It’s fairly candid, but it will be an actual historian/journalist who writes a complete unvarnished account of the 2024 presidential campaign. This isn’t it.
She is bitter about the Biden administration. It’s full of “I love Joe” followed by “here’s something stupid he did. something stupid he said. How his staff stabbed me in the back.”
I thought it interesting that as she recounts the events of July 21 2024, when Biden announces he’s dropping out: not for a second does she entertain any doubts as to whether or not she wants to run for president. If she did, they didn’t get written into the book.
As she goes through the campaign day by day, she often pads the account with a verbatim excerpt from the speech she gave that day, using the ones that were particularly eloquent and uplifting.
There’s some good “inside baseball” stuff about the inner workings of a campaign, that I found really interesting. But if you were hoping to get a Steve Karnocki Big Board analysis of what happened on election day – why they underperformed so badly compared to the last minute polls – it’s not here. She watches the results; she’s worried; an aide says “we’re not going to make it” …. and that’s it.
Where she says that her campaign fell short, she says “we didn’t have time to get our message out” (see the book title). Seldom does she say that she had the wrong message.
Kamala was always handicapped by being put in the impossible position of having to 1) make herself appear distinct and different from unpopular Biden while 2) fending off criticism of “You were his VP, how could you not be associated with his policies.” A completely unrelated Democratic candidate would have been the better person to choose.
But yes, Biden also kneecapped her by giving her such a short amount of time that she had too little runway to use for takeoff. There is no excuse for this - Biden should have made it clear years earlier that he wouldn’t run again.
That, and also (she complains) that her role as VP wasn’t designed to maximize her exposure, and she was never given sufficient credit.
Speaking of veep: her first choice would have been Buttigieg…if she was a straight white male. Of the 3 finalists, Shapiro was over-qualified (ie, ambitious); Kelly was a professional military but a bit of an amateur as a politician. Walz was just right.
Walz disappears from the story after the selection and convention, which makes sense – they campaigned separately. She was disappointed in his debate performance vs Vance…she says that the Saturday Night Live skit depicting her reaction to the debate was uncannily accurate. I’ve never seen it; I’ll have to find a video of it online.
If she’d had any doubts to entertain, I’m guessing sh’d already entertained ‘em on the night of Biden’s debate with Trump, and the day after Biden’s debate with Trump, and the week after Biden’s debate with Trump…
To this day, I still think that if the election were held the weekend after her September debate with Trump – when “They’re eating the dogs!” was fresh and “They’re weird!” wasn’t yet completely played out --Harris would be President today.
I never have figured out what happened to Harris’ chances between late September and Election Day. It was like a balloon slowly deflating, and for no easy-to-point-out reason (at least, I missed it). By the time of the Vance-Walz debate, it seemed like Trump had drawn even again. And that VP debate didn’t seem to get much attention at all, and certainly didn’t move the needle in Harris’ favor (though that’s A TON to expect of a VP debate performance).
I think it’s the same effect as we saw with her in 2019. She had a pop or two of popularity and as the campaign went on her weaknesses were exposed. I’ve said that multiple times here.
In the book she addresses this indirectly—this is the point where Trump started running anti-trans ads around the clock.
She admits that they were partially effective but mostly just restates her opinion on LGBTQ rights. She never admits that perhaps her campaign should have been less that and more on the price of eggs.
At the beginning of Biden’s term, he delegated some stuff to her. Nothing ever came of it and, a few years later, Biden sneezed and resolved those self-same issues.
All we got from Kamala was some drama over her personal staff.
I feel the initial enthusiasm for Harris came almost all from the sense of relief the Democrats had about not having to deal with the issues around Biden’s age-related decline. It wasn’t about Harris. People basically knew nothing about her. Then as they got to know her, they found out that she wasn’t really all that charismatic, engaging, interesting, energetic, etc. She started at the top and then support declined as people saw her for who she was. She’s competent in her role, but she didn’t create that kind of energy that gets people excited about supporting her. I don’t know that there’s much more that she could have done because she doesn’t really seem like the kind of person that lights a fire under people. Probably the Democrats in general could have done more to create excitement about her and the Democratic platform in general. As it was, it seemed like they were running on a platform of “We’re not Trump” rather than “Here’s what we stand for and are passionate about”.
That’s really been my take on her for years. I feel that her natural ceiling in public office is as a prosecutor (so l’ll count state AG). A position where she doesn’t have to speak extemporaneously to an interviewer, is the one controlling the conversation with the other party forced to answer, and in generally either non-elective or low interest elective positions. It seemed that the people I heard who said they liked her in the Senate couldn’t really point to her doing anything other than when she got to the same sort of thing in a hearing.
I’ll put some blame on Harris. She is a bad politician and apparently never really understood her weaknesses. But I think it’s pretty clear that Biden made everything so much worse in how he behaved.
I looked up her record as Attorney General of California and it was difficult to see that she’d done much past organize some feel-good committees and, otherwise, let her organization prosecute crimes as usual.
I’d say that she’s a poor politician in the sense that she’s not particularly charismatic. But I’d probably put it that she’s a good politician in the sense that she’s good at not bucking the status quo and taking the reward for other people’s work. You could swap her out with a pet rock, and you’d have a hard time telling the difference.
I’d take a pet rock over Donald Trump, but it’s certainly not easy to build enthusiasm among the voters when those are your choices.
I’m surprised you would expect anything else. Of course she wanted to run for president! She had a history of running for president, which I understand is a thing people do when they want to be president. Why would she change her mind at any point? A former presidential candidate who was vice president and had the opportunity to run again – my default expectation would be that that person still wants to be president.
Sorry if I am misunderstanding your point. It just seems like one of those things I’d take completely for granted.
Yep. I feel like in retrospect, Biden should have started talking up Kamala in about 2023- maybe start giving her more responsibility and more exposure, and basically setting her up as the heir apparent. Then resigning about a year and a half prior to the election for health reasons, making her an incumbent.
Instead we got what felt to many like a cover up and/or bait and switch. I really do think had Biden not flamed out spectacularly in the debate and subsequently withdrawn, the election could have been different. I don’t think old Joe was so unpopular before that, really. But being made to look like a senile old coot on national TV, and worse, like everyone was trying to cover it up, just torpedoed the Democrats and made them look as untrustworthy as Trump.
I’ve never understood why 107 days wasn’t enough, and everybody thinks that if only she had more time, she would have won.
Sure, Americans are used to presidential campaigns that are like almost 2 years long, but it is not a good system. The primaries and then the actual campaign drag on and on…they get narrated like a football game, with each candidate " building momentum, and the hype about momentum becomes more important than the issues.
Harris skipped all that. She started the football game with a good spurt of optimism , but then somehow lost the momentum.If she had had extra time, (say, 207 days instead of 107), I dont think she would have won more votes..
Anyway, I knew with less than 2% of the returns in that she probably wasn’t going to win. Some people have told me, “So, what was she going to do?” Make it up as she goes along, just like all of them before?
I don’t think there’s ever really a situation where she wins. If Biden says by say June 2023 that he’s not running, we get a full primary. I don’t see her winning that primary. If he drops a week after that debate, perhaps there’s enough time for a short primary and again, don’t see her winning. The only reason I kept hearing as to why she had to be the candidate had something to do with campaign finance law and access to what Biden had on hand. And of course in the end she blew over a billion dollars to see the entire country move somewhat more to the right.
