In 107 Days, Kamala Harris Unleashes Criticism on Biden. Honestly, It's Relatable.
The book offers ample reminders of what people find irritating about Harris. But she also comes across as relatable and even, occasionally, amusing.
107 Days, by Kamala Harris, Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30
"Tariffs are a tax on everyday Americans," writes Kamala Harris in 107 Days, the former vice president's new book on her experiences from the time then-President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential election through the night she lost to now-President Donald Trump. On the same page, she refers to Ross Ulbricht—the man who spent years in prison for running a website—as a "fentanyl dealer."
It's a good example of the kind of whiplash you might get while reading this book.
From the get-go, 107 Days offers ample reminders of what people find irritating about Harris. The scenes she conjures feel down-to-earth—making pancakes and doing puzzles with her nieces when she first gets the dropping-out news from Biden—but also somehow stage-managed. (Phony.) She makes a point of mentioning how she would not stand up from a table until Biden did and twice calls herself a "stickler" for rules and for punctuality. (Hall monitor.) She glosses over, rather than reckons with, parts of her prosecutorial career that haven't aged well, portraying herself as a pure defender of women, children, and the working man. (Hypocrite; Cop.)
But there are also reminders of what people like about Harris. She uses spicy language. She seems idealistic but also pragmatic. She is capable of a deadpan sort of humor. And she doesn't hold back when it comes to her rocky relationship with the Bidens or her dismay about the way Joe Biden handled both his presidential race and hers.
A scene near the beginning features Harris watching Biden's infamously bad debate against Trump. After the event is over, one of her advisers hands her post-debate talking points that include the idea that Biden won. "Are you kidding me?" Harris writes.
I don't think I would have continued beyond the first few pages if it weren't for this. Throughout the book, there is a hilarious undercurrent of disappointment in, disbelief at, and sometimes barely concealed rage about Biden, with whom she describes her relationship as "complicated."
For instance, her husband, Doug Emhoff, complains that Biden gave her "shit jobs" for four years as vice president after Jill Biden allegedly pulled him aside on July 4, 2024, for a loyalty check. She describes the mantra of those around the Bidens during Joe's early days in the 2024 campaign: "'It's Joe and Jill's decision.' We all said that, like a mantra, as if we'd all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness." She details a scene when Biden put on a MAGA hat during a September 11 event:
And then I glanced across to the far side of the room, where Joe was sharing a joke with some guys in MAGA hats. One of them took his hat off and offered it to Joe.
Don't take it.
He took it.
Don't put it on.
He put it on.
Cameras clicked. Within hours, the picture was all over: Joe Biden in a MAGA hat, with the caption 'Biden endorses Trump over Harris.'
I've been a vociferous critic of Harris in the past, and I'm sure I will continue to be one in the future. This book is a constant litany of policies she enacted or wanted to enact that range from bad to disastrous. And even if we put policy aside, I can never like Harris for the simple reason that she started a dishonest prosecution of Backpage that would later form the basis for a federal prosecution that ultimately ended in a good man taking his own life.
But reading this book, I did—for the first time—find Harris to be relatable (and, occasionally, amusing). She comes across more like a real person than she did in her first book, The Truths We Hold, or than she generally has when in the spotlight.
Reading 107 Days, I got the same suspicion that I did reading some old newspaper pieces about Harris or, ever so occasionally, in clips of her on the campaign trail: that there is a person here who can be bitingly funny, endearingly dorky, a little weird, and actually fun to be around. It's a person unlike the Harris whom we usually see, and it makes me wonder if part of Harris' whole problem has been a mismatch between her personality and the persona she's chosen to project.
In any event, much of Harris' new book is downright boring: a play-by-play of her campaign stops, lists of people she met, some surface-level notes about what they talked about or how she felt. It absolutely did not need to be 300 pages long. To keep with the conceit of an entry for every day of her campaign, we get a lot of fluff about what diner she stopped at or labor union she spoke to or church she visited, plus a whole lot of puffery about fighting for truth and justice and the American people.
There is also at least one glaring inaccuracy beyond the Ulbricht business: She claims that 350 transgender people, including 15 kids, were murdered in America in 2024. In fact, the Human Rights Campaign is aware of 32 "transgender and gender-expansive people whose lives were…taken through violent means" in the U.S. that year, only one of them a minor. Harris may be citing a report from Trans Europe and Central Asia, which pinpointed 350 murders around the world.
Occasionally we get something more interesting—behind-the-scenes notes on some of the campaign's more memorable decisions, interviews, and dramas. There is the moment when Trump challenges the idea that she is black and she rejects her staff's decision to push back. ("Are you fucking kidding me?" she recalls herself saying. "Today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He'll say I'm not a woman and I'll need to show my vagina?")
There are her interviews with three potential V.P. picks, during which Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro seems to have ruined his chances by saying he would want to be in the room with her for every decision. ("A vice president is not a copresident. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership," she writes.) There is her disappointment with herself for answering a question about what she would have done differently from Biden by saying there wasn't anything that came to mind. ("Why. Didn't. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?" she writes, noting that a member of her campaign team told her bluntly afterward that "people hate Joe Biden" and reflecting why it took her so long to grasp that she really needed to reinforce the differences between them.) She mentions how her debate prep partner dressed up as Trump and stayed in character during the breaks. How on the debate stage she was going to introduce herself to Trump—who had made a big deal of not knowing how to pronounce her name—by saying "It's pronounced KA-mala," but decided at the last moment not to. ("It felt bitchy," she says.) She also describes how close she came to calling Trump "this motherfucker" on stage.
I know this apparent candor is calculated, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn here. All politician memoirs are political fictions, readable as a sort of meta-text: Why is this bit being included? What is this person trying to say about themselves? 107 Days seems desperate to convey that Harris is not Biden, was not responsible for Biden, and would have done things differently than Biden. In all of this, I believe her, though I also believe the differences would be a mixed bag of bad and good. Harris also seems eager to convey that she did all she could during the campaign and that, while she suffered from some bad personal and campaign choices, she was also constrained by the hand she was dealt, including the weirdness of running against someone like Trump. That seems fair enough.
But intended or not, there is another message that stands out, and it's that Harris is still really angry—about Biden and his people, about Trump and his lies, and about the hand we've all been dealt. Whether intended or not, I think that's perhaps the most relatable message of all.