While waiting for the hard copy to arrive, I downloaded the audio version of Kamala Harris’s bestseller to get a sense of things. Who narrates it, I wondered — surely not Kamala herself? Alas, however, it was indeed herself, a choice which may go as far as anything described in the book to explain why we are addressing “Mr.” instead of “Madam” President.
After all, since Harris’s most indelible impression on the American electorate was an audible one — the laugh, the tone, the gauzy platitudes — it takes someone of either supreme self-importance or astonishing tone-deafness to insist on reading her own memoir. I’m inclined, after finishing it, to believe she’s both. She even glancingly addresses this, though only in the context of a grumbling remark about the latent sexism in wardrobe choices: “Like our tone of voice or our uninhibited laugh, it has the potential to be noted ahead of the consequential matters we’re engaged in.” Fair point, but only to a degree. Margaret Thatcher, Madeleine Albright, or Golda Meir might sympathize momentarily but have no real patience with such blame-shifting. It is, in fact, the main takeaway from 107 Days: Kamala sees herself primarily as a victim, someone “held away” from the power she was uniquely suited to wield.
I’d like to imagine that the electorate saw through this self-indulgence and voted accordingly. But it is a mark of our times that someone so preternaturally imbued with self-conceit would lose an election to someone even more self-absorbed. Plenty has been made of Trump’s wardrobe and delivery style as well, after all, and yet he now occupies the Oval Office. Something more than reflexive discrimination, in other words, accounts for Harris’s razor-thin popular vote loss. I suspect it was this defining sense of grievance, channeled into her diction and tone, that made the difference.
She begins her account, for example, with a finger-wagging vignette explaining how, on the day she got news from then-President Biden that he was throwing in the towel, she had to lecture him and his team on the errors of their timing. “Really?” she whines, “give me a bit more time… the whole world is about to change…” Well, it was — for her, maybe — but for a narcissist the personal and general amount to the same thing. She “knew,” after all, that she was “the most qualified and ready” candidate. Nobody else could be trusted to preserve Joe Biden’s legacy. Nobody else would prevent him from being “thrown under the bus.” She then proceeds to spend the next few chapters doing exactly that. It is not, shall we say, especially edifying.
But enough ink has been spilled over the book’s pettiness and contradictions. It was intended, after all, to be a work of inside baseball — a political sausage-making retrospective for pundits with scorecards. None of that interests me. What led me through each tedious, over-rendered day was the faint hope that it would shed light on a basic worldview: the animating impulse of the modern progressive Left. In light of the extraordinary autocratic turn of the Trump presidency since the election, I had hoped for some glimpse of a shared political principle — a potential bridge across our bitter divides. No such luck. We are now trapped between two equally joyless visions of centralized authority. Two hundred and fifty years of political experimentation in self-government have left us high-centered between progressive and conservative flavors of authoritarianism.
Not that you’ll find such introspection in 107 Days. Harris builds her entire persona upon vaguely described, high-flown rhetoric devoted to ever-greater state “assistance” in the private lives of Americans. It never seems to occur to her that such a vision might account for her electoral defeat. Steeped in defensive language, she sees the failure of Americans to fully embrace her platform as the essential problem. “Fight” is her persistent watchword, a shibboleth for action against an ethereal enemy that seeks to thwart her vision of a fully empowered monolithic state.
“I was born into a fight for freedom,” she says, “and stood in that tradition” (whatever that means). She then proceeds to rattle off the remainder of her visionary agenda:
“Freedom to vote, to control one’s own body, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, to be free from the fear of weapons of war on our city streets and in our children’s classrooms. Freedom from anxiety about health care costs, childcare costs, a retirement spent in poverty. Freedom to afford a home, build wealth, provide our kids a good education. The freedom not just to get by but to get ahead. And the freedom to simply be.”
“To simply be.” I sincerely don’t wish to be churlish here, but that kind of vacant puffery isn’t the masterstroke she imagines. In fact, such inanities will eventually get you in trouble. You can’t keep offering voters a “vision” that consists of things Americans either already enjoy or can only acquire through coercive redistribution. Nothing in Harris’s conception acknowledges that many Americans now crave freedom from government meddling more than a longer list of taxpayer-funded entitlements.
To illustrate: Harris mourns her loss mostly because it denied her the chance to do “all the work that [she] wanted to do.” That “work” includes $25,000 government downpayment housing assistance, increased child tax credits, more Medicare programs, more international aid — programs that always begin with noble intentions but end with bureaucratic sclerosis. “I wanted to make changes from inside the system,” she says, “to keep people safe and help them thrive.” It is, in short, a perfect encapsulation of the modern nanny-state ethos.
To her credit, the book’s closing passages do show glimmers of humility — or at least fatigue. The afterword offers a genuine and reasonably clear assessment of Trump’s return to power, a clear-eyed warning about democratic backsliding in which institutional “guardrails are buckling.” But when she turns back to her “vision for the future,” the mist rolls in again. Blandishments about “investing in Gen Z” substitute for anything resembling policy or philosophy. Moving forward, she says, “I will be with the people…in towns and communities, rebuilding trust, empathy, and government worthy of the ideals of this country.” It’s a nice sentiment, but hardly the basis for a coherent political comeback.
In the end, if you’re in the mood for dishy, behind-the-scenes gossip and a heavy dose of self-pity, this book will not disappoint. If you’re looking for introspection, principle, or even a hint of political imagination, it undoubtedly will. Harris closes by lamenting that “107 days were not long enough” to win the presidency. She’s right — but for reasons that have nothing to do with time.
