Excerpts from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s quasi-confessional new ebook, launched Wednesday, appear to beg the query: Is that this the message of somebody planning to run once more for president?
“It seems like she is edging away from running for president, step by step,” mentioned Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at UC Berkeley and USC. “This type of positioning looks more like playing for history instead.”
Harris’ most ardent supporters, who’ve stood by her since her first, short-lived run for president in 2019, really feel in any other case, believing the candor and honesty she shows in her ebook, titled “107 Days,” present what true management ought to appear like.
“It’s just a message of someone who wants to tell the truth and be honest about her feelings,” mentioned Derreck Johnson of Oakland, a longtime private buddy who has volunteered along with her campaigns.
Harris, the Oakland native who served as California’s Legal professional Basic and U.S. Senator earlier than Joe Biden named her as his operating mate in 2020, is ready to launch the ebook on Sept. 23.
In excerpts launched to The Atlantic, Harris mentioned it was a mistake to permit Biden alone to determine whether or not to run for reelection, that he might have been “tired” however nonetheless sharp, and that her efforts to differentiate herself as vice chairman have been undermined by a Biden crew afraid of diminishing its growing old chief.
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps,” she wrote. “But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.”
On reflection, she wrote, “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.”
She additionally took intention at Biden’s crew — although not Biden himself — for failing to defend her in opposition to media assaults.
“When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it,” Harris wrote. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”
Their pondering was “zero-sum,” she wrote. “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.”
Though it could be comprehensible to precise frustration with an expedited marketing campaign that started when Biden pulled out in July final yr, “this isn’t the way a future President of the United States normally expresses themselves,” Schnur mentioned.
The excerpts additionally counsel that Harris is casting blame on others relatively than herself and her personal marketing campaign, analysts say.
“There are some fundamental, practical aspects of her as a candidate that are equally challenging to the weight of former President Biden on her potential candidacy,” mentioned David McCuan, a Sonoma State political science professor.
She didn’t capitalize on key assignments, like Vice President J.D. Vance did on the Munich Safety Convention earlier this yr, McCuan mentioned, and made blunders throughout her presidential marketing campaign, together with her comment that “not a thing” got here to thoughts of what she would do in another way than Biden as president, and forgoing an invite to comic Joe Rogan’s podcast, the place she may need picked up extra voters amongst his hundreds of thousands of subscribers and followers.
The discharge of the ebook three years earlier than the following presidential election is “cracking the door to a potential candidacy that I think is not there,” McCuan mentioned. “I think her moment has passed, even though this is a traditional time that you would release a book if you were going to run for president.”
Longtime Harris supporter Elisa Camahort Web page, a San Jose author and entrepreneur, says that excerpts of the ebook launched up to now present that Harris “was very respectful” of Biden and maybe Democrats ought to be taught from Republicans, who primed Trump him for his second reelection try by supporting him within the interim 4 years.
“I would 100% spend the next four years pumping her up,” Camahort Web page mentioned. “Lots of people don’t win their first run for president. Biden didn’t. Reagan didn’t. Lots of people try again and win, and that would be following a playbook that the GOP has used successfully.”
She doesn’t blame Harris for shedding to Trump, although.
“You know who I blame most for Donald Trump being in office?” Camahort Web page requested. “The Republican Party that had many chances to walk away from him and didn’t, and the people who voted for him.”
