107 Days

by Kamala Harris

“Hi, Joe,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” He was calling from his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he’d gone to isolate after testing positive for Covid four days earlier. His voice sounded hoarse, exhausted. “I’ve decided I’m dropping out.” “Are you sure?” “I’m sure. I’m going to announce in a few minutes.” “Why today?” “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.” Really? Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants, and the two people staffing me right now are under four feet tall. I put the phone on mute and went back to Amara and Leela. Eyes wide, eyebrows raised, voice urgent: “Go get your parents!” My husband, Doug, was in Los Angeles, trapped by the global CrowdStrike software glitch that had grounded many flights. My sister, Maya, was in New York. I needed to start alerting the family before this story broke. The president was still talking. “I want you to do this.” He would endorse me, he said, but not for a day, maybe two, when he would make an address to the nation. That would be ruinous, and I said so. “Joe, I’m honored, but we live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, and if you wait that long, the airwaves will be full of nothing but questions: ‘Why has he not supported his VP?’ If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.” I urged him to reconsider the timing. “What ...

“What we do, right now, is so important,” I said. “People will look at how this moment occurred for decades. There’s no reason to rush this. Can we slow it down so I can prepare? And you need to endorse me at the same time. Any gap between the announcement and the endorsement will lead to the same kind of chaos we’ve had for the last three weeks.”