Without a doubt, it is important to capture the reflections of a vice president who found herself in an unprecedented situation after the president was pressured to withdraw from the 2024 election. And \u201c107 Days,\u201d a taut, often eye-opening account \u2014 written with the help of Geraldine Brooks \u2014 takes you inside the rooms where it happened, as well as what led up to Kamala Harris\u2019 remarkable run.<\/p>\n
For one, apparently MSNBC\u2019s Lawrence O\u2019Donnell first gave Harris the idea she should seek the presidency in 2020. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were having breakfast at a restaurant near their Brentwood home when O\u2019Donnell \u201cwandered up to our table to talk about the dire consequences of a second Trump term.\u201d Harris, then in her first term as a U.S. senator, recounts that O\u2019Donnell bluntly suggested: \u201c\u2018You should run for president.\u2019 I honestly had not thought about it until that moment,\u201d she writes in \u201c107 Days.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, Harris also reveals that Tim Walz was not her first choice for running mate: Pete Buttigieg was, though she ultimately concluded the country wasn\u2019t ready for a gay man in the role. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,\u201d she writes. She assumes Buttigieg felt similarly, but they never discussed it.<\/p>\n
We do not glean much more than we already knew or assumed about President Biden\u2019s life-changing 2024 phone call that set Harris on this path. Pleas for Biden to step aside had been building following his disastrous debate performance less than five months before the election, but by that time Harris had given up on the idea that he would withdraw from the race. But on Sunday, July 21, Harris had just finished making pancakes for her grandnieces at the vice president\u2019s residence and was settling in to watch a cooking show with them when \u201cNo Caller ID\u201d came up on her secure phone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need to talk to you,\u201d Biden rasps, then battling COVID-19. Without fanfare, he told her: \u201cI\u2019ve decided I\u2019m dropping out.\u201d \u201cAre you sure?\u201d Harris replies, to which Biden responds: \u201cI\u2019m sure. I\u2019m going to announce in a few minutes.\u201d In italics, we are made privy to what Harris is thinking during their brief phone call: \u201cReally?\u201d Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I\u2019m here in sweatpants.\u201d<\/p>\n
If we wanted in on the powerful feelings that must have been swirling within each of them during such an exchange, or a nod to the momentousness of the moment \u2014 no dice. The conversation shifted to the timing of Biden\u2019s endorsement of Harris, which Biden\u2019s staff wanted to delay and which she wanted immediately. Politics, not sentiment, reigned.<\/p>\n
The Atlantic book excerpt published earlier this month, it turns out, accurately represents the overall tone of \u201c107 Days.\u201d A thread running throughout is one of bitterness toward Biden\u2019s inner circle, whom Harris felt had been poisoning the well since she first took office: \u201cThe public statements, the whispering campaigns, and the speculation had done a world of damage,\u201d she recounts, and perhaps laid the groundwork for her defeat. While she had a warm relationship with the president himself, Harris believes she was never trusted by the first lady or the president\u2019s closest advisors, nor did they throw their full weight behind her as the Democratic nominee.<\/p>\n
At the same time, she never doubted that she was the right person for the job. She writes, \u201cI knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. \u2026 The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition.\u201d She also calculates that the president and his team thought she was the least bad option to replace him because \u201cI was the only person who would preserve his legacy.\u201d \u201cAt this point,\u201d she adds, \u201canyone else was bound to throw him \u2014 and all the good he had achieved \u2014 right under the bus.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For those who are cynical about politics, \u201c107 Days\u201d will not alter your view. After Biden announces his withdrawal, First Lady Jill Biden welcomes Second Gentleman Emhoff into the fray, advising: \u201cBe careful what you wish for. You\u2019re about to see how horrible the world is.\u201d Her senior adviser David Plouffe encourages Harris to distance herself from the president on the campaign trail, because \u201cPeople hate Joe Biden.\u201d Again and again, Harris provides examples of being left out of the loop or not robustly supported by his inner circle. She writes that her feelings for the president \u201cwere grounded in warmth and loyalty\u201d but had become \u201cmore complicated over time.\u201d She claims never to have doubted Biden\u2019s competence, even while she worried about how he appeared to the public.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn his worst day,\u201d she writes, \u201che was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump at his best.\u201d Still, his decision about seeking a second term shouldn\u2019t \u201chave been left to an individual\u2019s ego, an individual\u2019s ambition,\u201d she concludes in an observation that grabbed headlines upon its publication in the Atlantic excerpt.<\/p>\n
The exhilaration that Harris\u2019 campaign frequently exuded in those early rallies is summarized here, but those accounts don\u2019t capture the joy. Some of the details she chooses to highlight tamp down the excitement. For example, at their first rally together after picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, Walz, Harris and their families greet an audience of 10,000 people in Philadelphia. Though Harris writes, \u201cWe rode the high of the crowd that night,\u201d she also notes, \u201cWhen Tim clasped my hand to thrust it high in an enthusiastic victory gesture, he was so tall that the entire front of my jacket rose up.\u201d She makes \u201ca mental note to tell him: From now on, when we do that, you gotta bend your elbow.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Kamala Harris I saw on the campaign trail and enthusiastically voted for is often in evidence on the page. She is smart, savvy, funny and tough. As in many of her stump speeches and media interviews, she tends to recite her accomplishments as if reading from a resume, which sometimes reads as defensive. But she is also indefatigable: She believes that she must win to save democracy, yet she seems to shoulder that formidable burden without breaking a sweat.<\/p>\n
\u201c107 Days\u201d does an excellent job of conveying the difficulty of seeking \u2014 and occupying \u2014 high office, and suggests that if she\u2019d won, Harris\u2019 resilience and ambition would have served her well as the leader of the free world. Many of her insights are astute, though occasionally tinged with rancor. She does accept responsibility for certain missteps, such as when she was asked on \u201cThe View\u201d if she would have done anything differently than Biden had she been in charge. She reflects that her response \u2014 \u201cThere is nothing that comes to mind\u201d \u2014 landed as if she\u2019d \u201cpulled the pin on a hand grenade.\u201d But she doesn\u2019t attribute her eventual loss to that or any other miscalculation: She simply needed more time to make her case.<\/p>\n
I craved a soaring moment, a rallying cry. I didn\u2019t find hope or inspiration within these pages \u2014 the book felt more like an obligatory postmortem with an already established conclusion. If an aim of this memoir was to rally the troops for a Harris run in 2028, \u201c107 Days\u201d falls short of lighting a fire. The brilliant, charismatic woman who came close to breaking the ultimate glass ceiling has given us an essential portrait of an unforgettable turning point in her journey, but \u201c107 Days\u201d is mainly absent the perspective and blueprint for going forward that so many of us hunger for. A few years out, that wisdom may come.<\/p>\n
Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah\u2019s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review 107 Days By Kamala HarrisSimon & Schuster: 320 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":241581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[6502,1582,276,12088,2385,4238,7129,25232,2609,129010,129009,2961,85582,224,5337,69122,5349,5207,11459,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-241580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-biden","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-campaign","12":"tag-day","13":"tag-days","14":"tag-editor","15":"tag-harris","16":"tag-hope","17":"tag-inner-circle","18":"tag-kamala-harris-book-review","19":"tag-la","20":"tag-lawrence-odonnell","21":"tag-los-angeles","22":"tag-losangeles","23":"tag-mate","24":"tag-moment","25":"tag-president","26":"tag-woman","27":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115236986642105167","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}