Kamala Harris Testifies to What We’ve Lost
Two media critics talk back to the political press about "107 Days"
1. Looking Back
Susan:
When Rachel Maddow interviewed Hillary Clinton on September 14, 2017, nearly a year after the 2016 election, Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell schmoozed amiably on his MSNBC show about how “presidential” Hillary was. So brilliant! So calmly confident! So on-target, so prescient about…well, everything. And so relaxed! Maddow seemed surprised and on the verge of the where was this Hillary during the election? that we’d heard so often from commentators who couldn’t face—or wouldn’t admit—the gravity of their own irresponsible coverage.
I wanted to throw something very hard at the screen.
This time, after watching Maddow’s recent interview with Kamala Harris about her new memoir 107 Days, my mood was more like grief—exhausted grief. Once again, we’d been painfully reminded of how we’d thrown away our chances at excellence and allowed the absolute worst to happen. And once again, as Maddow gave Harris the chance to “defend” those sections of 107 Days that the mainstream media has found so headline-worthy, the never-spoken hung in the air for me. Would we ever confront how the political press had hobbled Kamala Harris’s campaign with hectoring, skeptical headlines, and interviews designed for scoops and “gotchas”?
The badgering for “sit-downs” with them while she traveled the country, introducing herself in person. The scorn for “scripted” answers and “softball” conversations. The pouncing on “flip-flops” and “evasions” and “skating away” from what they congratulated themselves as “hard-hitting” questions. The moments when she struggled to respond to the ubiquitous “how will you be different from Biden?” without trashing Joe. The charges of “word salad” when she wouldn’t yield to the demand for a “yes or no” answer. The (usually male) commentators and other politicians blathering on about the groups she was “in trouble with” or what she “needs to do.”
They imagined themselves just “doing their job.” They may as well have been wearing MAGA hats.1
Martha:
Reading 107 Days brought back the way I sobbed during the dregs of election night last year. It recalled why my tears kept rolling when Harris gave a powerful concession speech the following day at Howard University. I don’t believe I was foolishly hopeful on election night; I expected a close outcome that would be mired in weeks of recounts and lawsuits. But as Harris makes clear, it really was a shock when everything changed so fast—and I doubt she had any illusions about what the Trump agenda would bring.
Her book is by no means a literary memoir. It’s a political memoir, a genre I’m not fond of, given how much politicians of all genders indulge in image-polishing. There’s some of that in this one by Harris, and I began it wondering how much of the speechifying and other set scenes were really her. But by the end, I came away feeling that the straightforward voice does reflect who she is: a skilled politician, lawyer, daughter of immigrants and sorority woman of the “Divine Nine” who’s devoted to public service.
And I like that no-nonsense voice, its pragmatism and admissions of uncertainty. For me, 107 Days has forced a reckoning with the terrible outcome of that election and the media fallout, even if I sometimes wish I could forget.
The closing sections of her book evoke how painful Harris’s loss was, yet many commentators have simply skipped over what it felt like for those of us who voted for her. In her “Election Night” chapter, she states outright how wrenching the results of the failed campaign were for herself and her husband:
It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book.
Her husband Doug Emhoff, in particular, had begun election day hopeful but then struggled with growing dread, especially after learning “intel” from a friend at Fox News about what their polls were showing. As Harris puts it, he hid his feelings during a lively family gathering in the VP’s residence until word came down from campaign chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon that Harris had lost: “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t think you’re going to get there.”
Harris, on the phone with Dillon, describes how shocked she felt in that moment:
“Oh my God. What’s going to happen to our country?”
I could barely breathe.
“Should we fight this?”
“We’re just not in the zone to ask.”
As the bad news sinks in, Harris writes, “All I could do was repeat, over and over, ‘My God, my God, what will happen to our country?’”
That is the point of this book—although you wouldn’t know it from all the reviews that seem to miss the looming forest for the trees.
2. Kamala’s Book Is Not “Dishy” or “Bitter”
In “Kamala Harris’s Burn Book,” Oliver Wiseman of the Free Press asks, “What’s the point of 107 Days? The book clearly isn’t about coming to terms with failure. Perhaps it is the start of a comeback? Democratic strategists have noted that no one serious about running again would write a book like this. Why create so many enemies?”
A Politico piece by Melanie Mason and Elena Schneider describes the book as “an ambush of fellow Democrats” that’s “peppered with digs at fellow party members.” These writers report that “the tome landed with a thud among a political class struggling to make sense of the former vice president’s account,” quoting one Democratic consultant who wondered if it was written as a “catharsis to assign blame somewhere else.”
“If there’s a political strategy here, it’s a bad one,” said former Obama strategist and bête noire of the Biden White House David Axelrod, also quoted in the same piece. “There’s an awful lot of grievances and finger-pointing that really doesn’t serve a political agenda.”
These mostly male politicos seem determined, with considerable venom, to turn the author of 107 Days into a bitter, kvetching woman who either wants a divorce from politics or is just having a hissy fit about how badly she’s been treated.
They read a different book than we did.
Like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris emerged from a period of reflection and recuperation with a book looking back on the election. Inevitably—and this distinguishes candidates’ post-election look-backs from regular memoirs—that would include explanations for the moments that had been turned by the media into controversies and “failings” during her campaign. These were dredged up again in postmortems like Jonathan Allen’s Fight and Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin.2
Just as the candidates’ reflections are a special sort of genre, so are the look-backs by others. They offer themselves as “political analysis” and “history” but are neither. Written by reporters (not historians) who get to schmooze with a bunch of Washington insiders and journalist pals venting their anger and disappointment about the election “on background” (no names), they pull a shitload of impressionistic quotes, imagined thoughts and novelistic, hyperbolic descriptions into a narrative that’s more interested in “breaking news” than providing a balanced, accurate historical account.
They (or their editors) slap on a sensational title. Then they make the rounds of all the news and interview shows. The reviews, written by pals, describe them as “deeply reported,” “well-sourced”—but also “dishy“ (the currently favored, reader-enticing PR euphemism for “gossipy”). And too often, their narratives get embedded in our collective understanding of what happened. As if they are history. Which they aren’t.
The look-backs of candidates, inevitably, are in part a rejoinder to the attacks, half-truths, and gossip that have become embedded in this way. So, if they sometimes have a defensive tone, blame the mainstream media rather than accusing the candidates of “sour grapes” or “finger-pointing.” The (usually unspoken) subtext: Okay, you’ve gotten the politicos’ and journalists’ narrative; now let me tell you how I experienced it.
Kamala Harris’s 107 Days, without ever aggressively taking the media to task for their (false) “objectivity,” makes no pretense about the fact that what she is offering is different from a mere record of what happened or a dishy tell-all (we’ve both been noting how often reviewers—even Maddow—keep slapping on that PR term). Here, for example, without mentioning Allen’s or Tapper’s books, Harris confronts one of their central narratives—as well as the runaway media trashing of Biden as too old and infirm to be a capable POTUS:
Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. 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 at eighty-one, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles…. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country….
There was a distinction between his ability to campaign and his ability to govern. I was right beside him as he navigated successfully through intensely dangerous world events: Putin’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons on the Ukraine battlefront; the missile exchanges between Iran and Israel that might have escalated into regional war if we hadn’t rallied the diverse coalition that protected Israel during those attacks. His judgment, his experience, and the relationships he had developed were expertly deployed.
As for campaigning, I did have concerns. His voice was no longer strong, his verbal stumbles more frequent. Apart from the superhuman stamina required, communicating is the main game. Before he stepped aside from the top of the ticket, I had planned to do many of the big public rallies and a lot of the crazy travel while his team fashioned a White House–based campaign for him.
Even so, his inner circle, the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far, and that in its rigors, he’d be perpetually, increasingly, unavoidably exhausted. They should have counseled him accordingly. Instead, it seemed that the worse things got, the more they pushed him.
(bold emphasis is ours.)
As you read this, think about the outsized prominence the mainstream media has given to one sentence—and one word—that appears earlier, as Harris reflects on her conflicted emotions, and struggle to reason through the pros and cons of Biden dropping out:
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high.
Wiseman, in his nasty Free Press take-down, misrepresents the “recklessness” that the press has seized on, turning it into their favorite stuff: an explosive headline. As Harris emphasized in her Maddow interview, the “recklessness” was a collective failure that included, most prominently, herself. But Wiseman transforms her self-reflective look-back into Harris blaming Biden: “His decision to run again at 81 was ‘reckless,’ says Harris, who tells an awfully convenient tale of Biden’s decline.”
The snipe at “awfully convenient” isn’t the only bitchy bit in his review. “The self-exculpation is unrelenting” (he likes that word; he also calls the book “unrelentingly bitter”); it’s “passive aggressive”; “patronizing, preening.” In Wiseman’s unrelenting view, “The closest Harris gets to self-criticism is when she questions whether she was too loyal to her boss. No one, not even her own husband, is spared in her diary-style account of her sprint for the White House—except herself.”
Reading these words, we both felt a flood of déjà vu sweep through us: How many times had we read and heard exactly that complaint—blames everyone except herself—about Hillary Clinton? Susan, who wrote a book about it, especially couldn’t help remembering the press response every time Clinton opened her mouth to talk about the 2016 election. Then Clinton dared to publish What Happened a year after her campaign. Her look-back is a personal yet far more complete account of the election than Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes had supplied, but she was accused of passing the buck.
There were no such complaints about Bernie Sanders, who, when they’d barely finished counting the votes in November 2016, rushed to publish a self-aggrandizing look-back that skewered the Democrats without restraint. No one told him to “go quietly into the night,” either, as Vanity Fair’s T.A. Frank suggested Hillary’s post-election exit from public life should be. At the time, Susan thought this allusion to Dylan Thomas’s poem was the most grotesquely misogynist “go away” trope that could be hurled at a woman who dared, after losing an election, to continue claiming the right to public presence.
But then we hadn’t seen the headline and image for Carlos Lozada’s opinion piece about 107 Days in the New York Times.
We’re sorry that you have to see this.
This is the NYT’s version of clickbait, of course, but more telling is Lozada’s framing of the “sense of disrespect [that] permeates 107 Days.” Trump and his trolls dragged her down, Lozada notes, but he points to “disrespect from Biden and his team, too, who Harris says constantly undercut her and even whispered that she wasn’t up to the top job.”
Harris is not the first to argue she was ill-used by the Biden team. We’re far more persuaded than Lozada seems to be that feeling disrespected by aging white pols made a difference in the election and hamstrung her. And we find ourselves saying back: Maybe you just don’t get what it feels like to be disrespected, to have to grin and bear it in the no-win situations Kamala Harris often found herself in, unless you’re a woman.
3. On Those Other “Dishy” Confessions
Besides the “reckless” comment, reviewers and interviewers have lambasted Harris’s account of how she chose her running mate, charging her with homophobia—or at best, cowardice—because she passed over her first choice, Pete Buttigieg. In one of the most honest and engaging parts of the book, she admits that she thought the combo of Woman/Black/Indian/Jewish Husband and Gay Running Mate would be too “risky” an overload of Otherness. Her wording was less pointed than ours is here, but apparently acknowledging the reality of who is electable in the US of A qualifies as too candid among the fluttering politicos who all think the same thing but don’t say it out loud.
Harris writes that another finalist, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, was eliminated because of her “nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two.” Her assessment of Shapiro has been seen as bitchy sniping, although virtually every journalist at the time was saying exactly the same thing. And at least one gay male commentator—Eugene Daniels of MSNBC’s “The Weekend”—has said that although her assessment of the risk of Pete Buttigieg was painful and “sad” (as she says herself in the book, several times), she probably was right.
Susan recalls how Lawrence O’Donnell put such identity-politicking in VP selection in appropriate perspective. On his MSNBC show “The Last Word” during the 2024 election cycle, when “DEI hire” was popping up in conservative media circles, he pointed out that “diversity”—whether ideological, geographical, or racial (see Obama’s choice of white-guy Biden to “round out” his ticket)—has always figured in veep choices. We expect it—and may even celebrate it—when straight white guys do it, as Biden did with his choice of Kamala Harris.
But straight white males are the default mode for our image of POTUS, and a Black woman (married to a Jewish man) is already in the “diversity” side of the column. It may be an uncomfortable reality to recognize, but when critics attack Harris for paying attention to political pragmatics—or for being a “DEI hire” in the Biden White House—they’d better extend their criticisms to Biden, Obama, John McCain (with a pistol-packing woman), and George W. Bush (with an elder conservative operator to balance his hapless youth). The fact is that all vice-presidential picks have been DEI hires in one way or another.
4. Race and Gender: Naming Reality
Harris seems dead-set on not appearing to be a victim, which does undercut some of the impact of her storytelling in 107 Days. She keeps much of her emotional turmoil under wraps, referring explicitly to “the armor I usually wore.” But the two of us can appreciate why, especially when she notes early on that “of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that [Biden] should drop out.”
This is an honest assessment of how she would have been perceived—self-interested, too ambitious, out to grab the top job—not an excuse to get herself off the hook. (“Such is the price of politesse,” as Lozada snipes in his NYT piece.)
There were no good options, considering the cognitive dissonance any vice president would have felt under those circumstances, not to mention the parade of Democratic luminaries who tried to convince Biden. He didn’t want to drop out. Harris’s apparent affection for him likely increased the dissonance, as she alternated between sharing “a chocolate shake or a sundae” with grandfatherly Joe during private lunches in the Oval Office and the White House communications team ignoring right-wing attacks on her.
Then there’s the woman thing—or in Harris’s terms, “confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove exhausting. I was the first vice president to have a dedicated press pool tracking my every public move,” she writes. And yet, too many reporters appeared to have paid no attention to who Harris was.
The “softball” interviews they scorned, in which her brain is not on alert, wondering what the next gotcha will be, tell us more than the deadly, predictable ones with traditional broadcast journalists like Dana Bash and Bill Whitaker. In more relaxed, truly conversational modes (such as with Howard Stern and Charlamagne tha God), we see that Kamala Harris means everything she says. She cares about everything she is fighting for. What some may think are campaign promises are lifelong passions of hers. She’s the real deal.
The stilted and inquisition-like interviews the press clamor for may serve their own interests, but not those of the voter. They don’t reveal her humor, her scrupulousness, or her ability to motivate a crowd, especially in Black communities. As she wryly notes of her first campaign rally, at which Megan Thee Stallion was a featured speaker, the “audience was on fire,” and Harris’s first words beyond thank you were “Oh, it’s good to be back in Georgia!”::
Later, I read the reporting on that rally with amusement and some chagrin. Many of the reporters now traveling with us hadn’t covered rallies I’d been having as vice president. My college tour events had often been standing room only, same with my rallies for reproductive rights. If they had covered those events, the enthusiasm in Atlanta might not have come as such a surprise.
Watching clips from that rally (from only a year ago!) spotlights what’s under threat now. Kamala Devi Harris is a Black-South Asian woman born in Oakland, California. Stating this might seem obvious, except we think it needs to be said: this is a Black woman who almost became president, and our view of America would be very different if she had.
In a line that was so enthusiastically received that she repeated it at every rally, she knew Trump’s “type.” She saw through him and wasn’t afraid to call him out. She brings that wry knowingness to the book, too. At one point, Harris describes phoning Trump after a second attempt on his life last September, which came shortly after their one debate, where she trounced him. Her realization about his fulsome glad-handing during this call (“You’ve done a great job, you really have…. I’m going to tone it down. I will. You’re going to see”) may also seem obvious but is worth repeating:
People had told me that he had the capacity, one on one, to show a warmer side. That he could even be charming. I hadn’t believed it. But now I was experiencing it. And then, a reality check: He’s a con man. He’s really good at it.
5. Fighting Forward
Some commentators believe Harris has burned her political bridges with 107 Days. (Get ready for “please go quietly” 2.0 in the days to come.) Ironically, this feels like a book that’s been gone through with a finetooth legal comb. Sympathetic Rachel Maddow called it “candid,” which implies it’s full of political dirt or take-no-prisoners commentary. It’s not, unless you consider the way Harris admits a few doubts, drops some “salty” remarks about the idiots and trolls blocking her way, or talks about Trump the con man to be candid.
You can fault her campaign team all you want for getting their polls wrong or her as a candidate in prosecutorial fight mode. As media critics, we could pick apart all sorts of things about how Harris’s story is voiced or what is left out—and yes, 107 Days buries the lede with the most forceful writing in “Election Night,” the day after, the grim certification of votes on January 6, and her “Afterword.”
But we both finished this book with respect for Kamala Harris and the way she is still attempting to make sense of what happened to her and the country. What a thankless task it was to be in her position! With 107 Days, Harris is a whistleblower about the damage Trump caused during his first term and is continuing to cause. We should all be listening to her, not ripping her down for not winning a very close election or “not blaming herself” enough.
On January 6 of this year, in her role as vice president, Harris had to certify the Electoral College votes for her loss before Congress. After stating Trump’s winning tally, she read out, “Kamala D. Harris of the state of California has received 226 votes.” As she then writes:
It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I stood there and did my duty for democracy. And that day, democracy stood.
As I finished speaking, both sides of the aisle rose and applauded, as one.
We don’t view this as self-pitying or bitter. It was brave, especially given the January 6 riot four years before. We wanted Harris to win for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is what we’ve now lost: a communal belief in a diverse nation that shares certain core ideals about what it means to be American.
As she opened her concession speech, to a tearful crowd yelling “I love you”:
My heart is full today, full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me, full of love for our country, and full of resolve. The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for. But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.
Her book helps us remember what we’re fighting for.
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