Kamala Harris explains why it wasn’t her fault
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Kamala Harris did not select an easy assignment when she chose to write her new memoir of the presidential campaign, “ 107 Days .” While the Democratic defeat in 2024 has a thousand parents, it’s extremely difficult to argue that the nominee herself did not have a significant role in a beating that Democrats always knew would have far-reaching consequences.
Even the book’s title, referring to how long Harris was the Democratic presidential nominee, is an implied excuse; many Democrats have talked themselves into believing that the race was too short and if it had gone on longer, she would have pulled ahead. That’s not borne out by the data, as Donald Trump gained ground from late August to Election Day and, once again, most polling was underestimating his support . (Also note: The Pew Research Center determined that even if every eligible voter had gone to the polls, Trump still would have won.)
The Atlantic published an excerpt from Harris’s memoir on Wednesday morning, and the section suggests that the subtitle of her forthcoming book should be “Why Nothing that Happened Last Year Was My Fault.”
First, Harris backs the implausible contention that Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance was a result of jet lag from overseas travel: “I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser.” Biden returned from his overseas trip on June 15, and later that day attended the Hollywood fundraiser — where he reportedly didn’t recognize George Clooney , who, in addition to being one of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces, had met Biden many times before. The debate was on June 27. If you’re still jet-lagged 12 days after an overseas trip, you’re in no condition to be president.
Much of the excerpt offers Harris spilling the tea about how she felt as if the Biden team undermined her at every turn during her time as vice president. At times, it sounds as if Harris felt the Biden loyalists were an even more infuriating and consequential opponent than the Republicans were.
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “The president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me.”
When she went to France in 2021, conservative media “went wild, claiming I’d faked a French accent. This was total nonsense,” Harris recounts, “but the White House seemed glad to let reporting about my ‘gaffe’ overwhelm the significant thaw in foreign relations I’d achieved.”
Contemporaneous reporting does affirm that there were worse-than-usual tensions between the Biden inner circle and Harris, going back to when they faced each other in the 2020 Democratic primaries. After one debate, in which Harris had attacked Biden, his wife, Jill, reportedly
" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> cursed at her and then later opposed Harris’s selection as her husband’s running mate. A 2022 book by then-New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns quoted Biden advisers who believed Harris’s staff focused on trivial matters such as how she looked on the cover of Vogue. A 2023 Reuters report quoted a Biden confidant as saying, regarding presidential responsibilities, “I don’t think that the president sees her as somebody who takes anything off of his plate.”
Harris herself complains that she got stuck with the worst assignments. In 2021, Biden announced that Harris would “lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.” She writes: “Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar.” (Reread the Biden quote above and decide for yourself whether that’s really such a wild mischaracterization.) She complains, “No 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.” And: “No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with .”
Welcome to the vice presidency, where you rarely if ever get the popular and easy tasks.
Harris does believe that she knocked it out of the park with the administration’s messaging on abortion and Gaza, but concludes she was punished for that, too. “When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging.”
The excerpt concludes, “My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.”
An unhelpful Biden team was no doubt a problem for Harris as vice president, but there is also that little matter of how she actually performed in the job. In Harris’s version of events, she was consistently doing great work — but her job approval rating remained in the low 40s and high 30s because of a pincer movement of Fox News, GOP critics and saboteurs within the Biden administration, driven by jealousy.
And the lack of support from Biden’s White House team she’s so bitter about preceded those 107 days. Once Harris was the nominee, it was her show — at the Democratic convention, on the debate stage and on the campaign trail with her riffs about “joy” and coconut trees. Perhaps the full book, coming out Sept. 23 , will have better answers — but for now, a reader is left asking: Never mind losing the race overall; if you did such a terrific job, why couldn’t you manage to win even one swing state?
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Not going to buy this book but every review makes it appear as exactly what I expected.
Nothing is her fault.
Ridiculous excuses for Biden (he was jetlagged from a trip 12 days before!)
No attempt to explain why she didn't speak up about Biden's incapacity
Whining about being named border czar and how impossible the job is without acknowledging trump solved it with no new legislation.
She was such a terrible candidate. She had a massive advantage in money, the MSM did everything they could to push her to victory and she was running against the most personally unpopular candidate of all time. And she couldn't win a single swing state.
You are 2000% not the intended audience.
It's is written with the express purpose of telling her supporters what they wanted to hear.
A democratic acting like a victim. Who would have thought?
Biden's team responded:
It wasn’t her fault. It was Biden’s fault, mainly. I’d also be willing to put some blame on those closest to him, but that usually isn’t the Vice President.
As of January 2021, virtually everyone in the Democratic Party assumed Biden would not seek reelection, and with good reason. He made it clear that his was to be a transitional administration and that younger people should follow him.
But he went back on that “promise” and no one had the stones to push him on it. That froze everyone.
By the time he quit the race in 2024, it was too late for anyone else besides Harris to even try to mount a campaign. If the Democrats had had two or three years to prepare for open primaries, I doubt very much she would have been the nominee.