Kamala Harris’s Book Shows She Still Doesn’t Understand Why She Lost
Kamala Harris’s memoir about the 2024 presidential campaign, 107 Days, is being released next week. The emerging theme from the excerpts and leaks is that the former vice-president feels snakebit. The title of the book illustrates her complaint that Joe Biden’s reluctance to step aside forced her into a too-brief campaign in which the 46th president’s legacy and continuing interference were insurmountable problems.
The latest take on the book from the Washington Post suggests that to this day Harris doesn’t understand exactly why she lost, or what she might have done differently, particularly with respect to the living ghost of Joe Biden, which haunted her campaign to the very bitter end. Most interestingly, she talks about what many of us consider the great lost opportunity of her general-election campaign, an October 8 appearance on The View:
When she went on “The View” on Oct. 8, Harris was asked what, if anything, she would have done differently than Biden over the past four years. She responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” The former vice president describes that response as having “pulled the pin on a hand grenade.”
Still, Harris defends her actions against her critics who said she should have done more to distance herself from Biden, saying she did not “want to embrace the cruelty of my opponent.” She also argues that naming one specific policy difference would have created a “backward-looking rather than forward-looking” conversation and “would have limited the definition of the difference between us to that one thing, rather than my unique perspective on a variety of issues.”
Harris reports that her campaign staff knew her answer to the “What you would have done differently” question was a disaster. But she can’t seem to think of anything else she could have done:
In hindsight, Harris writes, she wishes she’d said that, unlike Biden, she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet.
She actually did make that pledge later in her appearance of The View. It speaks volumes about her sense of imprisonment (or her timidity) that this sort of empty gesture toward bipartisanship was the best she could come up with — then or now — as a declaration of independence from her highly unpopular boss.
Harris could have — should have — shown some public awareness of the need to improve on the Biden administration’s handling of the two issues that were simply killing her campaign: inflation and immigration. Instead, she made the perpetual error that seems to be a systemic problem for Democrats, seeking to evade difficult issues and change the subject to something else. Yes, being Joe Biden’s vice-president made it difficult for Harris to clearly signal how she’d be different aside from her age and identity. But it’s been done before. In October 1968, at almost the exact same stage of his own presidential campaign, the sitting vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, broke with his all-powerful boss, Lyndon Johnson, on the top issue of the day, the Vietnam War, and it took his left-for-dead candidacy to within an eyelash of victory. Considering she was in a much better position than Humphrey was and facing an opponent even less popular than Richard Nixon, Harris could have changed history.
As my then-colleague Jonathan Chait observed even before she flubbed the key question of the campaign on The View, Harris had more control over her destiny than she seems to imagine:
The vice-president has no constitutional power. If the president wants to do something Harris doesn’t like, Harris can’t stop him. She is therefore not responsible for any policies she doesn’t wish to associate herself with.
The vice-presidency is a strange office, lacking any formal authority. Its inhabitants have generally lamented the powerlessness of the job. Harris really ought to stop thinking about her position as a confining dilemma and realize that it is a liberating opportunity to define her campaign as whatever she wants it to be, unburdened by what has been.
Yes, Harris had a difficult task under extraordinary circumstances. But she played it safe when the political climate dictated some risk-taking. Learning now how trapped she felt makes me sympathize with her as a person but not as the leader of a party that needs bolder leadership than she was able to provide when the country needed it most.