Kamala Harris is trying to figure out what’s next
By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
(CNN) — On what otherwise would have been her 247th day in the White House, Kamala Harris was in New York to finish the first stops of the tour for her book about the 107 days of the campaign that didn’t get her there.
Outside the venue, a collection of bouncers boosted the on-loan California officers by rearranging bike racks, trash boxes, a flowerpot and a few stacks of collapsed beer boxes borrowed from the busboys at the restaurant next door. They were trying to set up some sort of protected path to her car.
Inside, they were serving a custom “Madam VP” cocktail: gin, cassis, cardamom, lemon and honey. Outside, a street vendor set up with leftover “She Can Do It!” T-shirts in a wide selection of sizes and colors.
Pundits have lashed out at Harris over the book. Top Democratic operatives grated over what they feel is a relitigating of the 2024 election that they didn’t need and certainly don’t need now. The most common word used by aides to several of the politicians knocked in “107 Days” was “bizarre.”
The handful of loyalists to former President Joe Biden who, even when they were all in the White House, ruefully marked the anniversary of the day she blew him up in a Democratic primary debate found things to rage over. A range of her own campaign alumni, including some name-checked in the pages, say privately they don’t agree with certain assessments and don’t get why she would write them.
President Donald Trump sarcastically promised to buy the book. Vice President JD Vance said she’d have lost by more votes if she’d had more days.
Then there’s Harris herself, with a book already in its fifth printing one day after the official release, playfully hip-checking a slimmed-down Doug Emhoff in the freight elevator leaving Essence magazine’s offices in Brooklyn, then doing it again with a smile to make sure her husband realized it wasn’t just a bump in the ride.
There are the crowds who have been showing up, the type of people who will pay upward of $100 for a ticket and still see her defeat more about what was wrong with America than what was wrong with her. Among the people waiting in her photo line was Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, bubbling that sales have been so good after years of nonfiction and political books struggling.
“It’s very nice to have something up there with a romantasy novel,” Daunt said after meeting her.
Falling into politician mode, Harris ticked through conversations with a retired police officer who approached her at the Philadelphia location of the same spice store chain she visited on a break from debate prep last year, a person on the train who told her he’s scared, the students from her alma mater now wondering if federal agents will descend on campus doing ID checks.
Asked if all this makes her, essentially, stuck as a walking embodiment of an alternate reality, she said, “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think this is about nostalgia,” Harris told CNN in one of several exclusive interviews last week. “I wrote the book with the intention that this would be about remembering where we were, only for the purposes of contextualizing this moment, and then thinking about where we have to go.”
Rejecting the ‘luxury’ of disappointment
The events end, the doors close. There are no national security calls coming in. No campaign for governor back in California that she thought she’d be able to weave this book tour into. Several people who know her tell CNN they don’t think her book will be a problem for a 2028 presidential run because that isn’t where she’s headed anyway.
She is about to turn 61 – not young, but not old enough for her political career to be cut off. She is left trying to figure out her own place. How to have a voice in what Democrats do next. Hoping Democrats care what she may have to say, especially as she’s stepped out of her Brentwood bubble to get a better sense of what’s happened since she lost.
For now, she’s trying to work through whatever her next stage will be. She’s trying to understand how little trust Americans seem to have for each other in this path for America she was trying to stop, and all the disruptions and political violence that have come with it.
“Threats are not new to me. I’ve had death threats my entire career. I used to put people in prison. I’ve taken on gang crime. I’m not naive and I try to be thoughtful, but I am not going to be afraid,” she told CNN. “I really love it when we can do whatever I can do to create a sense of people feeling community. I think that’s what we need right now, and I’m not going to take myself out of that.”
She shrugs off the Democrats snapping back at her book.
“We’ve got to get out of our own head. And we got to get out of our own bubble thinking we’re the only ones involved in the conversation,” Harris said. “Because actually, we’re just having a conversation with each other, and there’s a whole country out there that wants to be seen and wants to be heard in a way that is not transactional and in a way that is actually about accurately and truly listening.”
Harris calls her book “a journal,” but by that, she means the conceit of having each chapter describing a day of her campaign. She did not keep an actual journal, or even many notes, beyond those she partially reproduces toward the start of the book tracking the responses to her calls locking up support in the hours after Biden dropped out.
She struggled over what to say, particularly about Biden. Only after the initial draft was sent back by the publisher as too bland did she work in some of the lines that have been stirring up most of the agitation.
“I knew when I was writing it that it would invite attacks or criticism, which I don’t want, but that versus candor – for the sake of hopefully inviting difficult, though they may be honest, conversations,” she said. “That’s the choice I made.”
She talked to Biden about writing that he showed his age and that he shouldn’t have been left to decide on seeking re-election, suggesting that she was guilty of “recklessness” for not pushing him to reconsider. She says their relationship is in fine shape.
On stage in New York, she said there were a number of what she called “f**k it, Dougie” moments when she told her husband that she needed to take a bigger chance and speak out. Asked by CNN if any of those moments had come after seeing something that made her want to stop Biden from running again, all she would say was, “Marital privilege.”
Staff sent copies around to Tim Walz, whom she says she never meant to insult by writing that Pete Buttigieg was her first choice for vice president. They also talked before the book was released.
“There are things that actually have surprised me about how people have interpreted some parts of the book. That was never intended. I didn’t even think that anyone would interpret that part as Tim Walz was second choice,” Harris said. “If I had, maybe I would have said, ‘It doesn’t mean that Tim is second choice.’ That was not on my mind at all, not on my mind at all.”
People close to Walz are mad but even though the excerpts landed right as he was launching his campaign for a third term as Minnesota governor, Walz has not gotten too hung up on what she wrote, according to a person who knows him.
The book does occasionally have flashes of self-criticism, if not deep self-reflection.
Even at its most revealing, “107 Days” often gives only a mostly accurate account of a portion of the story. The parts about Biden or his aides undercutting her tend to leave out her own struggles.
The parts about not picking Buttigieg because she worried that the country wouldn’t be ready for a gay man on the ticket with a Black and South Asian woman elide how she was the one who decided not to try. They seem to imply Buttigieg agreed with this assessment at the time. But the two didn’t have that conversation.
Though sometimes her laughs are forced, one of Harris’ skills is inflecting lines she’s said dozens of times to make the emotions sound mostly fresh. Now she’s worked passages from the book, often verbatim, into her repertoire.
Getting Harris to speak about her actual emotions, even about a loss she says brought grief only comparable to the night her mother died, remains tough. Though she says these days she is feeling freer, she also insists she’s more focused on the pain and frustration of seeing what comes from having a “buffoon” in charge, of seeing the country brought lower in the eyes of Americans and the whole world.
“We almost don’t have language for all of this because the word ‘erosion’ so minimizes what actually is happening. ‘Destruction’ is probably the closest. And understand that when we’re talking about destruction, it goes hand in hand with profound harm,” she said. “That’s where my head is.”
“I don’t have the luxury, frankly, of being too steeped in the disappointment.”
She returned to Washington for the first time since Trump’s inauguration
The person who’d have become the first woman to be president if roughly 230,000 votes across three states went the other way arrived back in Washington, DC, two days after kicking off her tour for the first time since Trump’s inauguration. She rode a train to Union Station and stayed in the downtown hotel where top supporters had gathered for their pre-Election Night VIP reception last year.
The next day, she took what her remaining hodgepodge of staff refers to with scare quotes as a “motorcade” – three rented SUVs with makeshift flashing lights stuck on the dashboards – over to Howard University, arriving at the edge of the campus quadrangle known as “The Yard.” Harris had planned to deliver her victory speech at her alma mater and instead returned the next afternoon to try to reassure her supporters that all hope was not lost.
Hundreds of cheering students mobbed her, some running out of buildings still wearing their lab coats. She signed a book for a sophomore from her hometown with, “Remember to dream with ambition and lead with conviction. Oakland knows how to do it.”
Harris used to tell advisers begging her to loosen up in public that she couldn’t without causing problems for herself as a woman of color. On Friday, she expressed her outrage at former FBI Director James Comey’s indictment when asked by CNN with an adamant, “Are you f**king kidding me?”
Hours later, she finished little chats with old colleagues on the 45-minute line who waited excitedly to take photos with her backstage at the Congressional Black Caucus dinner. “I’m coming to you,” she told Eleanor Holmes Norton, the 88-year-old Washington, DC, congressional delegate facing Bidenesque pressure to retire, as Norton slowly walked to her. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar gave her a double-cheek kiss.
“Stay strong, Bobby Scott,” Harris told the Virginia congressman as he shook her hand again before leaving. “Stay strong.”
She followed up with a short, sharp speech attacking congressional Republicans who “bend the knee and fail to uphold their constitutional duty” against an “unchecked, incompetent, unhinged president” with a “fragile ego” who is lining his own pockets while raising costs on others.
What can come off as typical platitudes, like “Never limit yourself by others’ limited ability to see what you can do,” hit hard like inspiration to those who remain attached. “I’m in church,” Essence chief content officer Michelle Ghee told Harris in response to that one, prompting another woman in the crowd to say, “Amen.”
Rhode Island Rep. Gabe Amo said afterward there was, “a collective sadness in the room” during the speech.
“Sadness,” Amo said, “for our country, given all of the chaos and destruction of the Trump presidency, and the feeling of loss for what nearly all in the room worked for — what could’ve been in a Harris presidency.”
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