Not a happy memoir, so far.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The period of finger-pointing and blame-shifting among Democrats for their 2024 election defeat should be near its end, but not before hearing from Kamala Harris. Her book on the 2024 campaign, 107 Days, will be released by Simon & Schuster on September 23, but The Atlantic has published an excerpt about her life as vice-president prior to Joe Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out. The only way to put it is that Harris is seething with anger over her treatment by Team Biden before she was suddenly thrust into the global limelight as the putative replacement candidate.
The excerpt begins on the very day of Biden’s withdrawal, when in her eyes the president subtly disrespected her one more time in his speech to the nation:
I watched it at the hotel that night. It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.
“I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.”
And that was it.
The rest of the excerpt is an indictment of the preparation she was given for the herculean task she inherited when Biden stepped away. The White House staff undermined her from day one, says the former veep:
When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans …
They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.
Indeed, says Harris, Team Biden was encouraging nasty stories about her:
I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.
Instead of defending her from “unfair or inaccurate” stories, Biden’s “inner circle” came up with an infernal first major policy assignment so that she could be “knocked down a little bit more”: immigration.
Harris dutifully went on a whirlwind trip to the Latin American countries from which migrants were heading to our southern border, a chore that led to the ludicrous but very damaging conservative label of “border czar” that Republicans hit her with right down to Election Day.
[N]o one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved….
Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
She finally got the task at which she would subsequently shine when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. But in her account, she was not assigned the role of chief defender of reproductive rights; she came forward of her own volition to fill the vacuum created by Biden’s inhibitions about discussing abortion publicly:
Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me.
So when Democrats made a stronger-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, she should have gotten some real credit, certainly within the White House, she clearly believes to this day:
Joe was already polling badly on the age issue, with roughly 75 percent of voters saying he was too old to be an effective president. Then he started taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.
When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging …
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. 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.
That’s where the excerpt ends, with a blunt accusation of Biden White House cluelessness, compounding the “recklessness” that Biden himself showed in delaying his withdrawal from the campaign so late in the day:
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.
To be very clear, we don’t know yet whether the bulk of the book devoted to her campaign continues this narrative of Team Biden sabotage, or simply treats it as a handicap as she began the uphill climb toward November. In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, she disclaimed any intention of “piling on” to criticism of the 46th president. But even if you take her word as gospel about her treatment by the president’s “inner circle,” it doesn’t offer much of a rationale for why she lost to Donald Trump.
Yes, some of the attack lines his campaign pursued against her with Elon Musk’s money reflected narratives begun or strengthened during her vice-presidential tenure. But others very clearly went back to positions she took and things she said during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, which for the most part she never bothered to contradict or contextualize. Biden and his staff had nothing to do with the disastrous 2019 interview she did in which she appeared to enthusiastically endorse free gender-transition surgery for imprisoned criminals who were also illegal immigrants, a huge combo platter of MAGA bait that led to an incredible number of attack ads in 2024 and helped obliterate her own message.
More generally, it was the overall Biden administration record on inflation and immigration that sank the Harris-Walz ticket, according to most informed analysis, not insufficient veep prestige within that administration. If she was treated as poorly as she now claims, perhaps she should have talked about it publicly as a way to distance herself from an unpopular president.
Now it all sounds like sour grapes. But she has every right to tell her side of the sad story.
