NICOLA Sturgeon has revealed she felt “despondent” after reading failed US presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s new book on her defeat to Donald Trump.
Harris has recounted her unsuccessful presidential campaign, which saw the Republican seize power for a second term last year, in the book 107 Days, which the former SNP first minister has reviewed for the Observer.
In a scathing review, Sturgeon blasts Harris as “self-pitying” and seeking to absolve herself of blame for the Democrats’ historic defeat.
She said: “Kamala Harris is a politician I have always admired, so I didn’t expect her book 107 Days – an account of her ill-fated 2024 run for US president – to make me feel as disappointed in her as it did."
Sturgeon argues that Harris’s post mortem amounts to an attempt to argue that had she had more time, she would have beaten Trump, laying the blame with a recalcitrant Joe Biden who refused to relinquish power.
She wrote: “When we strip the book back to its core – and this is my biggest frustration with it – the only explanation she really gives for her defeat is lack of time. It is her repeated refrain that the campaign just wasn’t long enough for voters to get to know her or understand her policies.”
Referring to the book’s title, which is the number of days Harris’s campaign lasted, Sturgeon says it dawned on her that it was not “just a description of what she is writing about – it is her excuse”.
She added: “She does genuinely seem to be saying that with just a few days, weeks or months more, she would have won. Does she really believe that? Because I’m not sure anyone else does. I know I don’t.”
Sturgeon went on: “Even if we were to buy into her theory about the brevity of the campaign, Harris takes no responsibility for its ineffectiveness. Given that she had been vice-president for four years under Joe Biden, it seems valid to ask why voters didn’t know her better. All we learn is that it wasn’t her fault.
"It was because Biden and his team had sidelined her. She admits that Biden was allowed to stay in the race for far too long and concludes that this was “reckless”, but also absolves herself of any blame: ‘I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out.’”
Noting that Harris was “surprisingly unsparing in her criticism of Biden” and expressing her sympathies for the “occasional frustrations of being a deputy leader”, Sturgeon added: “some of her comments struck me as a touch self-pitying for a woman who was second in command of the most powerful nation on earth.
“There is much in this book that I found exasperating, but aspects of it depressed me too. Without appearing to recognise it, Harris seems to embody one of the failings of modern politics: the constant quest for positions calculated to offend the fewest voters.
“Obviously, compromise is a virtue in politics – and an art that seems lost in today’s world – but triangulation often ends up sounding too much like moral equivocation.”
And despite hailing Harris as “an incredible role model, especially for black women” and saying her “political compass is broadly set in a good direction”, Sturgeon added: “Yet, for all that, the hard reality is I felt more despondent after reading this book than I did beforehand. I also can’t shake the feeling that the purpose of writing it may be more about testing the ground for another tilt at the White House than making sense of the last attempt.
“If I was to make up my mind about the prospect of that on the strength of this book alone, I’d have to conclude that it is not a good idea.”
