her power as wisely as she might have. She never really listened to the millions of Americans who want the US to stop Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians. Biden declared himself a Zionist. In the book, Harris tries to redeem herself by sort of empathising with Palestinians, but still carefully equivocates.
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.
We don’t really get to know how Kamala Harris was made. Barack Obama’s great memoirs gave us his life story with emotional literacy. Harris only shares snippets about her childhood, education and early career as an attorney. I wanted more about her leftie parents; her mother’s brilliant mind; more details of how, as the first female VP in the USA, she promoted civil rights, reproductive rights and undertook other progressive measures. A full introduction would have given us all that and made the book more substantial.
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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For me she is most appealing and convincing when she goes off-piste and loses caution. In an obsessively gun-owning nation, she denounces uncontrolled gun ownership and reminds her countrymen of 83 school shootings in the US in 2024. She speaks up for the disenfranchised and wants people to have “the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. And the freedom to simply be.” She is fiercely pro-abortion.
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.
American political contests are hard and unfair, bad and mad. Harris made history by becoming the first female VP ever. That provoked the right and traditionalists – her colour and ethnicity even more so. During her campaign, she was constantly demeaned because of her race and gender, and often betrayed by her closest political ally, Joe Biden. She wrote the book to put the record straight. Only she doesn’t. Too much is held back. Too much is held in. She says she is being “disciplined”. That won’t get her far in today’s America.
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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