Kamala Harris’ memoir about her ill-fated run for the White House debuted Tuesday, which means her publicity tour is officially underway. After awkwardly hitting up the recently canceled Late Show with Stephen Colbert last month, the former vice president is now making the usual rounds and serving up her signature word salads.
It’s basically the fall of 2024 all over again – except, this time around, Democrats aren’t biting their tongues. Instead, they are voicing skepticism at her claims and suggesting she take a good, long look in the mirror.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Mark Halperin, host of MK Media’s Next Up, to discuss Harris’ book tour and why it is a case of déjà vu.
Bad Reviews
The failed 2024 Democratic nominee’s new book, 107 Days, hit shelves Tuesday, offering a glimpse of a looser and more unguarded Harris who is eager to point in any direction but the mirror while trying to explain the spectacular collapse of her short-lived campaign.
As reported on Tuesday’s AM Update, early reviews for the book are not exactly raving. “I don’t know if Harris found writing 107 Days cathartic, but reading it certainly wasn’t,” wrote The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi. “It seems likely to alienate her critics further and provides no closure or hope for her supporters.”
Semafor politics reporter David Weigel determined that, “after ‘107 Days,’ Kamala Harris doesn’t know how to win.” And Democrat insiders are not pleased either. Strategist David Axelrod told Politico, “if there’s a political strategy here, it’s a bad one.”
“There’s an awful lot of grievances and finger-pointing that really doesn’t serve a political agenda,” he added.
Nothing to Say
One of the takeaways from the book is that Harris did not feel like she could voice concerns about President Joe Biden’s ability to run for reelection because, as vice president, any doubts she raised would come off as self-serving.
She concluded, however, that it was reckless to leave the choice “to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition” because it should have been more than a personal decision. That analysis, along with other passages about her time in the Biden administration, apparently did not sit well with Team Biden.
“Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” one former Biden White House official told Axios. “She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key workstreams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”
To the concerns about substance, Harris certainly lacked it when discussing this portion of the book with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC Monday night. After Maddow asked her is she regretted not talking to the president about whether he should run again, Harris went in a, well, different direction:
“…But I think that, you know, one of the reasons I wrote this book, Rachel, is there are actually a number of reasons. One is, one that it is unprecedented. Right to your point of what you said in your opening, we had a president of the United States running for reelection three and a half months from the election, and decides not to run. The sitting vice president enters the race against a former president United States who has been running for 10 years with 107 days to go. And it ended up being the closest presidential election in the 21st century.
And there was so much about those 107 days that, for me – and this is really a behind the scenes look at those 107 Days – was about seeing people who seemingly had nothing in common coming together by the thousands with a level of optimism, and dare I say joy, about the possibilities for America. And I hope to remind people about that light that people brought to it and to remind people that that light is still there. And we can’t let that be extinguished by an election or the individual who’s in the office right now…”
“She’s still got it,” Megyn quipped after hearing Harris wax poetic – as she did so many times on the campaign trail – about “light” and “joy” while tediously explaining a situation that the audience is already very well-acquainted with. “No one is better at the word salad,” she added.
By failing to “stand up” for the parts of the book “that actually were honest or provocative” in favor of mindless “filler,” Halperin said Harris is engaged in “whatever the opposite of bookselling 101 is.”
VP Vengence
Maddow also brought up another headline-making piece of the book in which Harris described her VP vetting process and revealed that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was not her first choice for a running mate.
Harris said she ruled out the top contender, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, despite him representing a critical swing state, in part because he was too ambitious. She accused him of being more focused on perks of the office, like decorating the Naval Observatory residence, than in doing the job.
She wrote that she worried “he would be unable to settle for a role as number two” and that it would “wear on our partnership.” While Halperin noted that this actually aligns with his reporting on Shapiro, the governor did not respond kindly to the characterization.
“I mean, look, I haven’t read the former vice president’s book,” he told Stephen A. Smith during an appearance on his podcast last week. “She’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly.”
As for who Harris really wanted to run with, she claimed former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was her first choice. She decided it was too much of a risk, however, to pick a gay man. “Buttigieg would have been an ideal partner if I were a straight white man,” Harris wrote. “But we were already asking a lot of America to accept a woman, a black woman, a black woman married to a Jewish man.”
Buttigieg wasted no time denouncing Harris’ framing, saying he believes in “giving Americans more credit” because, in his experience, “you earn trust with voters… based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories.”
Maddow was similarly flabbergasted by the claim, telling Harris that the revelation Buttigieg “couldn’t be on the ticket, effectively, because he’s gay” was “hard to hear.” The former VP tried to claim that is not actually what she wrote.
See if you can follow this train of thought: “That’s not what I said, that he couldn’t be on the ticket because he is gay. My point, as I write in the book, is that I was clear that in 107 days, in one of the most hotly contested elections for president United States against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor to be a black woman running for president United States, and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man with the stakes being so high, it made me very sad, but I also realized it would be a real risk.”
She’s Back!
Halperin said one of the biggest issues for Harris is that she is now acting like these musings were from a private journal that was never meant to see the light of day and not a memoir filled with words she “purposefully published.”
While he concluded that “it is a weird way to sell a book,” Megyn is here for all of it. Between the meandering, meaningless answers on the press tour and the Dem-on-Dem backstabbing, she believes this book has delivered “the news cycle we’ve been waiting for since November.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Halperin by tuning in to episode 1,155 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.