107 Days

 

Politicians write their memoirs. That is just one of the things that they do - sometimes when their careers are already over, sometimes as one of their many maneuvers to keep one's career going. Which of these applies to this account by Kamala Harris of her unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign remains to be seen. With most such books, the first question is, obviously, whether - apart from mere curiosity - there is any good reason to read it. Whatever its faults, whatever its author's faults, this campaign memoir - 107 Days (Simon and Schuster), co-written with Geraldine Brooks - probably meets that minimal test and is worth the read, if only for one more inside take on the unprecedented character of the 2024 campaign, assuming one is interested in the daily ebb and flow of campaigns. That said, its day-by-day chronological structure does leave much to be desired stylistically. It actually may make the account more boring instead of more interesting.

Without even opening her book, most readers have already heard one thing from the media coverage of it - that Tim Walz was not her preferred choice for running mate, that Pete Buttigieg was her preference, but that she went with Walz as the more cautious choice.  This reflected (depending on the reader's preferred interpretation) either a left-wing Democratic obsession with identity politics or a traditional American awareness of the need to balance the ticket. Either way, it highlights her caution. Since she lost anyway, one might argue, perhaps this would have been a good occasion to throw caution away! In any case, apart from the generally accepted exception fo 1960, when has a vice presidential candidate really helped the head of the ticket?

I am not sure how much else is new that we actually learn from her book. We do learn, but should not be surprised, that she harbors resentment against the Biden inner circle, the same people who have elsewhere borne much of the blame for keeping Biden in the race beyond his sell-by date. Most of her comments reflect her resentments of Biden's inner circle, although there is some criticism of the President himself. Of course, this is often the lot of a vice president. It is a dumb job, another poorly thought-out legacy of our 18th-century constitutional framing. It may make sense for her to want to claim, as she does, "that there is only one apprenticeship for president of the United States, and that is being vice president." That claim has to be both theoretically nonsensical and historically proven false many times. Rarely have our better presidents been vice presidents beforehand!

At the same time, she genuinely believed she was the person best positioned to pick up Biden's fallen standard. It is fair, I think, to criticize Biden for not having gotten out of the race earlier - early enough to enable a better process for the selection of his successor, who might or might not have been Harris, who might even have been a better prepared candidate Harris. Who knows? But it is hard to fault Harris for taking advantage of the opportunity that fell to her. She would, however, soon experience what Jill Biden warned: "You're about to see how horrible the world is."

In any close race, it is impossible to single out any one issue as ultimately decisive. That said, one of Harris's principal problems, from the start, was how to deal with Biden's unpopularity. In the early days of the campaign, she pointedly praised the President in the first pert of her speech. But David Plouffe warned her: "People hate Joe Biden."

Whether that was fair or. not, whether the desire for her to separate herself from Biden was realistic or not, what Democrats really do have to confront at some point is widen debacle says about the party, its leaders, their communication and decision making, all sorts of issues that this tragic chain of events has highlighted. By their own admission (or, at least, their rhetoric) their primary job was not so much to get Biden re-elected as to prevent Trump from being re-elected. And in that the party failed dramatically.

By the distorted campaign standards of the 21st century, 107 days was probably simply too little time. Even so, there was a lot of excitement about her campaign, and it is worth asking whether her loss was inevitable and whether that ephemeral initial enthusiasm could have been more effectively translated into something more lasting.

All of which brings us to the deeper question which Harris' book never really answers, which is how and why the Democrats got themselves into the position over the past several years in which they have simply ceased to seem credible to so many Americans - and what, if anything, can de done to change that. It may not be fair to expect Harris alone to answer that, but the truly abiding lesson of the 2024 campaign is that that is the question that matters most for the party and, by extension, for the country.