Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s media tour for her new book “107 Days” has set off a firestorm within her party over her no-holds-barred depiction of her short presidential campaign.
Equal parts memoir and critique, Harris outlined her thinking around choosing her running mate — ruffling the feathers of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in the process – and took jabs at former President Biden.
The book has already elicited pushback from some members of her party and comes at a precarious time for Democrats, who are looking to reset after a crushing November election.
Here are five takeaways from Harris’s media book tour:
Democratic divisions are reopened
Harris’s book resurfaced tensions within her party as she spoke about her running mate selection process and her thoughts on Biden. In one excerpt, Harris panned the former president running for a second term.
“‘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,” Harris said in one excerpt, regarding Biden and the decision for him to run for a second term.
“The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision,” she continued.
During an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday, she critiqued herself when discussing how the 2024 cycle unfolded, saying at one point, “When I write this, it’s because I realize that I have and had a certain responsibility that I should have followed through on, which is — and so, when I talk about the recklessness, as much as anything, I’m talking about myself.”
Harris-Biden tensions on full display
One clear dynamic on display has been the simmering tensions between Harris and the former president. Some of her frustration has been directed at Biden’s decision to initially run again, while some of it has been directed at his age and his handling of certain issues.
In one excerpt, Harris praised Biden, saying that “on his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump at his best.”
But she also explicitly spoke about his age — something the president and the White House were sensitive about heading into the November election, as Biden and his allies argued he was mentally and physically fit to run for a second term.
“But at 81, Joe got tired,” Harris said. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
She also said that those close to the former president “should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.”
Harris jabs 2028 Dems
The former vice president ran through her reasoning for why she decided against choosing several Democrats as her running mate, in the process ruffling the feathers of a number of prominent figures considered to be 2028 prospects.
Harris expressed concern Shapiro wouldn’t take well to being second in command. And she suggested the country was not ready to elect a Black woman who was married to a Jewish man as president, while also electing a gay man as vice president, in a reference to Buttigieg.
“I mean, look, I haven’t read the former vice president’s book,” Shapiro said on sports commentator Stephen A. Smith’s SiriusXM show.
But he suggested that she’d “have to answer how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly,” referring to her handling of Biden’s decision to run again.
Harris said in her interview on MSNBC, when asked about her excerpt on Buttigieg, that it “wasn’t about any prejudice on my part.” She called the former Transportation secretary “a phenomenal, phenomenal public servant.”
“Maybe I was being too cautious,” she mused at one point, adding later, “Maybe I was. But that’s the decision I made.”
Still, the comments struck a nerve with Buttigieg.
“Well, I was surprised when I read that — I just believe in giving Americans more credit,” Buttigieg told Politico.
She also threw some shade at California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), saying he didn’t call her back while she was trying to reach him following Biden’s exit from the 2024 contest. Newsom told her he was on a hike.
“That exact same moment was working with my team to put out a statement to endorse her. I assume that’s in the book as well,” Newsom told reporters when asked about her contacting him last year. “That hours later, the endorsement came out.”
Harris rebukes Biden over Gaza response
The former vice president also rebuked Biden over his response to the ongoing war in Gaza. The issue emerged as perhaps the most contentious within the Democratic primary last year, with sizable portions of the voting electorate casting “uncommitted” votes or similar votes with a similar sentiment to protest the Biden administration’s response to the war in Gaza.
“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.”
The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee notably also took flak over how the party navigated the international conflict once Harris ran for president, particularly when organizers wouldn’t let a Palestinian speaker address the party’s convention.
Harris dodges on another White House bid
When Harris decided to a forgo a bid to run for California governor in 2026, many Democrats suspected she was readying herself for another presidential run in 2028.
But she dodged questions about the next presidential election while speaking to Maddow, saying, “That’s not my focus right now.”
The answer is sure to only fuel further speculation that she could be eyeing a comeback in the upcoming years.
