107 Days

107 Days by Kamala Harris, 300 pages

On July 21st, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris got a call from her running mate, President Joe Biden.  He had decided, after weeks of pressure, to drop out of the campaign and back her as the Democratic nominee for the 2024 election.  It was up to Harris to step into the breach and save the Democrats from defeat by the deplorable Donald Trump.  She only had 107 days to do it, and 107 Days is her own day-by-day account of that momentous campaign and its immediate aftermath.

Of course, Harris failed, but the hidden comedy of 107 Days is that she still does not seem to have realized this.  The book is filled with stories about how her campaign succeeded and Trump's failed, most directly when discussing the Joe Rogan podcast, which she somehow manages to present as something that she was cheated out of and simultaneously something that hurt Trump.  Again and again, the former vice president is caught believing too many impossible things, that Biden was perfectly fit for a second term but should have quit the race sooner, that she was an inspiring success as vice president but unknown to the American people, that it was impossible to mount a successful campaign in 107 days but that on election night she believed there was no way she could lose.

Throughout, it is not entirely clear whether Harris is consciously trying to deceive or whether she is herself badly out of touch with reality, a distressing but by no means unusual trait in an American politician in the early 21st century.  Pointless agreements about combating climate change are touted as great foreign policy successes while wars rage around the globe.  The importance of job programs and affordable housing for American workers are touted as major priorities but legal and illegal immigration are treated as a minor concern.  She repeats Bernie Sanders' advice on the day Biden stepped aside not to concentrate on abortion as her defining issue, yet again and again that is what she does, secure in her complacency that no one who matters could possibly disagree with her.

This is the punchline of a very funny 300 page joke.  Harris claims to represent the future of democracy in the United States, but she repeatedly demonstrates that she neither understands nor particularly cares for the actual people of that country.  The comedy of her comeuppance is that much greater for not being hers alone, but shared by every institution that mocks the concerns of ordinary Americans because they do not conform to progressive ideological orthodoxy.