107 Days

by Kamala Harris

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

“It’s the only thing anyone is talking about. And it’s too much. There’s going to be another letter from Democratic members of Congress on Monday. It’s too much.”

I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition. A powerful donor base. And I also knew, as he did, that I was the only person who would preserve his legacy. At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him—and all the good he had achieved—right under the bus.

mother had once promised him a quarter if he went back and punched the bully who’d been picking on him. He did, and she gave him fifty cents.

“We’re going to lose our fucking democracy and it’s your fault!”

I was not about to tell the American people that their eyes had lied. I would not jeopardize my own credibility. This night had turned into a disaster, and I was fully aware of the importance of what I was to say. How we handled this, right now, would have a long-term political effect, not just for him but for me. I had to acknowledge what people saw and then try to give them a way to make sense of it.

The Mamala energy.

Barack Obama: Saddle up! Joe did what I hoped he would do. But you have to earn it. Michelle and I are supportive but not going to put a finger on the scale right now. Let Joe have his moment. Think through timing.

Hillary: We’re thrilled the president endorsed you. We’ll do whatever we can—we’ll jump on a plane, we’ll get on Amtrak. I want to be part of your war council.

I supported Joe because he was the strongest voice for the working class. Please focus on the working class, not just on abortion.

“You were born for a time such as this,”

I want to keep people safe and help them thrive.

I wanted to see Gen Z given the tools they needed to become a new Greatest Generation, and I had so many ideas on how to help them. I wanted to create a secretary of culture to uplift the immense creative talent of this country. I wanted to change the way we think about our workforce, to assign value based on an individual’s skill, to open up government jobs to talented people who didn’t necessarily have a college degree. I wanted to increase home ownership. All these things, and so much more, all grounded in the fundamental values of dignity, fairness, and opportunity.

Jurao que la gente vota con el culo.

Four things you can’t mess up: Rollout, First Interview, Convention, Debate. Nail the big moments and don’t sweat the small speed bumps.

“Lyin’ Kamala Harris destroys everything she touches!” “That’s all he’s got?” my Jersey boy shot back. My Dougie.

A man

I yearned for a bipartisan era when senators could reach across the aisle to accomplish real improvements in people’s lives.

“Don’t… read… the… comments!”

But I suspect Jill hadn’t quite forgiven me for the 2019 primary debate, when I’d gone hard at Joe over his early opposition to busing.

As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.

I had never, in three and a half years at the White House, in the Oval Office or the Situation Room, witnessed anything remotely like the level of confusion, incoherence, and debility we saw on the debate stage.

holy fucking shit

That roar told me they could see it. Clearly, for the first time. This could be, and it should be. It was not because of gender or because of race, but despite it.

I thought, as I often did, of Shirley Chisholm, and I know they did, too. The first Black woman elected to the US Congress and the first woman to run for our party’s nomination. She had blazed the path, and now I was standing on it.

As senator, I’d been to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and I’d toured the communities in my home state that had been ravaged by wildfires. It was heartbreaking to see the scale of these losses and the exhausted faces of individuals standing in the ruins of a lifetime’s work, a lifetime’s dreams. It was infuriating to see how predators swarmed like cockroaches, price gouging, spreading misinformation. But it was also inspiring to talk to the first responders who ran toward danger, sometimes helping strangers even as their own homes were at risk. And then there were the regular people who stepped up to help in whatever way they could: collecting toiletries, making sandwiches, organizing clothing drives.

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. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.

“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.

Corruption and gangs thrive when there are limited resources.

My success was important for him.

I believe Israel was right to respond to the atrocities of October 7. But the ferocity of Netanyahu’s response, the number of innocent Palestinian women and children killed, and his failure to prioritize the lives of the hostages had weakened Israel’s moral position internationally and created angry dissent within Israel itself.

Netanyahu wanted the guy who would acquiesce to his every extreme proposal for the future of Gaza’s inhabitants and add his own plan for a land grab by his developer cronies.

For any enduring peace, we have to let go of extreme rhetoric on both sides.

I wanted to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, and history of the region, but it seemed very few people had the appetite for that or the willingness to hold two tragic narratives in their mind at the same time, to grieve for human suffering both Israeli and Palestinian. Loud voices on either side claimed there were no innocents on the other, a position I found inhuman. And I know Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who was tirelessly hauling himself from Jerusalem to Doha to DC, sincerely wanted to end the suffering on all sides.

The narratives on the war have only the people go be culpable for it.

The threat to withhold their vote got to me.

What truly killed Kamala's election chances.

I wished they would understand that sitting out the election or voting for a third candidate would elect Trump and kill any effort for a just peace, any hope for a two-state solution.

PUÑETA VOY A LLORAR

Trump had stopped wearing the bandage on his ear, almost two weeks after the bullet had nicked it.

Sendo paquetero

I might as well say that Pete Buttigieg was my first choice. Harvard grad, multilingual Rhodes Scholar, business consultant, naval intelligence officer, twice-elected Midwestern mayor, cabinet secretary, loving husband and father: he was well qualified in so many respects. I love Pete. I love working with Pete. He and his husband, Chasten, are friends. He is a sincere public servant with the rare talent of being able to frame liberal arguments in a way that makes it possible for conservatives to hear them. He knows the importance of taking our case to people who aren’t usually exposed to it and is magnificent at sparring with opponents on Fox News. He would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk. And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.

This would have shaken shit up in the best way possible.

The person who is winning, the team reminded me, is the person who is having the most fun.

I am a stickler for being on time—I feel it’s a mark of respect.

“Don’t you ever let them make you cry.”

Hurtful and degrading comments are, sadly, part and parcel of running for office these days. You can’t endure it at this level unless, above all else, you care about the people you want to represent and the things you will be able to do to make their lives better. If you do care about that, then there’s no time to wallow in self-pity or lament the unfairness of it. Not that you don’t feel it. Not that it’s okay. It is what it is.

People like Loomer do their dirty work hoping their target will lash out and say something inappropriate or be personally wounded to distraction.

Sports of cruelty and divisiveness: the very playbook Trump has always gone to.

Never mind the teleprompter, here was a guy who knew how to put an engine together. A guy who could talk knowledgeably to a farmer about hogs and soybeans. A guy who knew what it meant to hunt in fall to put food in the freezer to last through winter. None of it was shtick. It is just who he is.

We wouldve won the lottery with this guy.

Unlike the current national security team, we did not hash out our plans on Signal. America’s national security relies heavily on classified information that our adversaries try very hard to acquire. Why make it easy for them? And where is the professionalism, where is the self-discipline?

Hegseth you cunt

“Even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves… there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business,” he said. “I don’t need you telling me about our health care, I don’t need you telling us who we love, and I sure the hell don’t need you telling us what books we’re going to read.”

The CWU had asked, in earlier discussions, that we eliminate tax on tips, and my policy team had been working on our proposal before Trump’s half-baked announcement. I’d much rather give a tax cut to low-wage service workers than to billionaires. But unlike Trump, I worked to pair the exemption idea with an increase in the minimum wage, because the sad fact is that most tipped workers are so underpaid that they don’t earn enough to owe any federal taxes. For those people, eliminating the tax on their tips would be meaningless. I stressed that the exemption would be crafted to ensure affluent professionals didn’t start restructuring their compensation to take advantage of the loophole.

Elon Musk had set off my spidey senses long before his MAGAfication and his endorsement of Trump. Both SpaceX and Tesla sprang to life in California, and millions of California taxpayers had helped the companies prosper. But when Democrats tried to tie electric car subsidies to workplace standards—Tesla had been sued for labor violations, including racial discrimination and suppressing union organizing efforts—Musk began a rightward pivot. It accelerated during Covid, when he refused to close the Tesla plant to protect the health of his workers. When he moved his operations to Texas, he claimed it was because the state offered more “freedom,” which was the height of hypocrisy, since Texas, with its draconian abortion ban and the privacy-shredding policies around it, violated the most basic of human liberties. Musk is a talented entrepreneur. But there are genius engineers behind the cars and rockets, such as Tesla’s former longtime chief technical officer, J. B. Straubel, who deserve just as much credit. Despite what I think of Musk, I believe Joe Biden made a mistake in not inviting him to the White House in 2021 for an event promoting our electric vehicle policy. I shared this view with his team. Behind the president on the lawn that day were electric Fords, Chevys, Jeeps. American-made Teslas, then the world’s most innovative and successful electric cars, were nowhere to be seen. Biden, loyal to the UAW, was sending a message about Musk’s anti-union stance. But as presi...

Musk

I believe you can tell a lot about who a person is when you know who their people are.

In my career, I said, I’ve only had one client: the people.

“She looked and sounded more presidential in this convention speech than almost any other candidate I’ve ever seen accept the nomination… Her presentation, her delivery, her confidence—it was a sight to behold.”

Unlike Trump, I didn’t have a mouthful of lies about ending wars and lowering grocery prices on day one. I knew those kinds of things weren’t possible, and I wasn’t going to take the audience for fools.

As the first woman, or Black woman, in every office I have run for, except the Senate, where I was the second, racism and sexism have always been present.

You just might want to know, before someone can buy a lethal weapon, if they’ve been convicted of a violent crime. You just might want to know if the person buying a gun is a danger to themselves or others. All of us certainly want to know our children can go to school, learn without fear, and come home safe.