Harris’s 107 Days and the Missing Reckoning: Gaza
Early coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir, 107 Days, has been unfair. Yet Harris still won't adequately deal with the Biden administration's complicity in the Gaza genocide, or her own role.
Much of the early media coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign-trail memoir, 107 Days, was essentially unfair. Political commentators and media outlets portrayed her book as divisive, splitting the Democratic camp at a time when unity against Trump 2.0 was the top priority. USA Today reported that 107 Days was filled with “score-settling.” Politico claimed Harris’s book constituted an “ambush of fellow Democrats” because—shockingly!—Harris “used her new memoir to speak her mind”; four days later, the outlet wrote, Harris was desperately trying to “unburn the bridges.” The Hill adopted a similar line, but outsourced the task of giving voice to it to Democratic strategists said to be “frustrated” with Harris over a book intent on “picking fights and causing divisions at the worst possible time for the party.”
So what were these horribly divisive, bridge-burning, mind-speaking truths?
Harris writes that California governor Gavin Newsom never returned her call after inquiries were made about his availability as VP: “Hiking. Will call back.” Harris relays her own laconic parenthetical remark: “He never did.”
Harris notes her concerns about Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s ability to “settle for a role as number two”—Shapiro, too, had been tapped as a potential VP candidate—“and that it would wear on our partnership.”
Harris criticizes Biden’s inner circle—not Biden himself—for failing to be as maximally supportive of her as she believed they could have been: “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”
Harris doesn’t mince words about Biden’s infamous debate performance though claims she had no foreknowledge of his condition: “I had never, in three and a half years at the White House, in the Oval Office or the Situation Room, witnessed anything remotely like the level of confusion, incoherence, and debility we saw on the debate stage.”
Harris criticizes Tim Walz’s first on-stage appearance with her, when Walz clasped Harris’s hand in an “enthusiastic victory gesture,” but forgot to account for their height difference: “It felt like I was dangling from a jungle gym while wearing a suit.”
Harris laments Walz’s vice-presidential debate with J.D. Vance, when Walz seemed taken in by Vance’s faux-folksy demeanor: “When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling … I told the television screen: ‘You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.’”
But none of these observations are illegitimate; in fact, all of them seem like perfectly sensible things to write about in a campaign postmortem. They’re Harris’s truth, as she sees it, about how the campaign went—and they are not even particularly damning truths. Media portrayals of Harris as a “disloyal divider” seem driven more by the kinds of discrimination faced by women, and Black women in particular, in positions of power.
Harris herself would probably be the first to recognize it. “As the first woman, or Black woman, in every office I have run for, except the Senate, where I was the second,” she writes at one point, “racism and sexism have always been present.”
The Tragedy of 107 Days
107 Days is an oddly riveting book despite the fact that we all know how it ends. The story of how we get there is well-paced. Even if the day-by-day diary structure does grow a bit stale by the end, suspense derives from observing a tragic arc unfold: a heroic protagonist filled with reasonable hope and a surprisingly theological righteousness—progressive pastors and soulful prayer abound here—is defeated by a malignant foe, Trump; his victory sparks the unmaking of the liberal order and the rise of an aggressively authoritarian nationalism. 107 Days is high-stakes tragedy.
And there is much to commend its protagonist in this book. Harris shows real stamina, endurance, and a fine-tuned sense of humor. She appears a savvy political operator, a kind of political anthropologist of Washington, D.C. (“I know how this town works”), where information is a prime commodity: “What you know and what you’re prepared to trade are the keys to power.” Devastating, too, and pointedly accurate, are Harris’s portrayals of the many ways in which Trump remains the most temperamentally unfit person ever to seek the U.S. presidency—from his refusal to even look at Harris during their televised debate, to pretending not to know how to pronounce her name (“Ka-mar-la, sometimes referred to as Kar-ma-la, you know, she’s got about nine different ways of pronouncing the name,” he claims, baselessly). And much more.
Harris is deeply critical, too, of Elon Musk’s role in the election. She notes that X became a powerful MAGA propaganda vehicle under Musk’s ownership, becoming his “personal megaphone for boosting Trump and denigrating me.” Unsurprisingly, Joe Rogan also comes off as deeply unreasonable, inventing excuses not to platform Harris on his podcast. Harris understands well the complex web of powerful media and tech players that helped propel Trump back into the White House.
Harris comes across as a politician without illusions with a canny knack for dissecting realities. And if her prosecutorial background brought, by her own admission, an exaggerated care for preparation and factuality (“I have been conditioned by my career to weigh my every word”)—probably not an advantage when facing someone as slippery as Trump—Harris’s earnestness feels refreshing.
Gaza, a Missing Reckoning
But what hasn’t Harris learned from the failure of those 107 fateful days? In a word: Gaza. Israel’s genocide was perpetrated with weapons and political cover supplied in large part by the Biden administration. But for such a defining, gruesome issue, Harris shows a remarkable lack of introspection or awareness, completely out of character with her otherwise shrewd political persona.
Harris acknowledges that Biden’s popularity tanked not just over his “age issue,” as she delicately phrases it, but his “perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.” But this wasn’t just a ”perceived” blank check: it was very much a real permission and facilitation. The very same White House administration that Harris was a part of offered the military, fiscal, and symbolic means for Netanyahu’s forces to kill tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Harris does criticize Biden for his Gaza policy and claims she “pleaded with Joe” to “extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians. But he couldn’t do it: while he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”
But then why, when asked what she would have done differently from Biden did she offer the infamous reply that “there is not a thing that comes to mind”? Even with the benefit of hindsight, Harris seems puzzled by her own remark. She berates herself, in stilted prose (“Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?”), but also claims she had “no idea” that she’d “just pulled the pin on a hand grenade” when she failed to distance herself from Biden during her appearance on the TV show The View, a mere month before the election.
Instead, when Harris recounts witnessing pro-Palestinian protesters at one of her rallies, her analysis seems oddly disconnected from how political motivations work: “I wished they would understand that sitting out the election or voting for a third candidate would elect Trump and kill any effort for a just peace, any hope for a two-state solution.” But that’s just not how strongly motivated, single-issue voters operate. Thousands of voters cared deeply about Gaza and wanted their preferred candidate to do the same.
On the whole, one gets the sense that Harris still hasn’t dealt adequately with Gaza. The Democrats lost Michigan by more than 80,000 votes. Harris hardly recognizes that a near-total identification with Biden’s Gaza policy in the eyes of many voters cost the Democratic Party dearly—not just among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, but among leftist voters in general, especially young progressives. These groups were demobilized by Democratic complicity—not perceived complicity, but real, tangible, bloody complicity—in the attempted destruction of a people.
This isn’t just empty speculation. It’s supported by hard polling data. As an Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) report based on YouGov data noted earlier this year, nearly 30 percent of people who reported voting for Biden in 2020 but didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 said that “’ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ was the top issue affecting their vote choice.” Gaza loomed much larger in the minds of many American voters than the Democratic establishment was willing to recognize or act upon. Even after Biden passed the torch to Harris, there was no substantive course correction on Gaza, no meaningful “daylight” between them—despite a few well-timed remarks about the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population. It’s a key reason why Donald Trump now occupies the White House for the second time.
Defending Unabashed Progressivism
Less than a month before the election, Harris recounts a rehearsed debating line: “If I’m president I would appoint a Republican to my cabinet.” The infamous Liz Cheney maneuver was an attempt to curry favor with moderate Republicans, especially suburban women dismayed or repulsed by Trump. But centrist Democrats surely underestimated the vote-depressing effects of this rightward shuffle on their progressive constituencies (recall that nearly 90 million people didn’t vote—by far the largest party). What Democratic strategist had the bright idea of bringing onto the campaign Liz Cheney, whose father, Dick Cheney, was one of the principal architects of the Iraq War, in the midst of another violent Middle Eastern bloodletting from which the Harris campaign hadn’t sufficiently distanced itself? It was poor political craftsmanship, but also a failure of nerve—a lack of confidence that principled progressivism could win on its own terms.
The campaign’s waning resolve was also evident in Harris’s decision to select Walz for vice-presidential running mate over Pete Buttigieg, despite Harris’s preference for the latter. Heartbreakingly, Harris writes that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America. … Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.” In hindsight, this seems like a mistake. Giving in to bigots and reactionaries only whets their appetite for further concessions. Liberals must defend an unabashed progressivism. Buttigieg is no radical, but his candidacy would have sent a message.
107 Days is light on policy but does suggest Harris lacked the economic-populist instincts—beyond the rhetoric and policy proposals—that would have stood the best chance of defeating Trump’s right-wing nationalist populism. Harris never managed to represent herself as a bona fide economic populist, despite a number of policy proposals moving in that direction.
Most tragedies and disasters are overdetermined: more factors are available than are needed to account for the final outcome. The 2024 U.S. presidential election is the most momentous election in recent memory. We need to study and scrutinize it. 107 Days is an important source in that effort. A critical reading suggests that Harris lost because of inaction on Gaza, a failure of resolve, and a diluted economic vision, at a time when voters demanded bigger, bolder action. Combine this with the titular short run (a product of Biden’s pride), as well as the forces stacked up on the other side, including the communicative power of the world’s wealthiest tech oligarch, and Trump 2.0 begins to look like an inevitability.
The overarching political lesson I draw from 107 Days is that the center alone cannot hold: it shouldn’t be steering the ship or calling the shots on its own. Rolling back authoritarian populism, national conservatism, fascism, or whatever you want to call it—not just in the United States but around the world—will take broad center-left coalitions. But the stress must be placed on the left, not the center. More Mamdani, less Harris, if you will.