Kamala is still living in la-la land

She’s baaaack! Nearly a year after a spectacular loss in the 2024 presidential election, former vice-president Kamala Harris – she of the ‘coconut tree’ and the ‘vibes’ – has returned with a book to remind us all just how profoundly unserious she is.

The title, 107 Days, is a reference to the length of Harris’s presidential campaign – from when she replaced Joe Biden on 21 July to the election against Donald Trump on 5 November. As a book, it is a 300-page excuse for what turned out to be a landslide defeat. Whether it was a lack of time, Biden and his back-stabbing staff, a bigoted country or Trump’s lies, nearly everyone is apparently to blame for the fact that America doesn’t currently have its first female black president. Except her.

Harris’s problem was that her only real constituency was desperate, fawning and craven liberal white people – especially white women – who saw in her a chance to prove themselves the best white-lady allies of all time, and to stick that scary monster Trump into the naughty corner forever.

According to an account in Politico of one of her New York book launches, those ladies are still Harris’s ride-or-die bitches. They are living in a cloud cuckoo land where they can reassure each other of Kamala’s utter brilliance, while sipping $24 cassis and gin cocktails. As Politico says of the fawning audience, ‘few seemed interested in acknowledging the campaign’s failures’, which resulted in ‘the loss of every swing state and the popular vote’. Harsh!

Of course, Kamala’s track record is actually worse than that. She also ran in the 2020 Democratic primary and dropped out before a single vote had been cast. But no matter. There is something about her that soothes the soul of a subset of soft-handed and therapy-brained liberals, and they just can’t quit her. ‘Your voice, it’s just so calming’, said one grown-ass man to Harris at a promotional event in Philadelphia last week.

For the Kamala die-hards, the only harshness allowed is reserved for those horrible men – Trump, of course, but also Biden, whose names elicit the only boos from the audiences on her book tour. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s name is greeted with warm applause. Just like it was at the mortifying Girl Boss pantomime that was the Democratic National Convention last year, the vibe is clear: girls rule, boys drool. The state of American liberalism is just embarrassing at this point.

As part of her book promotional tour, Harris returned to the spice store in Philadelphia where she had made a campaign stop in 2024. There she was met with adulation to the point of hysteria from a few locals.

This time, she brought the same banalities and platitudes that helped her lose the election. ‘We don’t realise how unprecedented that election in 2024 was’, Harris said in her appearance last week.

Um, I’m pretty sure Americans do, in fact, realise how unprecedented the election was. One candidate was so demented he was given the boot. The other was shot on stage at a campaign rally. And then Harris was parachuted in as the Democratic candidate, as her boss was unceremoniously shown the door.

American voters also realise how unprecedentedly dreadful she was as a candidate. In a sign of just how unpopular she continues to be, Harris has now even lost the Democrats’ main base: the corporate media.

‘It often felt like she was performing for a political class of elites, rather than actually trying to win over the American people’, writes Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times in response to Harris’s memoir. Polgreen’s colleagues, Carlos Lozada and Michelle Cottle, sum up the book with one word each: ‘excuse’ and ‘whiny’.

Even the Guardian thinks 107 Days is an unintentionally hilarious book, ‘The kind of “you have to laugh or else you’ll cry” type of hilarity’. Its review describes Harris as ‘woman with a formidable lack of self-awareness and a propensity to self-valorise’. Double ouch!

In the book, Kamala admits that because of the limited time she had before the presidential election, she ‘shut down’ the idea of ‘some half-baked procedure’ for finding a Democratic candidate. In other words, she refused to hold an open competition for the nomination and therefore received what was essentially a coronation by Democratic powerbrokers. She claims in her book that it was this shortened timeline that caused her to lose.

This is perhaps one of the biggest flaws in the memoir. Despite Harris’s claim that she didn’t have the time to defeat Trump, the fact remains that her popularity diminished the more the American people got to know her. ‘After drawing even with Trump in the polls in August and pulling ahead of him after the debate in September, by mid-October, we’d stalled’, she writes, seemingly unaware that this undermines her central argument.

If the response to 107 Days is anything to go by, the media, it seems, are done covering for Kamala. As multiple journalists have now pointed out, her highly unusual route to the nomination actually helped her, and led to a huge surge of fundraising, publicity and good will at first.

‘There was a lot of energy’ at the beginning of her campaign, Polgreen notes. ‘There was this kind of huge groundswell, and it all just kind of frittered away.’ Kamala’s vision – then and now – was just wholly inadequate. Or, as Polgreen puts it: ‘Stuff that literally a congressional intern couldn’t get excited about.’

Carlos Lozada, also of the New York Times, observes that the Democratic Party ‘has defined itself so fully as being against Trump, that it sometimes has a hard time articulating what it’s for’. The most recent and most insane example of this is the social-media trend of pregnant women declaring they would down Tylenol just because Trump said it is bad for fetuses.

This is the real heart of the problem: blue America has been fundamentally broken by Donald J Trump. The person or cause who can put them back together has still not emerged. And anyone who thinks Kamala is the answer is surely living in la-la land.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.