Kamala Harris is done being a scapegoat
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has done something that politicians rarely do. She has written a book that will likely torch relationships and could make a future career in Democratic politics more difficult. But Harris is firmly in her Rihanna phase, with zero you-know-whats to give.
I’m here for it. In taking off what she calls her “armor,” Harris has melded her private self with her public persona, a refreshing and overdue shift. She has traded calculation and caution for candor, making for a dishy read - even though readers already know how it ends.
Over the course of 300 pages, 107 Days lays out a campaign sprint that became a microcosm of Harris’ uneasy existence in Bidenworld and a showcase for her own political talent. It captures the vibe of last summer, when she found her footing and her voice, galvanizing voters and injecting optimism and joy into what had been a moribund campaign and a checked-out base. And it portrays a Democratic Party that was hesitant to push President Joe Biden aside when it mattered and hesitant to fully back Harris when the time came.
I read Harris’ book on a day when President Donald Trump urged febrile pregnant women to “tough it out” rather than take Tylenol and when ABC announced that Jimmy Kimmel would be allowed to return to his job after being forced off the air by a government pressure campaign. The question of what could have been hangs heavy over Harris’ book, which comes as Trump has become the president Harris predicted he would be.
The military has patrolled American cities. He has ordered the Department of Justice to go after his perceived enemies, ousting prosecutors who declined to file charges. He has pardoned the rioters who stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 election. He has enriched himself, his friends and family, while doing little to make life more affordable for ordinary Americans.
The temptation to say “I told you so” is strong in Harris, but she writes that she wishes she had no cause to say those four words.
“Tariffs are a tax on everyday Americans. We are at risk of a recession … The authoritarian, nationalist Project 2025 is the blueprint for the Trump administration’s second term,” she writes. “Foreign leaders have played him with flattery, grift, and favor.”
Harris also captures the hubris and entitlement of Biden and those around him, so insular that they believed their own hype but not the polls which showed a consistent Trump advantage. The former president and his team failed to understand the stakes and the moment. And that has proved costly, both for them and for the country.
The book opens with Biden’s July 21 call to Harris, finally telling her that he would drop out 24 days after his disastrous debate performance. But, there was a catch. He would announce that he would drop out of the race, but he wouldn’t endorse her for a few days.
“Joe, I’m honored, but we live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle and if you wait that long, the airwaves will be full of nothing but questions: Why has he not supported his VP?’,” she writes. “If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.”
She ended up winning that fight, with Biden announcing his withdrawal from the race and his endorsement of Harris minutes apart. But Biden’s waffling, his tin political ear and his selfishness show up time and time again.
Tension between presidents and vice presidents is always a thing. When I covered President Barack Obama, it was clear he and Biden were temperamentally different and not exactly close. But the Harris and Biden dynamic was quite different. If it was Biden’s intention to pass the baton to Harris, as he suggested while he was running, those efforts didn’t materialize until he was forced to do so. Biden and his team never understood that a strong Harris made for a strong Biden.
“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital” she writes. “It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.”
After the debate, his team wanted her to go out and declare that Biden had won. She smartly refused, emerging in the post-debate hours with the sure-footed voice that would define her campaign.
Hindsight is always the best vantage point.
If Biden had decided not to run in 2022, would Harris, or whoever emerged as the nominee, have been a stronger candidate? If Harris had created more daylight between herself and Biden, would the outcome have been different? If the campaign had been shorter, or longer? If a gunman hadn’t come millimeters from assassinating Trump, a moment that galvanized his base and led to Elon Musk’s endorsement?
Yes, Harris made missteps, which she admits: press gaffes and not-so-great answers on what she would have done differently from Biden. She also admits that ignoring attacks on her record on transgender rights was a mistake.
“I wish I could have gotten the message across that there isn’t a distinction between ‘they/them’ and ‘you.’” she writes. “The pronoun that matters is ‘we.’ We the people. And that’s who I am for.”
But to focus on her handful of errors misses the bigger picture: That over those 107 days, Harris, often a streaky performer, was in top form. She raised millions in record time and nailed the big moments. All the while, Trump face-planted on the debate stage, lied and gave rambling answers to basic questions. Harris went into Election Day thinking she would win and avert a second Trump term and all that was sure to come with it.
That didn’t happen, of course. Trump, for the second time, bested a female opponent to win the presidency.
And that is worth noting, as gender and race hang over the book in big and small ways.
A Harris adviser suggested she give a “race speech” after Trump questioned her Blackness, à la Barack Obama in 2008. “Today he wants me to prove my race. What next?” she writes. “He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?”
Perhaps, advisers suggested, when she shook hands with Trump at the debate, she should tell him how to pronounce her name. “But at the last minute I decided not to. It felt bitchy,” she writes.
She wanted to go with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate, but decided against it. “[W]e were already asking a lot of Americans: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.”
And the whole Bidenworld experience is framed by a sense that they think she should have just been happy to be there, forever grateful for their magnanimity. That dynamic will be familiar to any ambitious woman.
So what’s next for Harris, who has decided against running for California governor? It’s unclear. “I wanted a seat at the table. I wanted to make change from inside the system,” she writes. “Today, I’m no longer sure about that. Because the system is failing us.”
When Rachel Maddow asked on MSNBC last night if she is considering another White House run, her denial was oddly convincing. “That’s not my focus right now. It’s not my focus at all,” Harris said. “It really isn’t.”
How could it be, given the scope of her defeat? How could she think that the America that elected Trump twice would elect a woman? Personally, I don’t believe this country is ready for a woman president of any race, let alone a Black woman.
But there is this: The political press has consistently misread public sentiment. On this score, I hope that America proves me wrong.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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Nia-Malika Henderson is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former senior political reporter for CNN and the Washington Post, she has covered politics and campaigns for almost two decades.