BOOK REVIEW — Kamala Harris’ 107 Days
Former United States Vice President Kamala Harris published a winner with her pre-second presidential run book 107 Days. It chronicles the three months she was given to take the ball from an ebbing Joe Biden and deliver our country’s first female and first Asian president to the Oval Office.
As you’ll recall, it didn’t happen.
As Harris preps for an almost certain second go of that, in 2028, she’s published the best selling 107 Days, and its a page-turner on number of fronts. First and foremost, readers get a slice of Harris she didn’t typically serve up. Interspersed with the legalese that the world came to expect from the brilliant attorney and prosecutor, the book offers soundbites that remind you of Harris’ upbringing in Oakland’s ‘hood, as she did on page 60, prompting me to literally laugh out loud on a recent cross country flight.
“Being a vice presidential candidate is an enormous gift, vaulting someone who might have local or state recognition onto the bigger, brighter national stage,” Harris writes. But it can also mean taking a job that, as FDR’s VP John Nance Garner so memorably said, may not be ‘worth a bucket of warm piss’.”
Or consider page 79:
“Today, [Trump] wants me to prove my race. What’s next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?”
Throughout 107 Days, readers learn or are reminded of the historic nature of Harris’ run for president. For example, she was only the 11th sitting VP to run for the nation’s biggest job.
We also get a picture of Harris’ foundational faith that fueled her during her race for the White House, including several citations of biblical scriptures to help bring some of her points home. It’s a faith that led her, she writes on page 177, to end every night of her campaign with a final prayer to God, asking “Have I done everything I could do today?”
That’s a prayer we could and should all repeat, independent of the job God’s given us.
But Harris also displays healthy doses of hubris and delusion in the book. While she’s certainly not alone among politicians in displaying those attributes, readers might be surprised to see them so prominently on display from the typically reserved politician.
For example, Harris writes repeatedly and often about the untenable time frame she was given to win the 2024 election. We get it. Biden screwed you by waiting so long. But man oh man, she spends a good amount of the book’s real estate drilling that point into readers’ heads.
In the delusion department, Harris pats herself on the back for being a politician who is known for being on time, as she did on page 155. Clearly, she’d forgotten her own 2023 campaign launch in Oakland when she wrote that passage of the book — the woman was over three hours late that day for an event that was in her own hometown.
In summary of her rationale for why her presidential campaign wasn’t successful, Harris Harris writes, on page 213, “Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?” While she, overall, writes lovingly and respectfully of President Biden in the book, she is at times quite critical of the man who simply had gotten too much of a taste of absolute power to willingly abdicate it because his mind and body were understandably starting to show the signs of wear and tear.
Harris, as much as any of us, should understand what a taste of power can do to a person. We’ll all get confirmation on that next year.
Overall, 107 Days reminded me that we missed out on a helluva president in sending Harris home two years ago as we welcomed Trump back for another run of destroying our democracy. But the book offers, expectantly and like Harris herself, a glimmer of hope:
“I’ll no longer sit in DC in the grandeur of the ceremonial office,” Harris writes on page 229. “I will be with the people, in towns and communities where I can listen to their ideas on how we rebuild trust, empathy, and a government worthy of the ideals of this country.”
There’s our Kamala. We’ll see you in 2027 at your presidential campaign launch, ma’am.
Please try your damndest to be on time for it.
Connect with writer Michael P Coleman at michaelpcoleman.com.
