107 Days

(By Kamala Harris, 2025)

Prologue

On 15 November, 2022, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to run for the Presidential election in November 2024. In April 2023, indictments on Trump started revving-up, and in the same month, President Biden announced that he would run for re-election. On 5 February 2024, the Robert Hur report was released, effectively concluding that Joe Biden broke the law on classified documents but that there was no point in charging him because he was, effectively, off his rocker. By 12 March 2024, both Biden and Trump had become the presumptive nominees for President by delegate votes from their respective parties. On 30 May 2024, Trump was found guilty in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Less than a month later, 27 June 2024, Biden and Trump had a debate. Biden’s perfomance was the worst in the history of US Presidential televised debates, prompting what was described by CNN’s John King as “a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic” in the Democratic Party. Throughout July, an increasing number of prominent Democratic politicians, supporters and donors, called on Biden to withdraw from the race. On 21 July 2024, Biden announced he was dropping out, and endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic nominee for the imminent election. There were 107 days to election day. There are no spoilers; we know what happened: Trump won fairly convincingly. In fact, it was the most comprehensive margin of victory so far this century. Ms. Harris has now published an account of her campaign, stressing the hurdles she faced and in particular, the limited amount of time she had in which to persuade the country to elect her as the first female U.S. President.

The Book

While competently written and containing some interesting and at times amusing insider vignettes, we had a profound problem with the book, mainly concerning the lack of accountability and faux victimhood which are its watermarks. Harris seems decent enough, for a politician, but the overwhelming impression is of a smart, tough, process-oriented but not-very-deep thinker. In the end, we concluded that one could only cannibalise the approach of the late, great P.J. O’Rourke in his review of another valedictory political work, that of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Who endorsed Harris on 3/8/24. (With apologies*).

Around our house, “107 Days” has become a complete home-entertainment centre. Using Cabernet-Kamala’s opus, we’ve developed six swell new parlour games. One is a drinking game – you open a page at random and need a drink. As for the others:

D-U-M Dumb

The object is to find the dumbest sentence in 107 Days. The book or Kindle is passed around and each player notes a passage. The winner is determined by the amount of laughter in the room when the quotation is read out. There are two categories, “Form” and “Content.”

(Her thoughts on being informed of Biden’s decision to drop out) – “Really? Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants, and the two people staffing me right now are under four feet tall.”

“Meena was in the closet, packing for the trip home to Palo Alto.”

“(Doug) was catching up with a partner at his former law firm who’d come out as gay during the Covid pandemic.”

“At 5.29 p.m., staff alerted me that the British singer-songwriter Charli XCX had posted: Kamala is brat.”

“Since then, she’d toggled between campaign work and issue-driven jobs, like working for Bono on poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.”

“There was a distinction between [Biden’s] ability to campaign and his ability to govern.”

“Everyone who said we couldn’t afford to make the necessary changes to achieve net-zero carbon emissions didn’t seem to grasp that we couldn’t afford not to. What sort of American economy would we have in a future where even Wall Street itself could be drowned by rising water?”

“My parents took me to demonstrations when I was still in my stroller.”

Finish That Thought

The object of this game is to find a Harris thought (be sure to allow adequate time!) and take it to its logical conclusion.

“As soon as [Biden] walked onto the debate stage in Atlanta, I could see he wasn’t right…Now he walked unsteadily, trying to balance himself with robotically moving hands” [As usual.]

“Biden answered in a thready voice, rushing through his answer. There was no light in his eyes, no expression in his voice. They’ve loaded him up with too many stats…” [Or something.]

“It was David Plouffe who would eventually put it to me more bluntly: “People hate Joe Biden.” It was hard for me to hear that.” [But easier to write.]

“”It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. 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.” [We should have smothered him with a pillow years before.]

“Germans value punctuality…” [Take their trains…] [After selecting Tim Walz as her running mate]: “”Honey,” I said. Have I made the right choice?” I hate being indecisive…” [But now I’m not so sure.]

“It was devastating to learn after the election that I lost some ground with voters under thirty, especially young men.” [So I gave Charlie Kirk a call.]

Ripostes

This is similar to Finish That Thought, but instead of adding material to different passages, a single passage is read and players compete to see who can come up with the most appropriate response.

“I’d stopped watching the Sunday-morning shows: no more endless rhetoric about the president’s capability” [Or lack thereof.] [A runner-up offered this riposte: That’s My Lane.]

“And I also knew, as he did, that I was the only person who would preserve his legacy. At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him-and all the good he had achieved-right under the bus.” [Like you’re doing now.]

“I knew the job; I knew I could do it. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do the work.” [For a change.]

“I might as well say that Pete Buttigieg was my first choice [for VP]…He and his husband, Chasten, are friends…He would have been an ideal partner – if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America…it was too big of a risk. And I think Pete also knew that – to our mutual sadness.” [Sadness is where and how the rubber of DEI flips and crashes in the cul-de-sac of intersectionality.]

“I’m not going to memorize lines and spout them. I have to understand the logic and building blocks of every argument so I can present it clearly and defend it persuasively.” [Non capisco.]

“That Sunday, I still believed our campaign of joy would triumph in two days.” [Thank you.]

You Don’t Say

In this game excerpts are written on a piece of paper. Players then have to guess whether the selections come from “107 Days” or elsewhere.

“No!” Amara waved her hands…she scrunched her small face into the best imitation she could muster of the urgent look I’d just given her – “come downstairs right now!” [  ] Kamala Harris  [  ] Elena Ceaușescu

“Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)”  [   ] Gavin Newsom   [   ] Lawrence Oates

“I could feel the intensity of emotion, and my only thought, when glancing down at a tear-streaked face or grasping a hand on the rope line: There is so much at stake. I cannot fail these people.” [   ] Kamala Harris [   ] Jesus

“I confess that sometimes I have a salty mouth. I keep it in check on most occasions.”  [   ] Kamala Harris  [    ] George S. Patton

“…I didn’t have enough time to show how much more I would do to help them…”   [    ] Kamala Harris   [   ] Caligula

“I had bought his gift via FaceTime with his favorite menswear store in San Francisco. It was a sports coat, black and gray. He looked great in it.  [   ] Kamala Harris  [   ] Peter Thiel

“She handed him a set of note cards. She’d numbered them one through five, for the nights we’d be apart …She instructed him to write a note on each one.”  [   ] Kamala Harris  [    ] Rochelle from the Dr. Phil Show

“When we go to the streets, as we will, we must not give them the spectacle they are craving.”   [   ] Kamala Harris  [   ] Lenin

Frenemies

Never mind K’s bile directed at Trump and Vance and Elon Musk, each of whom is repeatedly verballed. This game involves nominating the nastiest insinuation 107 Days contains concerning her so-called allies.

“These kinds of details – the set, the lighting, the chairs, the angle – were the kinds of details my advance person should have noticed.”

“We needed a counterforce to whatever might be brewing, and I knew that the campaign I’d inherited didn’t have the skill set or the resources for it.”

“I had a nagging concern that [Josh Shapiro] would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.”

“None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital…My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.”

“…I shouldered the blame for the porous border…No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.””

“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps.”

Kamala recounts that on 4 July 2024, at the White House, a besieged Jill Biden demanded support from Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. Doug assured Mrs. Biden of continued support and then: “…he unloaded. “They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them. Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people. And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?””

[Biden] “…rattled on about his own former debate performances. “I beat him the other time; I wasn’t feeling well in the last one.” He continued to insist that his debate performance hadn’t hurt him with the electorate. I was barely listening.”

Kamala constantly complains she didn’t have time to win. “Tim (Walz) and some of my team members later said that they were surprised to learn about my onetime musical prowess. It was another example of how there were so many more ways to connect with people, if I’d only had more time.” However, it seems more likely that she would have done better with less time. Tracking through her diary of the campaign, the impression was of a fairly leisurely schedule, a fair bit of the time. She was anointed and spared a bruising primary, received about $1b. in campaign funds and faced a divisive opponent that the administration of which she was a part tried to jail, bankrupt, demonise and disenfranchise. Yet she lost by 312 to 226 electoral college votes, and by the popular vote, although in her book tour she has repeatedly claimed that 2024 was the closest presidential race this century (in the book, she has it coming third, so we don’t know what metric she is using in either case).

It will be fascinating to see the Democrats bounce back, as major parties in liberal democracies tend to do eventually. Whether Harris is a part of that resurgence, time will tell, but she has burned a few bridges with this book, and we wonder whether she thinks another go in 2028 is worth the inevitable opprobrium.

[*P.K. O’Rourke, “Review of ‘Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life’ by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, (1987)” re-published in Give War a Chance, 1992, pp151-159.]