The title of this memoir refers to the 107 days Kamala Harris had to run a presidential election campaign.
So, in the very name there’s an implicit rebuke to the man who put her in this position: Joe Biden, who hung on for an indecently long while. 107 days is a rebuke but also a justification – there was, she keeps saying, just too little time to put her goods on show. There was also, it seems, too little time to hold anything so time-consuming as a primary, an opportunity for other Democrats to offer themselves. Nancy Pelosi declared that the process shouldn’t be an “anointment” but Kamala had other plans. She got in touch with all the party bigwigs for their support; the reply from Gavin Newsom, who probably fancied his chances, was, “Hiking. Will call back. (He didn’t).
Bernie Sanders, the best candidate the Democrats never ran (is it too late?) got straight to the point: “I supported Joe because he was the strongest voice for the working class. Please focus on the working class, not just on abortion.” That was prescient; her very favourite theme in the campaign was “reproductive rights”, though she never shows the smallest understanding of the other side’s position.
The 107 days also structures the book: it’s written as a countdown to the election, with flashbacks. And though we all know how the story ends, the accounts of the rave receptions, the endorsements from umpteen groups like White Dudes for Kamala, the enthusiastic youth gatherings, the benediction from Baptist congregations, all go to shore up the mindset that she was on a roll, that there was only one outcome.
One of the pleasures of this sort of memoir is the chance for score-settling, and Harris doesn’t pass up on this human impulse. So she puts the boot into Sleepy Joe at various points: not only did he not resign early enough (when he calls to announce he won’t be running she doesn’t even pretend to be sorry), but he did his best to mess up her chances. The old fool called her just before her debate with Trump, when she absolutely had to be at her best, to distract her with inane recollections; worse, he responded to a Trumpian calling Puerto Rico “garbage” by saying the only garbage was the Trump supporters, a remark Harris equates with Hillary Clinton’s disastrous “deplorables”.
And she and husband Doug take it badly when, before he steps down, Jill asks her if she was supporting Joe. Doug’s response is: “They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs [presumably sorting out the Mexican border situation] … never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments…and still they have to ask if we’re loyal?” That sounds like Kamala’s view of her four years in office.
She also puts the boot into Josh Shapiro, who was one of her potential vice-presidential candidates, for pretty well measuring up the Vice-President’s apartment for curtains before she even interviewed him. (Interestingly she got her Norwegian aide, Storm, to drive the candidates to interview, which was their first vetting; Josh failed.) Her preferred candidate was Pete Buttigieg, but she sorrowfully admits that a gay vice-presidential candidate as running mate for a woman of colour married to a Jewish man would be too much for many voters. Mark Kelly, an actual astronaut, wasn’t pro-union enough, not rough enough. So she went for Tim Walz on the basis that he would pose no threat to her; he didn’t.
Where she’s genuinely eloquent is on issues like gun control, and her description of a school shooting during the campaign by a teenager with a semi-automatic weapon is righteously angry. She’s less convincing on Gaza (protests about Palestine pepper her campaign), though she was, admittedly, holding a difficult balance between the powerful Israeli lobby and the Palestinian activists.
There are some nice vignettes: in her meeting with Angela Merkel, the then German chancellor recalled how hurt she was when her opponents went for her appearance. “Don’t let them make you cry,” she advises. Doug features as a marital prop, though there’s payback for him too: he forgot her 60th birthday and tried to pass off as a present some jewellery he originally bought for their anniversary; the eagle-eyed Kamala spots the date and lets him have it. Her staff make the mistake of putting a big 60 on her celebration balloon when they know she’s stopped counting birthdays; rather brilliantly, she puts a stiletto heel right through it. Her aide, Storm, doesn’t let Doug off with more marital-missteps; she gives him notes to fill in for when they’re apart; a couple are reproduced with a scribbled heart.
Donald Trump is given no quarter here, though it’s interesting when they actually talk, he’s almost fulsome. But her contempt for him made it impossible for her to envisage the possibility of failure: “We had plans for all kinds of contingencies…except the actual result”. So when she finally had to accept the unthinkable, the aides scraped the Madam President icing off the celebration cupcakes and brought them round as comfort food.
This is a vindication of her candidacy and it leaves open the possibility that she might try again. Plainly, she hates being unemployed. But she fails also to recognise that one reason people didn’t vote for her wasn’t the shortness of the campaign; it was that they didn’t like her.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist at The London Standard
107 Days by Kamala Harris is out now (Simon & Schuster, £25)
