107 Days, Zero Ideas

Kamala Harris’s new book proves she fell far short of being the candidate Democrats needed.

(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.)

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A lot of reading is about serendipity. When 107 Days by former vice president Kamala Harris arrived on the doorstep, I was already reading History Matters—a posthumous collection of essays by that master of presidential biography David McCullough. There he has a brilliant article on Harry Truman, another American vice president who was suddenly thrust into the political limelight—in his case when he became president after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. “He enjoyed being Harry Truman,” McCullough writes of the new president. “And again and again, he could reach down inside himself and come up with something very good and strong. He is the seemingly ordinary American who, when put to the test, rises to the occasion and does the extraordinary.”

Kamala Harris was the opposite. In so many ways an extraordinary and history-making figure, when she was put to the test she reached inside herself only to find the ordinary. And against Donald Trump that was never going to be enough.

Harris is not shy about pointing the finger of blame in this account of her 2024 campaign to be president. She sidesteps the glaring issue of whether Joe Biden was fit to govern by saying he wasn’t fit to run but criticizes him for not getting out of her way quickly enough and then undermining her at key points in the campaign. (“I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it about himself,” she writes of the president’s phone call right before her debate with Trump.) First Lady Jill Biden was “tense, even angry.” Running mate Tim Walz was useless. (“You’re not there to make friends with the guy,” Harris shouted at the TV during the vice presidential debate as J.D. Vance wiped the floor with him.)

Meanwhile, staffers are shown regularly getting reamed out, usually with salty language. One is even upbraided just for wearing a tie. (Presumably on a different day he would have been upbraided for not wearing one.) Fellow politicians are insufficiently supportive. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are too slow to support her. Gavin Newsom won’t return her calls. Raphael Warnock is a windbag. Of her opponents, Trump was a “fascist” and “a con man.” Elon Musk’s $288 million election spend was part of “the most brazen admission of corruption in history.” As for her judgement on Vance, “it begins with an m and ends with ah.” Even husband Doug gets it in the neck, shouted at for watching the Dodgers beat the Mets on TV while she was in the bath and therefore missing her phone call from the tub instructing him to fetch towels from the other side of the bathroom. “Really?!” she writes, “It was a bridge too far.” Really, indeed.

All in all, Harris emerges from this book as humorless and foul-mouthed. But politics is not a nice business. (Otherwise, Mitt Romney would have been president.) What does matter, however, is that after 320 pages, the reader is left with no real clue about what Harris thinks or believes. Anyone who reads or writes about American presidents might tell you that often the most intriguing moments are those that reveal the hinterland behind the public figure. In fact, reading what they read, as our friend McCullough reminds us, is often the best way to understand presidents. From Adams and Jefferson through FDR, JFK and Reagan, all were vociferous readers. But it can similarly be those “mornings on horseback” with Theodore Roosevelt or Ike Eisenhower building a house on the tenth tee at Augusta National Golf Club. All these successful candidates found their different ways to detach and think.

Trump is no great reader either, but he has his business interests, the passion for golf, and the whole alternate world at Mar-a-Lago. Harris has, or at least demonstrates, no propensity for contemplation or alternate worlds. In fact, she cheerfully admits to the opposite. “I tend to be task-oriented,” she writes, “and rarely allow myself enough space or time to reflect.” At one point in the campaign, she perhaps senses this need in herself but doesn’t know what to do with it. “I wanted to get out of the hotel and out of my head for an hour,” she writes. So she “scheduled a lunchtime visit to a small business, Penzeys Spices” to meet more voters. It’s not Nelson Rockefeller phoning the director of the local art gallery at whichever campaign stop he found himself to see if they could open at 6am for a private viewing, or Jack Kennedy taking his boat out to sail the waters off Cape Cod or Palm Beach.

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The Crimes of the Politburo

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This absence of hinterland is one plausible explanation for why Harris cannot think on her feet: she lacks what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “fantasia.” And perhaps Harris knew this about herself. She was hesitant to give interviews and when she did, they usually went badly. “I wanted the interview to be flawless,” she writes of her first public sit-down as the candidate, not realizing that perfection was not what was required. Flawless is rarely the same as inspiring unless you’re Simone Biles. Voters want more than impeccable from a candidate, including a sense of heart, ideas, spontaneity, genuineness, and quickness in the moment.

This last quality trips Harris up time and again. When Donald Trump sees her at the 9/11 memorial the day after their debate and says “You were great last night,” she “doesn’t know what to say.” Asked at a Noticias Univision town hall meeting to name three qualities she liked in Trump, she “racked my brain” but couldn’t come up with them. Quizzed on The View about what she’d do differently to Joe Biden, she infamously said “not a thing comes to mind.” Afterward, it took her campaign strategist David Plouffe to point out the obvious to her—“People hate Joe Biden.” Plouffe was used to working with Obama, but here was Harris unable to conjure a single independent thought in the moment, let alone express a philosophy or world view (in contrast to “Make America Great Again”). Even on her strongest topic, women’s health, Harris pushes a note across to her campaign staff mid interview demanding to know, “Where’s my briefing?” Her interviewer, Dr Mike, was “warmed up on all these issues and raring to go.” Couldn’t she have been too? The contrast with Trump’s freewheeling interviews, sometimes lasting hours, on anything and everything could hardly be starker. And because Harris couldn’t articulate her own vision, she let her opponent do it for her—“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

If Harris’s lack of ideas emerge clearly throughout the book, so too does her insecurity. She rails about those who “claimed I was ‘DEI hire’” and, with Doug ventriloquizing, attacks Biden for “hid[ing] you away for four years, giv[ing] you impossible, shit jobs.” Yet in her pick of Walz as running mate, recounted in detail in 107 Days, she reveals herself. Pete Buttigieg, a generational talent “magnificent at sparring with opponents,” was her “first choice,” but “we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” and asking voters to accept a gay running mate was seemingly “too big of a risk.” Which is odd, because twelve pages earlier she reports that when the campaign put a poll in the field with all the possible VP contenders, “the results turned out to be useless. None of the names moved the needle either way.” She went on to reject both Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona—two more A-listers in their different ways—and instead picked the B-list Walz, the candidate who on meeting her immediately declared that he was hopeless. “I’m not a good debater,” he confessed, “I’ve never used a teleprompter.” Welcome to Team Harris, Senator Vance will see you shortly.

Sadly for Harris, these are the kinds of harsh judgements that history hands down to the losing candidate in an American presidential election. It is, of course, important to remember that hers has still been a remarkable career. Her ascent to the United States Senate and the vice presidency as the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants is an American story and, “as the first woman, or Black woman, in every office I have run for, except the Senate, where I was the second,” a story of which she is justly proud. She writes persuasively of the challenges that women face in politics, not least because their looks and dress sense are held to a different standard. Her instincts can be admirable too. She offers her hand to Trump at the debate and phones him after an assassination attempt. She even ruefully admits to quite liking him. And she shows tremendous grace in defeat, not least in presiding over the Senate as her own loss was confirmed, even enduring the indignity of reading out the electoral college tallies. Not all losing vice presidents have done the same. Perhaps no one would have blamed her if she had followed Hubert Humphrey’s example after the 1968 election and not bothered to show up.

But is that all enough to erase the failure of defeat to someone who both sides agree is one of the most consequential presidents of the modern era? As Harris liked to tell her staff, “That was a rhetorical question.”

Richard Aldous hosts Persuasion’s Bookstack podcast and teaches history at Bard. His books include Reagan and Thatcher, The Dillon Era, and Schlesinger.

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