The ‘recklessness’ of Joe Biden, according to Kamala Harris

The Atlantic published the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s expensive memoir “107 Days” this morning, leading with a lickspittle editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg. According to Goldberg, the Harris we read in this book is:

“blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt – and throughout this newsworthy book – she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”

In this short excerpt we learn that Vice-President Harris repaired our supposedly broken relationship with France, mais oui, and also did a good job as “border czar.” She says so herself, and we have only her to thank. But the most newsworthy portion of the excerpt comes earlier, when she discusses Joe Biden’s unwillingness to drop out of the 2024 race.

“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. 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.”

“Recklessness.” “Ego.” The remaining 12 loyalists in Bidenworld are going to be mad. Harris adds:

“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 at 81, Joe got tired.”

Harris claims that she was more “loyal to my country” than she was to Joe Biden, but she held her tongue until the Party anointed her as successor and gave her free reign to completely botch her campaign against Trump. Anyone who read Fight, the excellent chronicle of the 2024 campaign that came out earlier this year, or even cursorily followed the narrative as it unfolded in real time, knows the contours of the story. Harris, handled an impossible task, managed to make a series of disastrous decisions, emboldened by her senior campaign staff imported from Barack Obama loyalists, who were both out of touch with reality and also didn’t like Harris much.

I don’t see any of that “bluntness” in this excerpt, which is also not slyly funny or occasionally profane. Unlike Fight, which was no Lost Illusions but still read like it had been written by actual humans with actual personalities, this excerpt of 107 Days reads very “as told to,” either to Harris’s extremely well-paid ghostwriter or to an AI chatbot, or to a ghostwriter who uses an AI chatbot. It may be unapologetic, but it’s also unapologetic sludge.

Harris, as the first female vice president, is an important historical figure, and she’s hardly the demon as painted by her opponents on the right. She’s also no great shakes. What we see in the memoir excerpt is what we saw of her in real life: marginal competence, extreme self-absorption, performative liberalism and laugh lines that fall dead to everyone but the most extreme paid loyalists. Let’s also keep in mind that it’s been less than a year since she’s lost, and even less time than that since she left office. This is a rehabilitation tour planned from the outset, and the whole thing feels fake, silly and manipulative.

Now we can sit back and wait for the recrimination cycle that may or may not come. There may be some ruffled feathers in Bidenworld. And Harris is, like it or not, going to be on our screens and in our feeds a lot in the next month or so. But there might also be less controversy than hoped for by people who love political gossip. Jeffrey Goldberg, invoking “my friend Kamala” just like Obama used to, may care about what’s in 107 Days, but the rest of the world has moved along.