The more Trump resembles a Mussolini tribute act the more Democrats want to distance themselves from the ignominy of last November’s election. The public settling of scores between the media elite, the Harris coterie and Joe Biden’s courtiers has crowded out a sober assessment of why Trump won. The latest instalment in this parochial finger-pointing is Kamala Harris’s 304-page excuse for why she lost.
You don’t even have to open the book to know what those 304 pages contain. The title, 107 Days, sums up her entire argument: I didn’t have enough time. As she puts it, Biden’s “reckless” stubbornness meant he stepped aside too late for Harris to mount a winning campaign. The canker in her not-guilty plea is that the book itself contains copious evidence that the more time voters had to get to know her, the worse she fared.
The flashing lights began on the first day of her campaign. The evening after Biden dropped out, Charli XCX had posted “Kamala IS brat” on X, and in a portentous sign she couldn’t resist celebrities, the Harris campaign quickly swathed their social accounts in Brat green. Hours earlier she had rung Bernie Sanders to ask for his endorsement. He told her, according to her notes from the time, to focus on the working class, not just abortion. Harris did not heed that advice.
There were other bad omens. She recalls that, at one of her rallies, protesters started shouting “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide. We won’t vote for genocide”. Harris writes that the protesters’ threat to withhold their vote was “reckless” – there’s that chastisement of others again – because “either Trump or I would be elected”. Yes, voters faced a choice between her and Trump. But the corollary here is that Harris thought people should vote for her whatever she promised. In other words, she deserved their vote simply by not being Trump. No wonder she didn’t feel the need to offer much more than symbolism.
This contempt for democracy found its voice in the campaign’s aesthetics. For 107 days, Harris confused courting celebrities with winning votes. She name-drops the stars who joined her on the campaign trail with abandon: Stevie Wonder; Flo Milli; Cardi B; Keegan-Michael Key; Spike Lee; Jon Bon Jovi; the cast of Saturday Night Live; rapper Fat Joe. Here is a representative sentence: “We left as Katy Perry took the stage and arrived at our last rally in Philadelphia as Lady Gaga sat down at her piano to sing ‘God Bless America’.” She was very proud of the fact an SNL producer told her that she got some of the loudest applause he’d ever heard. Even her campaign chief of staff had once worked for Bono on solving poverty in Africa.
The book is one long cast list for a film with Harris as the star. This is politics as celebrity, not policy. It eerily suggests that Harris thinks the process by which America decides who wields power is little more than a Hollywood performance. There’s Kamala dancing on stage with Usher; here’s her pretending to knock on doors which have already been vetted by the Secret Service. She and Trump put on different shows. Trump just happened to sell more tickets.
None of this is helped by the fact the blurb uses the second person as if the election was a draft script for the Bourne Identity. “Your secret Service code name is Pioneer,” it reads. “On July 21, 2024, your running mate, Joe Biden announces that he will not be seeking reelection”. This is where it resembles a more lackadaisical version of Mission Impossible: “You have 107 days”.
The surreal tone, and the unwillingness to ponder what the voters actually wanted – except as monolithic categories such as black women – is so vast that it becomes clear her only aim is to defend her reputation, not reflect on the consequences of her and Biden’s cowardice and solipsism. Or perhaps this is just how she sees politics. Harris is an erstwhile lawyer. Lawyers are trained to administer the fair application of rules. It makes sense, then, that those lawyers who become politicians are not that interested in what those rules actually are, ie the moral and ideological content of politics itself. She reminds me of an ebullient Keir Starmer with a Californian twang and bouncier hair.
Another shared trait between these pilloried politicians might be that both think a qualification for high office is to be a “nice” person. Harris periodically reminds the reader that she treats her social inferiors with respect. She would speak to hotel staff on the campaign to “let them know they were appreciated”. As she walked up the cabin on Air Force Two each day, she would high-five the head of her Secret Service detail. I welcome friendly politicians. But friendliness alone is not a reason to make someone the most powerful person in the world.
Harris’s belief in the importance of being nice is perhaps why she is so blind to corporate power. She boasts about cruising around with the billionaire Mark Cuban, for instance, but forgets to explain why she entertained firing the antitrust Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan after Cuban attacked her for blocking tech mergers. Antitrust was one of the few success stories she could have exploited to counter Trump’s faux economic populism. Instead, she offered something called the “opportunity economy”.
Harris is in many ways the embodiment of woke capitalism, which one might define as the use of social and ethnic positive discrimination in order to sanitise economic inequality. She admits that she was only vice president because Jim Clyburn, the chair of the black caucus who tilted the primary for Biden, wanted Biden to pick a black woman as his running mate. And she was only the nominee because she was vice president.
Trump and his supporters are fringe characters in her narrative. She is incurious about the populist age in which we live. Change the names and the narrative could have slotted into any campaign in the past 50 years. All she can muster is a glib paragraph about misinformation at the end of the book. Having offered this contentless, self-exculpating analysis, she concludes that politics is so broken that she no longer thinks working inside the system can solve anything. That’s probably an affectation. But her refusal to investigate why the system is so broken is the natural outcome of her studied vacuity.
The book’s conceit is that the Democratic Party had 107 days to stop Trump, and not a decade or two. Any politician who thinks this is true is probably more interested in excusing themselves from the consequences of the loss. The entire premise of the book is a revealing self-deception: that Washington’s personality politics is what determines elections – never mind the economy or, for that matter, the voters.
107 Days
Kamala Harris
Simon & Schuster, 320pp, £25
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[Further reading: Young people’s favourite politicians? Farage, Burnham and Trump]
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