Attorney and former Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris released her new memoir on Tuesday, September 23, revealing a critical assessment of her 107-day presidential campaign of 2024.
In the memoir, she outlined her complicated relationship with former President Joe Biden along with the key missteps that contributed to her loss in the election.
Published by Simon & Schuster, the book gives an unflinching look inside one of the shortest presidential campaigns in US history.
Harris described her relationship with Biden as being based on loyalty but becoming more and more strained. She complains about how her team was managed and her actions, which she thought were disrespected by his team. One of the moments came just prior to her debate with Donald Trump when she was called by Biden.
“I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself,” Harris writes recounting how he mentioned rumours of her disloyalty. “Distracting me with worry about hostile powerbrokers in the biggest city of the most important swing state.”
She also talks of the irresponsibility of the political establishment when it allows the Biden to make his own judgment about whether he further should run his campaign, a decision she asserts had too much to lose to the ambition of one person.
Harris unveiled that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was her first choice as a running mate mentioning him as a “He would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”
“But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. … But knowing what was at stake, it was too big a risk,” she concludes.
The book has been particularly critical of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, another finalist, whom she viewed as being too ambitious to hold the position of vice-presidential nominee citing that “he would want to be in the room for every decision.”
“I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation,” Harris noted. “A vice president is not a copresident. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership,” she adds.
“I had to be able to completely trust the person in that role,” she asserts in the book.
At that time, she opted Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, valuing his lack of over presidential ambition.
Several major missteps have been acknowledged in the memoir. Regarding her response on ABC “The View” regarding the record of Biden, Harris marks the phrase “there is not a thing that comes to mind.”
She also feels bad about the optics of her first significant interview as a nominee, a joint session with Walz on CNN.
“Having Tim there beside me, in hindsight, was an error,” she writes.
“My campaign felt we should do the interview in tandem because it was a thing that had been done by prior candidates and their running mates. But because we'd waited to do this interview, there was so much riding on it. And the plan to have him there fed a narrative that I wasn't willing or able to go it alone.”
107 Days comes across as both a post-mortem of a historic campaign and a probable precursor to the future of Harris in national politics, describing the issues of muddiness in allegiance, ambition and identity in a high-stakes political arena.
