Well yeah, but didn’t just have 107 days. You had four years. Fantastic as vice president of the United States. And to say now that I mean, it actually has concepts of a plan. I need to come up with our blueprint. Only Trump can get away with concepts of a plan. So what we’re going to talk about – Kamala Harris has a new memoir out. “107 Days” came out this week. Lydia and Carlos have given it a thoughtful read. Carlos basically gives everything a thoughtful read, and I’ve combed through all the juicy bits. So we’re going to break it down and talk through the implications for the Democratic Party, especially going forward. All right. So let’s get right into it. What I want first, your first impressions. I need a one word reaction on what you two thought of the book. One word. One word. One word. Give it to me, Carlos. Why must we be so reductionist? One word. I wrote 2000 words and they told me to pick one. I just would like you to pick one of those 2000 words, and we’ll start from there. Then one word, I think, for the O.K, we will pick many. O.K I’ll just come right out and say it. This is what I wrote about. I will say the word is excuse, right. This is not just an explanation for why Harris thinks she lost. I think it’s the excuse that she gives. And the excuses are right in the title: “107 Days.” Throughout the book she keeps saying, “if I had more time, I could have better sold my economic vision. I could afford a stronger tie to voters. I could have made clear I was offered a superior alternative to Trump.” But basically 107 days is her excuse for why she lost the election. O.K, Lydia, it’s pretty harsh. Yeah, I would say lawyerly. This is a famously harsher, though famously, Kamala Harris is a lawyer. I don’t know if you’ve heard I hear she’s a prosecutor, a prosecutor. And when you hear – when you think of lawyers and works of literary works or movies or whatever. You think about courtroom scenes, you think about closing arguments. And this, to me, felt lawyerly in the sense that it felt like a legal brief, almost. And I mean that in the sense that it was not a document for a jury of American citizens aimed at persuasion, but a kind of I don’t almost insider account of her argument for herself. So I guess I’m saying something quite similar to what Carlos is saying. It’s an excuse, just gentler, but it has this quality of a kind of legal brief, and that to me feels like of a piece with the whole problem with her campaign, which is who ultimately was this for. And it often felt like she was performing for a political class of elites rather than actually trying to win over the American people. So lawyerly. That’s my word. Yeah my word. And it’s a little bit harsh, but I got on the thesaurus.com and looked up like, is there an alternative that’s less harsh. And there’s just not. It’s just a little whiny, which is along the lines of defense or defensive. So maybe defensive, I guess. But that’s like stepping on Carlos’s line here. But it was just like, well, I only had 107 days and all these people didn’t trust me. And the Biden White House and these people weren’t respectful. And how am I supposed to operate with this going on. I mean, I get it. She did Yeoman’s labor in the time she was given and she was in a bad position. But my big question coming out of this is what you have alluded to Lydia, why, what is the point of this book? Carlos, as far as her excuses for what happened, she does point out the very real, I guess, challenges that she was up against, either from the administration or from outside. I mean, do you think that these excuses are fair or accurate? I mean, is, does she have a justifiable case here to whine about. When I say excuse like I should emphasize, I’m not like reading tea leaves like she very overtly says that this is why she feels that she lost like at the very end of the book, her second to last in the second to last page of the book, she says 107 days were not, in the end, long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency. And so that made me try to go through a thought experiment. So I see what you guys think of this. What if she had more time. What if she and the Democrats, in fact, had a lot more time. What if right after the midterm election, Biden had said, look, I said I’d be a transitional figure. I’m getting older, I’m slowing down. So I will be I’m going to hand this off. We have a deep bench in the party. Let’s have a process to pick the next nominee in that kind of scenario, do you think Kamala Harris would have necessarily emerged as the Victor. The counterfactuals are hard, but I don’t think it would be preordained. There are ways in which the short time frame actually helped her rather than hindered her. She says it herself. She said that when Biden drops out and people were asking her, what should the process be like to pick a new nominee. She just shut it down entirely, she said. If they thought I was down with the mini primary or some other half baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them how much more time would have taken to pull that off. So it feels a bit rich to complain about the short time frame that that’s not that kept you from winning and at the same time rely on the short time frame to secure the nomination in the first place. See, I looked at that as two different issues, though, which is that one. If there had been a process which folks like Nancy Pelosi were pushing for, Kamala might not have wound up the nominee, but whoever was given 107 days could have made a similar argument if they were so inclined. So she’s trying to have her cake and eat it, too. Yes but I mean, they are kind of separate arguments. Maybe but I think that probably the most devastating proof that time wasn’t the issue is that she actually got a huge boost. Polling fundraising. All of that right at the beginning. And I went out on the campaign trail, but it wasn’t actually the campaign trail yet because she hadn’t dropped out, because Biden hadn’t dropped out yet. And there was a lot of electricity, there was a lot of energy. There were this kind of huge groundswell. And it all just kind of frittered away. It just didn’t last. And she was unable to sustain it. I think that one of the problems, though with talking about excuses is that she actually does have, I think, a really big and very valid excuse of broadest sense, which is that this is all Joe Biden’s fault, right. Like he’s the one who chose not to drop out after the midterms and create the space and enough time. But that case that she could have made that ultimately, this was Biden’s fault because of loyalty or whatever, misplaced feelings she’s having. She really doesn’t directly go after Biden at all in this book, except in the most glancing ways, and usually putting the words in somebody else’s mouth. Yeah, talk about lawyerly. There she is really trying to I mean, it was really it’s I mean, that’s the thing. I didn’t have enough time, but there was no time to do this. I was stuck in this position, but and by this my predecessor, but I don’t actually want to go out there and name the thing that put me in this position and put responsibility on that person. So it’s an incredibly frustrating thing to read. And you just wonder, who is actually thinking about what was best for the country? So, Carlos, I was going to ask you this. Is she on multiple occasions has the killer lines in somebody else’s mouth David Plouffe apparently telling her that everybody hates Joe Biden, her husband. But this to me, speaks to her general problem of being too cautious and scripted and lawyerly anyway. I mean, how did you read all of that? So I said earlier, I didn’t want to be reductionist, but I’ll be reductionist here. I mean, this is an odd political memoir. And here’s the reductionism. There are two main kinds of Washington memoirs. And which kind you write depends on what stage you’re in your career. So if you still have high hopes for bigger jobs. Then the memoir you write tends to be careful. It’s lawyerly. You can say boring. You don’t want to piss people off. Boring they’re people keeping their powder dry for some future campaign. Laying out positive policy vision, et cetera, et cetera. “The Truths We Hold,” her prior book in 2019, was that kind of book. Then there’s the kind of memoir that you write when you’re done, when you’re done with your career and you can just unload and tell everyone what you really think, what was really wrong with the world or with the country, or with the party or with your colleagues whoever it is. Harris’s memoir is weird because it’s kind of stuck between the two. She does just enough to annoy some people and some potential future allies, but not enough to really feel like she’s telling us everything or really revealing something significant. It’s neither fish nor fowl. In Peru you would say, ni chicha ni limonada. It’s not chicha, it’s not lemonade. It’s something else. So she takes the potshots at Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsom. But it’s kind of small potatoes. Then when she can talk about some big issues, she really pulls her punches. Like she’s still being careful or cautious. Gaza is the perfect example. She speaks very generically about look, I just I wanted to have a more nuanced conversation and people are demonizing people on all sides. And I don’t want to do that. And then when she talks about a specific controversy in that she says there was some tension and bitterness that we didn’t give a speaking slot at the convention to a Palestinian speaker. And that’s it. She doesn’t say why. She doesn’t get into that at all. So it’s a weird memoir because it doesn’t really do either thing that these memoirs usually attempt to do. It’s trying to do them all and therefore does neither. Lydia, how much do you think that policies or policy issues played a role in her frittering away all of this versus just the general climate or the issues with Biden or her? Like, if she’d done something on Gaza, would it have been different? I mean, we’ll never know. I think that it is clear that there was a hunger for someone to speak truth to power in a really meaningful way about the lawlessness and the just complete pitilessness of the Israeli campaign in Gaza. And I think that to me, what’s interesting, and this came up in the campaign of Zohran Mamdani. That for mayor of New York to win the primary, that the appeal of taking a stand on Gaza was a message that meant: I actually really believe in something. And even if it costs me politically, I’m going to stick with my principle on this issue. That told people something that actually goes beyond policy. It says, I stand for a policy because I really believe in something. And I read that, reading this book, it was really a reminder of just how small ball. So much of what Kamala Harris, was proposing in her campaign was, I had conveniently or inconveniently forgotten about the $25,000 first home owner credit. That she had, put out there as her policy to help with the affordability crisis, which she didn’t really call the affordability crisis. And they were just examples after example after example of that kind of thing where you had very big picture high flown rhetoric about quote unquote ideas, meaning saving democracy, bipartisanship. We’re better than this. Freedom freedom. All of those kinds of things without any, a ton of specificity. Matched with frankly, some really kind of small bore policy proposals that I think at one point in the book, she talks about really only wanting to propose things that were possible, and to me, that’s madness in a presidential race. It just felt like I felt like you’re basically limiting yourself to begin with. So there’s just a real campaign in poetry and govern in prose, right. Yeah, exactly. But, but even beyond that, it’s like you campaign in policy papers, but those policy papers are things that literally a congressional intern couldn’t get excited about. Yeah it’s stuff that I don’t understand how any of this is going to motivate American voters at this particular juncture. That and again, casting our minds back to that time. Which brings us to the enduring question of does the party have a bigger say? I mean part of her problem, is that she was supposed to be leading a party that doesn’t really have a clear vision, or didn’t seem to have a clear vision, except for we’re not Trump. And the question now is, if you look at this book, it seems to suffer from a similar problem, which is it’s almost entirely backward looking and doesn’t really seem to have an idea of where she or the party would go moving forward. I mean, she says flat out that near the end. In fact, I think it’s in the epilogue or the afterword or whatever she chose to call the thing at the end that we need to come up with our own blueprint that sets out our alternative vision for the country. It’s like, well yeah, but didn’t just have 107 days, you had four years. Fantastic as vice president of the United States. And to say now that I mean, it’s like she has concepts of a plan. I need to come up with our blueprint. Only Trump can get away with concepts of a plan. And that’s not just an off the cuff thing in a debate that’s like that’s like how she wrote it in the book. It’s a book. And so it’s some the thing is, I think you’re right, Michelle, in that the party has defined itself. So fully as being against Trump, that it sometimes has a hard time articulating what it’s for. It’s like it’s almost like Trump and Trumpism is the guide. Just whatever they do, I’m going to push against. It’s like Costanza, I will do the opposite. I think part of the reason, for instance, that they didn’t do more on the border is that they felt they had to be completely opposite of what Trump had done, the performative cruelty against immigrants during his term. But, they won’t be running against Trump in 2028. They’ll be running against some form of Trumpism. What this reminded me of in terms of books is in Michael Wolff’s first book about Trump, “Fire and Fury.” Remember that book, they got so much attention. There’s this really kind of brutal moment early on in that first year of the presidency, where some deputy chief of staff or something confronts Jared Kushner about Trump’s objectives. And he said and this person said, I think it was Katie Walsh. And she said, just give me the three things that the president wants to focus on. What are the three priorities of this White House. And Kushner says, Yes, we probably should have that conversation. It had never occurred to him like there were no priorities. And so when I saw Harris saying, we need to come up with our own blueprint for what we want to how I want to lead the country. It’s like yeah, of course, you should. That’s your job, that’s what you should have been doing. It just reminded me of that kind of cluelessness early on in the Trump years. Yeah I mean, I had written down in my notebook that line that you just quoted about the blueprint. It’s on page 297 of a 300 page book. So make of that what you will. We were talking earlier about time and was it enough time. Did she suffer because there was in fact, just a little bit too much time. And if you’d had less and more, I think that conversation about time is actually downstream to a conversation about competition and democracy. And it’s interesting in this brings us into the conversation about the present and then meaning the midterms in 2026 and then also the 2028 race for the presidency, which hopefully the Democrat will not be facing Donald Trump in that race. Although you never know. You gotta you gotta hedge your bets there. But I think that the solution to this problem, of ideas is actually to have a competition about ideas and the way that you have a competition about ideas is that you have big brawling, knockdown primaries. You put your ideas in front of voters, you describe them, you build them out, you argue for them, you alter them. And so it strikes me that not having had a primary and I think that frankly, just in practical terms, Harris was that there really wasn’t enough time to do a mini primary and a mini primary would have required elites identifying certain candidates as being eligible, beforehand. So it would have been a cursed process no matter what. But I came away from this book thinking, we need like a big, big, messy battle within the Democratic Party in order to figure out the answer of this question of the blueprint, because ultimately it needs to come from voters. We need to have lots of different ideas out there that people get to debate and decide and tell their leaders like, these are the things that really resonate with us. I mean, it is worth noting that 2016, when we wound up with Trump for the first time, was a Republican primary. That was pretty rowdy. I mean, everybody thought, Oh, pretty rowdy, maybe the next Bush. Jeb Bush was seen as a big contender. Ted Cruz wouldn’t give up the ship for an extended period. It was brutal. And at the end of it, the voters had their say. And the Democrats, I mean, maybe the way to save democracy is by, doing democracy. Maybe it’s like actually having open, competition where people bring their personalities, bring their ideas fight for the support of voters. That’s true within parties and it’s true between parties. Well, think about the last time the Democrats had that kind of debate in a presidential primary. It wasn’t 2020. 2020 it’s not that Joe Biden emerged. Out of the froth of a battle of ideas. He was anointed quickly because they were terrified it might be Bernie and Bernie can’t beat Trump. And so let’s put Joe in there and you have to go back to 2016. You have to go back, you a long time to think about when they last did that at the presidential level. And you get rusty, you need to be able to hash those things out and hash them out publicly. And that’s the power of primaries. Yeah the last one that was really, truly the case produced Barack Obama. I mean, a Barack Obama two term, incredibly successful Democratic president who remains one of the most popular figures in American public life. So I think that in and of itself is testament to what can be achieved. And I think too often, especially on the Democratic side, people wait and pay attention at the presidential moment. But this year have two governors races, which are always a little bit different, and then you have the beginnings of a lot of these Senate fights. It’s good to see what is rising to the top, what is resonating with voters, what is not. Before you get into the heat of a presidential race, especially with a party that doesn’t have any obvious leaders. And, of course, all of that clarifies after the midterms, but it is good to watch some of these battles being played out and for voters to pay attention before it comes time to pick a president, which is always like one of my hobby horses, please pay attention to something other than the presidential level. So that what’s at stake. Yeah I mean, I think the most exciting possibility to me is that the Democratic nominee in 2028 is someone who we are not even talking about right now. It’s someone who’s going to and long after all of the review copies of 107 days have been sold at the strand bookstore. The remainder stand. And it’s marked down at Barnes Noble, right that there, that the name of the person who ultimately is going to win the Democratic primary for to be the party’s standard bearer in 2028. Like we don’t know who that person is. And in fact, as someone who’s like, not even in the conversation. And I think that there is tremendous risk in that. But I think that there’s also tremendous excitement and possibility. We’ve seen that in the Mamdani race in New York City, which obviously it’s a mayor, but it’s a pretty important city. I’m partial. I live here, but you see these candidates emerging in and some of them even running as independents rather than as Democrats, which is interesting in and of itself. And you just think like, this is actually exciting to see people who are saying something different, something new, trying to connect with voters, on a different level and really listen to what their constituencies are telling them. I really hope that some of that energy carries over into whatever happens. And we don’t have a kind of depressing choice between the same menu of options, who people were considering. If we had a mini primary after Joe Biden dropped out. Absolutely I mean, I think back to 2008 when they thought the candidate that might be the dark horse to come in and beat Hillary Clinton was going to be Mark Warner out of Virginia. And instead we wind up with, this first term Senator from Illinois who nobody had ever heard of. But that’s the problem with trying with parties, trying to game things out too far in advance, or when you try to line up your ducks before you see what voters are telling you. And this was obviously a huge problem in the last presidential election, voters were telling the Democratic Party, we have big concerns about Joe Biden, and the party leaders just weren’t listening. And I think ultimately that is kind of what doomed Kamala. She could have run the best race in the world. And I’m not sure it would have been enough to overcome voters sense that they had been sold a bill of goods with her predecessor. But again, armchair quarterbacking. Not that useful, I guess, at this point. But wait, if we stop armchair quarterbacking, then what are we even doing here. Yeah, that’s the job. I will. I will say that one of the people who I think actually really benefits from this book is actually Pete Buttigieg. And this maybe gets to some of the ways in which this book inadvertently does work. That is perhaps important. I mean, Pete Buttigieg is a talented guy. And, I think we’ll see more of him. I’m not saying that, he’s my favorite or even on my list of people who should be considered for 2028, but a real favor of this book does for him, is it. It really does put some daylight between him and Harris and Biden, which I think is much needed. I mean, I would almost say the same for Josh Shapiro and makes Harris look pretty petty and small. So I just I think it’s we have no way of knowing how any of this is going to play out now. But, for the 15 people who actually pay attention to this book, among other things. It’s not that it’s not going to be a bestseller and have its own Netflix series. The book is selling. The book is selling. How many copies is this book selling? If you’re talking about the American public. Nobody reads political books except you. I wish you were here so that. So that you can tell America what they need to know. I think a lot of people read books. Yeah please, Carlos, you’re the expert. Tell us. Oh, the Kindle versions, number one in the world. And number one on Amazon. So basically, those made up, not those made up categories, not those made up categories that they have. My book always does great in political literature. Criticism like these made up things that they I love that category. That’s my favorite category. Numero uno right there. So then that clinches it. She is on. She is on laughing all the way to the bank. She is on a glide path to be the next president. So, Lydia, I love your idea that the major use for this book is to make the people she goes after look better and improve their prospects for a political future. That’s a very weird answer to my question of what’s the point. But I actually kind of like it. Beyond that, though, do we think she’s trying to lay the groundwork for running in 2028? Is that what this is? Well to put out the best possible case for her, she has gotten closer each time. In 2019, she didn’t even make it to the primaries. She didn’t even make it to the first actual primary vote. And then in 2024, she became the nominee. So baby steps. But I think there’s a mantra, I think that anyone, anyone who thinks they should be president of the United States usually doesn’t stop thinking they should be president of the United States, right. And I’m not a betting man. I hate all those betting commercials on TV sports broadcasts. But if I were betting for 2028, the Democratic nominee, I would take the field over Kamala Harris. But you think she’s going to be in there. You think she’s going to be in there fighting. I suspect she’s going to run and then she’ll drop out. Yeah Lydia, what about you. Yeah, I mean, I think that if Kamala Harris honestly wanted to compete for the 2028 nomination there, I think her best bet would have been to write a searingly honest burn it all down, tell the truth. About her own mistakes, her own, the things that she learned. Why coloring inside the lines led to her defeat. Show some real humility, but also some real kind of spine in saying like this I took bad advice and I’m never going To do that again. And here’s how I would have done it differently, I think. I think there was another book that she could have written that could have been a real scorcher really indicting the Democratic establishment and saying, I know this because I was a part of it. And I think for me, after Biden dropped out, I think I felt a certain amount of projection of those hopes onto personally, a projection of those hopes onto Kamala Harris that perhaps she would start to speak the truth. But I think this book reveals that the truth is that she’s a kind of bog standard politician who just doesn’t really have a lot of ideas and worked her way up inside the technocratic machine that is the contemporary Democratic Party, and I don’t think a person like that should be the nominee in 2028. And I certainly pray that they won’t be the nominee in 2028, regardless of who the Republicans nominate. Yeah, I think you’ve hit on it right there, which is even if she even if she does have ideas, I think she’s too cautious to let those off the chain. So I think that this book is a reflection of what her shortcomings as a politician are in general. I just wanted to say I have right here. I’m sorry for getting off screen for a moment. I have her two prior books, smart on crime and the truths we hold and now 107 days. I’ve read all of Kamala Harris’s books, all three of them. She was never going to write the scorcher that you wanted Lydia for, precisely for precisely the reason that you give that she is be cautious. Party bureaucrat and bureaucrat is. I don’t mean that in the most pejorative sense. I mean, it’s pretty pejorative. She she’s not. No bureaucracy. Max Weber didn’t write about it as a bureaucracy, as a pejorative. It’s not always a negative, but as a presidential candidate characteristic, she’s someone who works her way up the greasy pole of party politics. And she’s done that in general in a cautious manner. And in a sense, this book is this new book is consistent with that. It goes a little further than some of the others. But it’s still true to that kind of politician that she’s been. O.K we’re going to let you have the last word. But now to get the unappealing image of a greasy political pole out of everybody’s mind. Please, God, we’re going to do what we usually do to end these conversations, which is I need a recommendation from both of you for listeners. Lydia, you want to go first. Sure I so we’ve all been talking a lot about political violence in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And I feel like there’s been a lot of talk thrown around about which side is more violent, and is this better or worse than the 1960s and 70s. And there are lots of great books about the political violence in the 60s and 70s. But I wanted to recommend to our listeners my absolute favorite, which is “The Skies Belong to Us,” which is a book by a journalist named Brendan Koerner, who tells the story of the skyjacking craze in the 1960s and 70s. And I think it’s great because it gives you both a portrait of what the political atmosphere was like at the time. All of the mail bombings and the Weather Underground and all that kind of stuff. But it really focuses in on these skyjackings and what it was like to fly at that time. But I think that if you want an actually incredibly entertaining but also, really, really insightful book that gives a unique window into that period of American life, it’s one of my absolute favorites. And I’ve been I picked it up again recently because I love it so much. Love it. Carlos, if you tell me Kamala’s memoir, I’m just going to cut the. I’m just going to cut the camera. No, I had something that I was going to say, but Lydia, you said something in the middle of this conversation that made me change my mind. So I’m going to call an audible, and I’m going to read a poem. Ooh, this is awesome. It’s called “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” by Clive James. The book of my enemy has been remaindered and I am pleased in vast quantities has been remaindered like a van load of counterfeit that has been seized and sits in piles in a police warehouse. My enemy’s much prized effort sits in piles and the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs. Great square stacks of rejected books. And between them aisles one passes down, reflecting on life’s vanities, pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews, lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book. For behold, here is that book Among these ranks and banks of duds, these ponderous and seeminly irreversible cairns of complete stiffs. The book of my enemy has been remaindered, and I rejoice. It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion beneath the yoke. What avail him now his awards and prizes. The praise expended upon his meticulous technique, his individual new voice knocked into the middle of next week. His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys the sinkers clinkers, dogs and drags the edsels of the world of movable type, the bummers that no amount of hype could shift the unbudgeable turkeys. I’m going to stop there. There’s two more chunks of it. But Clive James is a genius. He’s an absolute genius writer. And when he talked about how Kamala Harris’s book would one day end up in the remainder pile, all I could think of was “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” by Clive James, which you should all any author among you or reader among you, should check it out. All right. Well, I’m going to lean into my Washington nerdy roots and recommend a Netflix show called “The Residence.” Have you guys watched this? Carlos, never watch anything. Lidia, did you watch this? I watched it. Loved it. It’s brilliant. So it’s produced by Shondaland. How do hear about these things? What do you mean? How do I hear? Because I live in America and we watch TV, especially streaming. So it dropped in. Othering me. Oh, Carlos. Now your homework is to watch this. It dropped back in March. But we’re like six months too late to everything. A lot of the time it is a murder mystery set in the White House. The main ssher, the chief ssher of the White House, played brilliantly by Giancarlo Esposito, who’s a genius with everything, winds up dead. And at the state dinner for the Australian Prime Minister, they have two lock down the White House and they bring in a very eccentric detective named Cordelia Cupp, who is played by Uzo Aduba. And she is absolute genius. She just takes every single line they give her and makes it sing. And if you’re in journalism or political journalism or politics, often I tend to approach shows that try to dig into that world with an eye roll and they take themselves too seriously, or they’re way over the top or whatever. This is just daffy enough and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is just this fantastic murder mystery and I highly recommend. I was very sad to hear that they’re not picking it up for another season. I’m very bitter about this. So it’s a really fun show. Yeah, it is great. So Carlos, you should watch that. I will check this out. All right then. I think we’re going to leave it there. Thank you guys so much for coming in to talk this through with me. That was so great to be reunited. Great to see you again. “MOO” forever.
