Revisiting what has been, still burdened by what never was.
Kamala Harris has no idea what she's doing. She demonstrated as much from the moment she entered the 2020 Democratic primary, throughout her tenure as vice president, and on numerous occasions during her 107-day campaign for president. Her postelection memoir, 107 Days, attempts to explain why Donald Trump bested her in a high-stakes contest to decide the future of American democracy and recount what she "saw, experienced, and learned" in the process.
Spoiler alert: Harris doesn't have a clue. She just knows that it wasn't her fault. There wasn't enough time, as the title implies. She was too busy solving the nation's problems as vice president to campaign effectively. Fox News was spreading misinformation. Her team dropped the ball, and so did the American people, who were too dumb to appreciate the historic success of her administration and the wisdom of her policy proposals. Republicans were too racist, obviously. "I did not have time, in 107 days, to undo ten years of Trump's demonization of immigrants," she writes, handwaving the legitimate outrage over the lenient Biden-Harris border policies that even former White House staffers have acknowledged were disastrous for Democrats.
The book is full of lines that cast serious doubt on Harris's competence and ability to grasp how American politics works outside the state of California. The word inflation rarely appears, except when Harris is praising the Inflation Reduction Act as "the most consequential climate bill ever enacted into law." She seems genuinely aggrieved that most voters were "focused on the cost of things today," rather than the projected future savings thanks to "generous rebates" for families who installed heat pumps and other energy-efficient appliances. She is astounded to learn that young people based their votes on "perceived economic interests," rather than on niche issues such as abortion, climate change, or hatred of Israel.
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