The new book by Kamala Harris, released today, is not only an instant bestseller. “107 Days” is also a launchpad for the former vice president to reach millions of voters likely to see her on presidential primary ballots in 2028.
During the next few weeks, the book will combine with media interviews and a speaking tour of nearly 20 major cities to propel her back into the Democratic limelight.
The book is a smooth read. Its 300 pages present Harris as a complex woman, sometimes openly vulnerable and even self-critical, while necessarily tough-minded about politics. Behind-the-scenes anecdotes are plentiful, and even include a marital spat with her husband Doug Emhoff during the stretch drive of the grueling 2024 campaign.
“107 Days” could do a lot to buff up Harris’s image. It is less likely to solve key political barriers she’s going to face if she opts to seek the next Democratic presidential nomination.
Harris strives to surmount one of the main hurdles — her record of publicly insisting that Joe Biden’s evident cognitive decline wasn’t really happening over the course of his presidency. That reality was obvious from afar, so how could Harris be working so closely with the president and pretend there was no problem?
Such questions are sure to linger in the political air, and “107 Days” fails to answer them satisfactorily. The book says about Biden’s decision to run again that “in retrospect, I think it was recklessness.” Yet Harris provides an explanation for her own conduct that many will read more as an excuse: “Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty.”
Ironically, when Harris writes that it would look “incredibly self-serving” for her to push for Biden to step aside, that rationale is itself rather self-serving. It goes a long way toward letting her off the hook — rather than admitting deference to party conformity and a calculus about her own political future.
In the book, Harris falls back on a timeworn riff about Biden: “On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best.” But knowing more, having better judgment and being more compassionate than Trump is merely a high jump over an abysmally low standard.
Harris adds that Biden’s “inner circle, the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” It is unclear whether Harris considered herself to be part of that “inner circle.” But she writes that up until Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate, “I had never … witnessed anything remotely like the level of confusion, incoherence, and debility we saw on the debate stage.”
If Harris does run for president again, as most observers expect, her enabling role in Biden’s re-election bid will dog her among the Democratic electorate. She will continue to have some explaining to do. And her record of 100 percent loyalty to Biden — such an important theme in “107 Days” — is likely to land with a thud among many Democrats.
One of the worst and most damaging moments of the 2024 campaign came four weeks before Election Day, when Harris appeared on the ABC program “The View” and responded to the question, “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
When Harris writes about that moment in her book, she acknowledges that the answer was weak. But she doesn’t seem to realize its significance — namely, that she was loyal to an extreme fault. In her words, “I was still vice president to President Biden. … I felt I owed him my loyalty.”
That loyalty still appears to be fogging up her window on the political world. At the same time Harris was writing her book earlier this year, a CNN poll asked Democratic voters “which one person best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party.” Only 1 percent chose Biden.
Even heavier than the loyal-to-Biden albatross on Harris’s shoulders is her record of fully supporting arms shipments to Israel for its siege of Gaza, which spanned the last 15 months of the Biden-Harris administration. The grim weight of that record is made no lighter by her treatment of the subject in her book.
In fact, after all this time — with tens of thousands more deaths of civilians in Gaza since last November and with human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israel has been engaged in genocide — the Harris book is notably tone-deaf on both moral and political grounds.
To hear Harris tell it in the pages of “107 Days,” the Gaza situation was little more than a nettlesome hassle for her campaign. She not only bypasses the reality that U.S. arms shipments continued to literally make possible the carnage in Gaza. She also fails to mention the polls that showed — even during her campaign and after the election — that she would have gained far more votes than she would have lost if she had come out for an arms embargo against Israel.
Harris recounts how she handled a group of people she refers to as “hecklers” at an August 9 rally in Phoenix who were protesting her support for Israel’s war in Gaza. She quotes herself with evident satisfaction: “Let’s talk Gaza for a moment. We all want this war to end and to get the hostages out, and I will work on it full-time when I am president, as I have been.” It’s almost as if she thinks even now that these empty platitudes were substantive commentary.
Later that month, Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention included a brief passage about Gaza. In the book, Harris is self-congratulatory about this. After writing that “I knew that the section of my speech dealing with the Gaza war had a lot riding on it,” she simply quotes an adulatory part of a Washington Post article praising “her 5.0-degree-of-difficulty straddle on the war in Gaza.” Harris gives no indication that there was anything wrong with a “straddle” that justified mass killing of civilians enabled by U.S. military aid.
Speaking of which, the book’s treatment of Gaza is fleeting. In four spots, it recaps the standard rhetoric of the Biden administration. On her campaign trail, Harris said during a mid-September interview: “We need to get this deal done and we need to get it done immediately — and that is my position and that is my policy.” That Harris chose in her book to uncritically cite those hollow words is an indication she still does not recognize their hollowness.
There are some occasional moving passages in “107 Days.” Harris writes eloquently about racism and sexism, as well as about gay and transgender rights. Less apparent is any commitment to challenge the power of corporations or tackle the nation’s extreme income inequality.
In her afterword, Harris does a good job of sketching out some of the terrible unfolding realities of the current Trump presidency. She is on target when she deplores the capitulation of so many institutions: “The billionaires lining up to grovel. The big media companies, the universities, and so many major law firms, all bending to blackmail and outrageous demands.”
But, overall, “107 Days” does not speak well of the author’s political courage. The disastrous Trump presidency now underway is in no small part a result of the policies and self-focused behavior of the president to whom Harris obsequiously deferred as vice president. Her book, appearing eight months after she left office, does little better than retread her own historic evasions.
Norman Solomon is cofounder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” was published in 2023.
When it comes to political evasions, Kamala Harris has written the book
