On Wednesday, Kamala Harris announced that she would not run for governor of California. On Thursday, she announced that she has written a memoir! Kamala said: we’re outside now! The book is called 107 Days, which is the length of her presidential campaign – from the day President Biden announced that he was withdrawing from his reelection bid through election day. I’m so glad she’s written about it from her perspective, because tons of other people have already written books blaming her for everything that happened, when really, she was getting screwed over in like a hundred different ways.
VP Harris’s first stop on her book promotional tour was an extended interview with Stephen Colbert. Perfect choice, honestly – Colbert is also getting screwed over by Republicans. Kamala was lovely here – Colbert even asked her how long it was before she turned on the news, and she said “months.” She’s been watching cooking shows, and she says that Doug is back to practicing law – when she was VP, Doug moved to DC and he taught at Georgetown Law. I imagine Doug just went back to the same law firm he worked at before 2021. Anyway, here’s the interview:
Colbert asked Harris if her decision to not run for the California governorship was about leaving herself open to run for a “different office.” Kamala got really serious and said that after decades as a devout public servant, believing with all her heart that for people like her, “Shouldn’t we also be inside the system?” But now: “Recently I made the decision that I just — for now — I don’t want to go back in the system. I think it’s broken.” She said that she doesn’t want to take away from the good work being done by so many public servants in the country, but “It’s not about them. But you know, I believe, and I always believed, that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. And I think right now that they’re not as strong as they need to be.”
So… if you ask her right now if she’s eyeing another presidential run, the answer is decidedly no. She’s not going to run to fix a system she thinks is fundamentally broken. And I understand that perspective. She also knows that all of this is basically a Sisyphean task for Democrats, that even if Dems win big elections in the next few decades, they’re basically going to be trying to clean up Trump’s mess.
Photos/screengrabs courtesy of CBS/The Late Show.
