Kamala Harris’s book on the 2024 campaign, 107 Days, hit shelves on Tuesday — but the blame game began long before that.
The former vice president said on The View Tuesday that she and her former boss, Joe Biden, are still friends and hold a mutual respect for one another. In the press and on social media, however, the Democratic Party is trading vicious blows with itself.
Excerpts from Harris’s book drew a clear picture, which finally came into view this week. The vice president squarely blames Biden for her party’s defeat in 2024, including her own: she likens the former president, whose confused, whispery performance at a June debate sparked panic among Democrats, to a dead weight or an insurmountable mountain her campaign simply couldn’t overcome in a sprint to the finish line.
In another interview on Tuesday with ABC News, Harris seemed to take some blame herself while simultaneously taking a sharp swipe at Biden: “I do reflect on that and feel that it was a recklessness about not raising it with him.” She added that she regretted not making the call and advising her running mate to drop out sooner.
But in the book itself, Harris also abdicates responsibility here, explaining that it would have appeared “self-serving,” adding: “I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out.”
Here, the former vice president is addressing what is near-universally agreed would be the main question she’d face upon mounting a political comeback. The question of why others didn’t speak out or raise concerns privately in a more timely fashion about the concerning demeanor of Biden onstage at June’s debate is not just an anchor around Harris’s neck but also Pete Buttigieg’s, and anyone tied too closely to the White House or Biden campaign after 2024.
Whether Harris is open to that comeback is still her call. She declined a chance to run in California’s gubernatorial election earlier this year and told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday that she wasn’t focused on running for president in 2028, but didn’t rule the latter prospect out entirely.
On another topic, the war in Gaza, Harris similarly breaks with her ex-boss in the book. Writing of Biden’s response to the suffering of Palestinians that has now led to a record number of Democrats in her party calling for an arms embargo on Israel — and more than ever calling the destruction of Gaza a genocide — Harris says the former president’s response was insufficient.
“I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians,” Harris wrote. “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.”
While Harris’s explanation for deference to Biden on the issue of running for re-election certainly falls within political norms (if not, by her own admission, good judgment), on the issue of Gaza ,the former vice president is caught in a clear and awkward about-face.
The former vice president’s handling of the Israeli siege of Gaza remains the biggest sore spot for progressives after the 2024 election. Many argue that it was one of many chances Harris turned down to meaningfully distinguish herself from Biden as a candidate, and view her avoidance of it as a key reason she was unable to turn out Democratic-leaning voters in the same numbers Biden had four years earlier. At the 2024 Democratic convention, her campaign infuriated many by refusing to allow a Palestinian-American speaker onstage, even to make a speech in support of Harris’s bid.
And in Harris’s book, she reckons with the issue only as far as whether she can assign blame to angry and heartbroken college students and younger Americans who viewed the carnage in Gaza and what Harris called her former running mate’s “perceived blank check” penned to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as horrifying stains on U.S. foreign policy. She leaves it up to the reader to decide, but barely hides her contempt for the Uncommitted movement: “It felt reckless…Why weren’t they protesting at Trump rallies? I wondered.”
Her refusal to seriously consider the issue and the respective criticism she’s faced on it since November is the biggest reason why Harris’s effort to shift blame to her onetime running mate falls flat here. Harris’s argument was not accepted by the left, which did not take kindly to what many activists viewed as a dismissive attitude from her campaign during the election, or journalists, who quickly pointed out that the vice president repeatedly declined to break from Biden on the issue after becoming the candidate, even going as far to say there was nothing she’d have done differently had she been president for the prior three years.
And during the campaign, her comms team and Joe Biden’s both denied that there was even any private disagreements between the two on the issue — making the sudden existence of Harris’s concerns about Biden’s empathy sound awfully convenient to many progressives and centrists both.
Where Harris goes from here isn’t certain. But if it’s back into politics at the national level, Joe Biden’s former running mate will have many more questions to answer from critics about her time in office — and not just about what finally doomed his presidential bid, but what took down her own, too.
