Kamala Harris has a timing problem. The former US vice-president and White House hopeful has spent recent months on a book tour, promoting her memoir 107 Days, which recounts her fast and furious campaign as the Democratic candidate in 2024 after Joe Biden, at last, dropped out. In case you somehow don’t know how that campaign fared, the very existence of said memoir should tell you all you need to know – sitting presidents don’t do book tours.
Yet that’s about the extent of the memoir’s revelations. Despite being published nearly a year after her loss, Harris offers little insight into why she thinks she failed other than the fact that she was forced to run “the shortest campaign in modern presidential history”, which made it difficult to sell her political vision to the public. It’s a theme she’s reiterated again and again over the last few months, during public events and a flurry of media interviews, including a splashy interview this week with the New York Times.
What of the other unanswered questions that still loom over 2024? Harris has little time for them. She refuses to reckon with the Democrats’ silence around 81-year-old Joe Biden’s competence until his diminished abilities were exposed to the world in the first presidential debate. Instead, she insists that she always believed in his mental capacity to serve as president. Though she does acknowledge that Biden’s policies on Israel and Gaza were out of step with the public’s views, she doesn’t dwell on it while also criticising pro-Palestinian protesters for not demonstrating at Donald Trump’s campaign events. Her problems with sounding too scripted? She was “disciplined”, actually, and it’s sexist to suggest otherwise. Her loss, it seems, all came down to the timeline.
I’m someone who has a lot of sympathy for the argument that Biden’s prolonged refusal to drop out of the race torpedoed whatever chances the Democrats had to beat Trump. As I wrote in this magazine in the weeks before the election, 100 days was simply not enough time to build a winning campaign and liberals were deluded if they thought “there would be zero consequences for swapping out one candidate for another three months before election day”. So when Harris laments that her truncated campaign faced an insurmountable challenge from the beginning, she has a point.
But that was always only part of the story, and Harris is unwilling to reckon with the rest of it – namely, any part she may have played in her own loss. This will pose a challenge for her inevitable run for president in 2028. Because while she continues on with her publicity blitz “freedom tour”, travelling the country, speaking to packed venues and giving media interviews in order to sell books, she’s also clearly setting herself up for another shot at the White House.
Not that she’s prepared to call it a campaign just yet. “It’s three years from nooooow,” she told the New York Times when asked by their national political correspondent, Shane Goldmacher, about the next election, and suggested that 2028 is so far in the future that it would be ridiculous to plan a run now. “I mean, honestly.”
Honestly, it’s a remark that gets to the heart of Harris’s timing paradox. If 107 days is too short and (just under) three years is too long, what, exactly, is she after? Does she want lots of time to sell her political vision or not?
Perhaps she worries that once she commits to 2028, she’ll no longer be able to blame timing as her greatest obstacle to the White House. Over the course of her many recent public appearances, Harris has refused to say anything substantive about her beliefs, about what she has to offer the US, or even about where the Democrats should be heading in this political moment. Instead, she doles out political pabulum, telling the NYT, “We have to stand for the people.” She offers neither criticism of moderate Democrats who are increasingly seen to be obstructing the party (“I’m not going to engage in a circular firing squad”), nor resounding endorsements of the party’s rising stars (of top Democrats’ apparent hostility to Zohran Mamdani and his left-wing politics, she said blandly, “I do not think he’s a scary face for the Democratic Party”). She has formed a non-profit organisation, KDH for the People, with a paint-by-numbers mission statement about strengthening “communities across America through the promotion of economic opportunity, justice and protection of fundamental freedoms”.
This is not the clear-eyed outline of an inspiring ideology; it’s the opaque offerings of a political persona focus-grouped to the point of meaninglessness. Even with all the time in the world, Kamala Harris can’t sell her political vision if she doesn’t have one.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage’s American dream]
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