WASHINGTON (AP) — When it was all over, Kamala Harris couldn’t consider it.
“I could barely breathe,” she writes in her new ebook about studying she had misplaced the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump.
Certainly one of her aides peeled “Madame President” off celebratory cupcakes earlier than serving them to crushed staffers. Harris saved asking, “My God, my God, what will happen to our country?”
The subsequent morning was no simpler. “I was ashamed to realize I was in the denial and bargaining stages of grief, a very long way from acceptance,” she wrote.
It’s one among a number of uncooked admissions in Harris’ ebook, “107 Days,” that’s scheduled for launch Tuesday. The title refers back to the size of the hyperspeed marketing campaign that the previous vice chairman launched in opposition to Trump after Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Though Harris earned a popularity as guarded and circumspect, the ebook has the tone of somebody who’s completed biting her tongue. She concedes errors, reveals frustrations and particulars a few of the stranger moments from her race.
The ebook isn’t a winding memoir or a political treatise, and Harris doesn’t disclose any future plans. As a substitute, it reads like a ticking time bomb, with every chapter counting right down to Election Day.
Right here’s some memorable moments.
‘Joe got tired’
Harris insists within the ebook that she had no issues about Biden’s means to function president. “If I believed that, I would have said so.”
“But at eighty-one, Joe got tired,” Harris wrote. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
Harris wrote that Biden’s interior circle “should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Nevertheless, “it seemed that the worse things got, the more they pushed him.”
The tenuous scenario unraveled when Biden and Trump confronted off with one another. “As soon as he walked onto the debate stage in Atlanta, I could see he wasn’t right,” Harris wrote.
Biden’s workforce gave the impression to be in denial. Afterward, they gave Harris speaking factors that mentioned “JOE BIDEN WON.”
Biden was a supply of frustration
Harris wrote warmly of her partnership with Biden, however there have been frosty moments too. As Biden confronted calls to drop out of the race, he invited Harris to hitch him for a Fourth of July celebration on the White Home.
First woman Jill Biden pulled Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff apart. “What’s going on?” she requested. “Are you supporting us?”
Later, in personal, Emhoff erupted in anger. “They have to ask if we’re loyal?”
One other troublesome episode got here after Harris had changed Biden on the high of the ticket and was getting ready for her personal debate with Trump.
Shortly earlier than she took the stage, Biden referred to as to say he heard from his brother that Harris had been badmouthing him, upsetting some energy brokers in Philadelphia. Then he rambled about his personal debate performances whereas Harris was “barely listening.”
“I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself,” she wrote.
Hindsight is 20/20
Harris admits some errors of her personal, significantly a dangerous look on “The View” discuss present. When one of many hosts requested what she would have completed in another way than Biden through the earlier 4 years, Harris blanked on the speaking factors she had ready and easily mentioned, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
“I had no idea I’d just pulled the pin on a hand grenade,” Harris writes.
Across the studio, “my staff were besides themselves” about how she had simply given a “gift to the Trump campaign.”
Harris wrote that she didn’t need to criticize Biden or litigate any of the areas the place they disagreed. However she additionally didn’t perceive how a lot her affiliation with the president was holding again her candidacy.
David Plouffe, a senior adviser, advised Harris bluntly that “people hate Joe Biden.”
The VP’s seek for a VP
There’s loads of grist within the ebook that might make the subsequent Democratic conference just a little extra awkward.
Harris wrote that Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary and a former mayor from Indiana, was her first option to be her operating mate. He’s additionally homosexual, and Harris thought it was “too big of a risk” to select him whereas already asking voters to just accept a Black girl as president.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was one other risk. However Harris “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 ended up going with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, however his debate efficiency in opposition to JD Vance left her yelling on the tv display screen. “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate,” she mentioned.
There’s just one reference to California Gov. Gavin Newsom within the ebook.
When Harris reached out to him after Biden ended his reelection marketing campaign, he texted, “Hiking. Will call back,” however he by no means did.
Taking on the marketing campaign
Harris’ brother-in-law is Tony West, a former high Justice Division official and member of her interior circle of political advisers. Whereas Harris was serving as vice chairman, West put collectively what was often called the “Red File,” a set of plans in case one thing occurred to Biden.
West argued that it will be silly to not put together. Harris writes that she “didn’t want to dwell on such an eventuality” and “I left it in his hands.”
He saved refreshing the doc as folks pressured Biden to drop out, which got here in helpful when Biden lastly pulled the plug on his reelection marketing campaign.
Harris writes that Biden was planning to attend a day earlier than endorsing her as his successor, an concept that horrified her.
“If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now,” she recalled telling him. Harris prevailed, and the endorsement occurred shortly after Biden introduced that he was completed.
Issues received bizarre generally
Campaigns will be hallucinatory affairs, and this one was filled with weird moments.
Harris writes that she warmed up for her conference speech with knowledgeable voice coach who “wanted me to stand there and emit animal noises.” Just a little hesitant, Harris received her complete workforce to make “hums, grunts and trills” along with her.
Harris additionally writes about speaking with Trump after a second assassination try in opposition to him. Regardless of tearing into her on the marketing campaign path, Trump proceeded to flatter his opponent.
“How do I say bad things about you now?” he mentioned. “I’m going to tone it down. I will. You’re going to see.” Then Trump mentioned that his daughter Ivanka “is your big fan.”
When the decision was over, Harris was left marveling at Trump’s means to activate the appeal. “He’s a con man,” she thought. “He’s really good at it.”
