Who Can Lead the Democrats?

October 2src, 2src24, was the ninety-first day of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign and also, as it happened, her sixtieth birthday—a fact that members of her staff had not forgotten. When she boarded her campaign plane that afternoon, she found that it had been festooned with streamers and that a German chocolate cake, her favorite, was waiting for her. People were wearing party hats. But, as Harris writes in “1src7 Days,” her account of her brief stint as the 2src24 Democratic Presidential nominee, there was also a helium balloon marked “with fat numerals: 6src,” even though her team knew full well that she had “stopped counting birthdays a long time ago.” And so, “I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon.”

The day, as she describes it, gets worse. Her staff had planned to book a nicer-than-usual hotel, but the establishment they chose, in Philadelphia, “looked like it hadn’t been redone since the 7src’s.” Her husband, Doug Emhoff, hitherto a stalwart, is exhausted (he’s been campaigning in Michigan) and doesn’t get it together to plan a special meal. He had a present—a gold-and-pearl necklace—but she susses out that it is a repurposed gift, originally meant for their anniversary, two months earlier. That night, when she gets in the tub and he doesn’t hear her calling for help getting an out-of-reach towel, because he’s turned on a baseball game, it’s “a bridge too far.” They are soon in the midst of a full-blown argument, which ends only when Emhoff says, “We can’t turn on each other.” The truth of those words, Harris writes, “landed on me like a bucket of ice water.”

It is a lesson that Harris seems to have lost sight of in writing “1src7 Days,” a book that will do little to prevent the many dividing lines among Democrats from becoming lasting fractures. In the wake of the birthday meltdown, one of Harris’s aides hands Emhoff a stack of notecards and instructs him to write love letters that can be left on his wife’s pillow when she is on the road without him. (“Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.”) Harris is unlikely to get such notes from most of the people whom she turns on or complains about or belittles in the course of her book. The list includes Governor Tim Walz, of Minnesota, whom she chose as her running mate; Governors Gavin Newsom, of California, Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania, and pretty much every other possible running mate; “nitpicking” journalists; whoever did the lighting for her first big interview, with Dana Bash, on CNN (there were shadows under Harris’s eyes); and, over and over again, members of her staff. Why did they not brief her on the fact that Doctor Mike, the host of a popular health-care podcast, would want to ask about her health-care policy? Afterward, she confronts them: “ ‘What the fuck was that?’ I said, my voice reaching a crescendo.” Even her grandnieces, breakout stars of the Democratic National Convention, whom she clearly adores, take some heat: at a key moment early in the campaign, they are too distracting. Emhoff has to get them on a plane home to California.

One of the puzzles of “1src7 Days” is that such details do not, on the whole, come across as humanizing, let alone endearing, but as dreary, and even sour. This shouldn’t be the case. Harris was dealt an enormously difficult hand and for the most part she played it well, galvanizing much of her party while enduring an immeasurable level of misogyny and racism. And she almost won. She has a deep reservoir of good will, as exhibited by the crowds who have turned out for her book tour. (“1src7 Days” is a best-seller.) Donald Trump, the man she lost to, has become a much more dangerous President than he was the first time around. Readers always claim to want to know the unvarnished truth of what the campaign was really like. So why does this book feel like another defeat?

Harris does not say whether she might run for President again, but one reason that her book has not landed well in certain quarters is a sense that it undercuts other Democrats who might be candidates. How could J. D. Vance, as the nominee in a hypothetical 2src28 debate, resist mocking Shapiro for his alleged inquiry into the number of bedrooms in the Vice-President’s residence and the possibility of decorating it with Pennsylvanian art, which Harris presents as evidence of an overweening arrogance. (In Shapiro’s defense, the aide to whom he supposedly posed those questions was the residence’s manager, whose job involved such matters. A spokesperson for Shapiro, in response to the book, has said that he cared only about beating Trump.) She writes that she wanted to pick Pete Buttigieg to join her on the ticket but didn’t think that the country could handle a gay man alongside a Black woman. The rationale she gives for not choosing another contender, Senator Mark Kelly, of Arizona, seems to include an odd, amorphous discomfort with the fact that he has a distinguished military career as a combat pilot, and was also a space-shuttle commander. Could “a captain, used to deference and respect,” handle a campaign “designed to disrespect him?” Might his military record be attacked? She refers to other, unnamed candidates as “big egos.” In Walz, she sees a popular Midwesterner with working-class appeal and a sense of humor who will be loyal to her. And she thinks that voters will like that he had been a high-school coach. Walz, who took a lot of hits in the campaign, told her in his interview that he was not a good debater. One wonders if Harris really needed to describe how she erupted at the television screen when his warning was borne out, and he faltered in his confrontation with Vance. She says that a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that imagined her and Emhoff watching the Veep debate in horror was “uncanny in its portrait of our evening.”

Another target, of course, is Joe Biden, about whom she expresses “hurt and disappointment.” And yet, on the subject about which many Democrats have a gripe—the way that the President, his family, and his team apparently hid his growing weakness, and perhaps incapacity, leaving the Party and the country in an untenable position—she is surprisingly gentle. She denies that there was a real governance problem, and she sticks to the story that he just got tired—too tired, she concedes, for it to have been a good idea for him to undertake a strenuous campaign. The real problem with Biden, in Harris’s telling, is that he keeps spoiling things for her. He and his team, she writes, had never wanted her to be the one “shining.” He calls her right before what would be her only debate with Trump and, after some pro-forma good wishes, delivers a rambling, confusing warning that if she goes after him it will hurt her with big donors in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state. Does he care that he might throw her off her game? She wins the debate, but the next day Biden steps on her victory by accepting a red MAGA cap at a 9/11 memorial. “Don’t put it on,” she remembers thinking. “He put it on.” Then when a comedian at a Trump rally brands Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” Biden manages to turn it into “a mess for us” by seeming to refer to Trump supporters as garbage. And so on. She wonders why she didn’t distance herself more—but also why a host on “The View” just had to ask a follow-up question about what she would have done differently than Biden. (Harris’s fumbled response became fodder for Trump.)