Kamala Harris was famously resistant to criticizing Joe Biden during her truncated run for the Oval Office in 2024, but the first excerpt from her upcoming book reveals a much more candid assessment of her former boss.
The Atlantic published a preview chapter from 107 Days, named for the amount of time Harris had to mount a campaign for what would’ve been a historical presidency. Of course, her bid was unsuccessful — and now, she’s reflecting on the ways she felt hamstrung by Biden and his team during her time as vice president. She also shares her take on Biden’s insistence that he had what it took to pursue another term, despite growing worries about his age and mental acuity.
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup [against Donald Trump]. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again,” Harris writes. “He was, by some measures, the most consistently underestimated man in Washington. He’d been right about his tactics for pushing his agenda through a resistant Congress. It was just possible he was right about this, too.”
Even as political commentators and voters alike sounded the alarm about Biden being “too old” to endure another four years in the most powerful job in the country, Harris continued to defend him. In the excerpt from 107 Days, she reiterates the reasons she was able to retain confidence in him at times: “Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best.”
But, Harris admits, it became increasingly obvious that Biden was no longer the scrappy politico he’d once been.
“At 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles,” she says. “I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
But Harris also writes that she felt she “was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out.” As Biden’s number two — and the most obvious heir to the Democratic nomination for the presidency, should he end his campaign — she worried that recommending he leave the race would come off as an “incredibly self-serving” show of “naked ambition” on her part.
Instead, Harris and the party at large framed this monumental choice as a personal one for the Biden family — and the former VP doesn’t mince words now in saying that was the wrong move.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. 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.”
Harris airs another grievance in the 107 Days preview: the way the former president’s team treated her during her time as vice president. She writes of feeling unsupported by the administration and unable to use her own political capital to change the narrative in Washington.
“[The Biden administration] had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible,” Harris writes.
One example she offers is her assignment “to attack the root causes of the misery that was driving people from their homes and villages in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador” — a role she says Republicans “mischaracterized” by referring to her as the country’s “border czar” during a time when illegal immigration was a particularly hot-button issue. Harris says the White House was resistant to sharing details of her successes in this space, leaving her feeling like she’d “shouldered the blame for the porous border.”
Harris says she often felt shoved aside, even though she believed it was important to spotlight her own successes as second-in-command, “given the concerns about [Biden’s] age.”
“When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging,” Harris writes. She adds: “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”
The release of 107 Days, which hits bookstores Sept. 23 (and can be preordered right here), comes shortly after Harris announced she won’t run for governor of California. Questions remain about whether she might make another bid for the presidency in 2028 — and it’s safe to assume Harris sees this book as an opportunity for a bit of a political rebrand for her, based on the assessment of The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
“I read [the book] last week, expecting lawyerly calibration and discretion,” Goldberg writes in his intro to the excerpt. “This careful Harris is present, but so too is another Harris: blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny…She no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”
In response, Harris’s writings have drawn sharp criticism among the former president’s team.
“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” a former Biden White House official told Axios. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.” The same source added: “[Biden was] not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign. Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”
