107 Days, by Kamala Harris (Simon & Schuster, $30)
Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir is probably the last time you’re going to hear from the former vice president in a significant way. In July, she announced that she’s not interested in running for governor of California, and she’s a supremely unlikely choice to be the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee.
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Harris is a strangely fascinating figure in our modern politics. Just about everything she did from the start of her political career until about mid-2019 worked; she never lost a race. She seemed to have been engineered in a lab to thrill Bay Area progressive donors. And then, in the July 31, 2019, presidential debate, while discussing Harris’s record as a prosecutor, Tulsi Gabbard gutted her like a fish. Since then, and despite Biden’s selecting her as his running mate for his successful 2020 presidential bid, Harris has kept tripping over her own feet.
One of the headlines that followed the publication of an excerpt from 107 Days, in The Atlantic, was her seeming insistence that she saw no sign that Joe Biden could not serve another four years as president. “I had never, in three and a half years at the White House, in the Oval Office or in the Situation Room, witnessed anything remotely like the level of confusion, incoherence, and debility as we saw on the debate stage,” she declares. “I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I had, I would have said so.” This is not exactly shocking. If Harris had written, “Yeah, the last few years, Joe seemed like a doddering, forgetful, spaced-out octogenarian,” she would have blown up not just Biden’s presidency but also her own service as vice president. But the rest of the book indicates that Harris wasn’t quite as convinced of Biden’s capabilities as that excerpted passage suggests.
When special counsel Robert Hur released his report concluding that he could not bring charges against Biden related to his alleged retention of classified documents because the jury would perceive the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Harris furiously denounced Hur. “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [was] clearly politically motivated,” Harris said. In her book, however, she concedes that “the report had detailed concerning lapses.” Oh, had it now? Harris reminds readers that Biden told George Stephanopoulos that he couldn’t remember if he had watched his own debate, and that Biden staffers had given two radio interviewers scripted questions: “In his post-debate context, it was damning.” She describes Biden’s greeting of Americans released by Russia as part of a prisoner exchange in August 2024: he’s happy to see Paul Whelan but forgets that Evan Gershkovich is standing right in front of him. She recounts cringing as Biden puts on a red “Trump 2024” hat while visiting a firehouse in Shanksville, Pa., that year, on the anniversary of 9/11.
