Book Review: "107 Days" by Kamala Harris

The title of former Vice President and former future President Kamala Harris's new campaign memoir about her bid for the Presidency in 2024 refers to the length of her campaign, but it could just as easily be a reference to how long it takes - or seemingly takes - to read it.

There are three revelatory facts in "107 Days" that most people didn't know before this book was published.  The first is that she came to the realization that President Biden shouldn't have sought a second term.  "In retrospect, I think it was recklessness," Harris wrote. "The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."  The second is that her first choice for a running mate was Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg but she thought it would be too much to ask voters averse to identity politics to elect a ticket headed by a half-black, half-South Asian woman (with a Jewish husband) whose running mate was gay.  She deemed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, her second choice,  "unrealistic expectation" for the role of the Vice President and thought his Jewishness and his support for Israel may have been a turnoff for voters.   And the third revelation is that Biden White House staffers seemed to have little interest in defending her record against attacks from Republican ideologues.  But you don't need to read this book to learn all of that.  The media already reported on it.

I was going to say that the reader wouldn't learn anything beyond what I've already noted, but apparently that is not true.  I, for one, learned that Vice President Hubert Humphrey wouldn't count the votes in and certify the 1968 presidential election, in which Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, when the electoral votes were tallied in Congress, so he let the Senate president pro tempore do it.  But did I have to hack my way through a book as revealing as a burqa just to learn that?

I'll come right out and say it: This is the most boring campaign memoir I've ever read.  It induces the worst sort of tedium - enough to make your eyes glaze over, but not enough to cure insomnia.  Harris's writing style is the sort of style you'd expect from a lawyer - emotionless - and her picayune descriptions of life on the campaign trail - her accounts of the hotels she stayed in, taking hot baths, relaxing with a chamomile tea - actually brought to mind that hilarious episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in which Ted Baxter tries to write his autobiography and documents every minute thing that happens to him or is said to him.     And then there are irrelevant personal stories the story of her mother, a medical researcher, complaining about a male co-worker walking around the lab with an obscene cell sample in a Petri dish that's one of those stories I could have done without hearing.

Kamala Harris tries to make the case for her one-hit wonder of a presidential campaign as a pretext for a possible third try (counting her failed 2019 presidential campaign which sputtered out before the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses began in earnest) in 2028.  Like Hillary Clinton before her, Harris deflects most if not all of the blame for her loss to Donald Trump on others.  Unlike Hillary Clinton, not everything that went wrong was her fault - after all, she inherited a Biden campaign staff more loyal to the President than to anyone else, and yes, racism and misogyny are to blame (in part) for her loss - but she still bears some responsibility, such as not directly addressing issues concerning the voters (like inflation), and her perky, cutesy-pie turns of phrases that she thought would endear herself to voters ("Trump has an enemies list, I have a to-do list.").  Plus, she kept playing that horrible Beyoncé song at her rallies (which is not worth expanding on in yet another parenthetical clause). If this book is meant for Harris to make her presidential ambitions for 2028 take off, it crashes without ever getting off the ground.

As always, the best reporting on the most recent presidential campaign, which is thus the most riveting reading, is Jonathan Martin's and Amie Parnes' "Fight" about the Harris-Trump election.  If Kamala Harris wanted a solo account of her campaign without a male perspective, she should have let Doris Kearns Goodwin produce a book about the 2024 presidential campaign.  Harris is only good at making history - not writing it.