107 Excuses, Evasions, and Pathologies
my review of Kamala Harris's book
Yes, I have already read it.
I ordered the Kindle version, so it would be accessible at midnight, then planned my Monday carefully to include naps on my lunch hour and after work. I set an alarm two hours earlier than I normally get up, but didn’t need it.
I woke up a little past midnight, happy to get started.
Snarky, humorous dunking on a Woke moron is the kind of thing that once garnered me a large (for an individual, anyway) Twitter following. It’s cheap and lazy, which is a big part of why I left Twitter and don’t let myself indulge it anymore.
But it’s also hella fun.
So the rare circumstance when I can justify it to myself is a treat indeed.
Harris’s book reads like a masterclass in a very particular genre of political writing—the genre of excuses dressed up as explanations.
The distinction matters. An explanation is an account of causes: “This is what happened, and here is why.” Explanations don’t necessarily absolve the speaker; they can even incriminate. But they take reality seriously.
An excuse, on the other hand, is an explanation with the responsibility filleted out. It’s a story structured to make blame slide off the teller like oil on Teflon.
What complicates things is that the difference isn’t always in the raw facts. It can hinge on the stance of the speaker. The exact same sentence can be an excuse or an explanation depending on whether the person offering it is taking responsibility.
To give a simplistic, easily understandable example: “I was late because of traffic” can be an explanation if followed by “…and I should have left earlier.” It becomes an excuse if the unspoken message is “…so it wasn’t really my fault.”
In other words, excuses are explanations minus accountability. The internal shift—whether the speaker shoulders the consequences or wriggles away from them—marks the dividing line.
And that’s where Harris’s bitch-switch writing style comes in. Explanations take ownership; excuses polish the Teflon. Her pages are drenched in the latter, all written in the tone of someone settling old scores while pretending she’s just “providing context.” That’s why the whole book could’ve been more honestly titled 107 Scores to Settle.
The irony, of course, is that in working so hard to excuse herself, she confirmed every caricature her critics ever drew. The right didn’t just land a few lucky punches; she basically stood there holding the target.
It’s so overwhelming, in fact, that if it ever comes out that the ghostwriter was a secret MAGA? I….won’t be surprised.
So the central question I’ll be asking throughout is simple: does Harris explain, or does she excuse?
Does she take ownership, or does she polish her Teflon?
And why does it matter whether she does one or the other?
If all we ever hear are excuses, what happens to truth?
Our story begins with Biden’s decision to drop out, which necessitates referencing the debate.
She settles her first score, with Rob Reiner—who, let’s be real, comes across more of a girl than I am. To her credit, this particular grudge at least involves someone being a dick to her husband, so points for spousal loyalty.
Her tale of the debate is one of great prescience: Biden called her from Camp David sounding old and tired, so of course she just knew the night would be a disaster. That’s why she surrounded herself with her most trusted people, her crack team, her inner circle.
And here comes the first real reveal of the sheer vapidity and stupidity of our political class. Note the highlighted passages.
Imagine this being your big takeaway:
That Trump was different in kind, not just degree.
That MAGA was not a typical party.
In other words: imagine needing a political operative to tell you the sky is blue, water is wet, and Trump is not Mitt Romney in a red hat.
Imagine needing a political operative to know this.
Imagine being dumber than a box of hair.
After the debate, believe it or not, her response was her idea of protecting her credibility: she couldn’t tell the American people their eyes had lied, but she also couldn’t just admit what everyone saw — the President of the United States looking like a nursing home field trip gone wrong. So naturally, she cast herself as the brave truth-teller who would help the American people “make sense” of it all. Because apparently we peasants, left alone with our lying eyes, might not recognize elder abuse when it unfolds live on CNN. Luckily, Kamala was there to explain reality to us. And, of course, she reminds us she was “fully aware of the importance” of what she was about to say — not because it mattered for the country, but because it mattered for her own political career.
To be fair, her point that Trump didn’t have Mike Pence’s endorsement is a solid one — probably the sharpest jab their side could have landed that night, and she actually delivered it well. Credit where it’s due.
But then, instead of letting the moment stand on its own merit, she decides to close the section by quoting… wait for it… a journalist singing her praises. As though citing a CNN talking head is how you build credibility with readers who just watched the whole thing for themselves.
A journalist.
LMAO.
That’s like writing your own Yelp review and pretending it came from a stranger. If you have to trot out John King’s swooning to tell us you’re a “great asset” and “star power,” you’ve already lost the plot.
The Red File: Or, How to Pretend It’s Not Your Job
The next section is where the pathology shows in ways that make me wonder if the ghostwriter was secretly MAGA.
I cannot believe this part made it into print — a feeling I would experience over and over again as I read.
As we’re walked through the day Biden finally bowed out, we meet her family, who were visiting. Enter Tony, her brother-in-law, suddenly elevated to the role of Unofficial Shadow President. He’s the one laying out contingency plans for the unthinkable — what happens if the octogenarian Commander-in-Chief keels over mid-term. Tony apparently took it upon himself to prepare the “Red File”: a checklist of world leaders to call, colleagues to notify, and how to choreograph her first public statement if the worst happened.
And what does Kamala do with this? She tells us — with no self-awareness — “I didn’t want to dwell on such an eventuality: I left it in his hands.”
Let’s pause. She is one heartbeat away from the nuclear codes. The literal Vice President of the United States of America. And she decided to outsource that responsibility to her brother-in-law, a lawyer who worked for her campaign, because she “didn’t want to dwell.”
Then, when pressure mounted for Biden to step down, Tony convened a meeting in the pool house with her core team — and she flat-out says she didn’t want to be part of those discussions either.
Imagine being that allergic to responsibility.
Not wanting to “dwell” on the possibility that the eighty-year-old President might… you know… die.
Not wanting to even sit in the room when the conversation turned to whether he should drop out.
Snark aside, that’s not just unserious.
That’s dereliction of duty masquerading as self-care.
And she printed it like it was cute.
Coronations and Coffee Dates
Her description of how she secured the delegates is particularly telling: she earned the coronation — and it was a coronation — not through merit or qualifications, but by gaming the delegate selection process to make sure the room was packed with people who already liked her. Translation: the system was tilted her way because she tilted it.
Reading this, I kept comparing her to Hillary Clinton.
Now, I know much of my readership despises Hillary, and some of you probably believe the Alex-Jones-level nonsense about drinking the blood of babies cloned in underground tanks. I don’t. I’m glad she didn’t win, but if she had, she would’ve been an ordinary center-left President in the same way W was an ordinary center-right one.
But the contrast here is brutal. Hillary actually prepared for the job: eleven-hour Congressional testimony, substantive Senate record, Secretary of State, serious relationships with heads of state. Kamala’s résumé moment? Manipulating a delegate pool and name-dropping Doug’s coffee run.
One woman built professional credibility with serious, job-relevant experience. The other curated social connections.
I read Hillary’s book, What Happened, and while it slipped into excuses occasionally, it was mostly explanations and it took full responsibility for the failure, over and over again.
The contrast is stark.
The Roll Call of Grievances
The extended section about the people she spent July 21, 2024 calling to secure their support reads like one long score-settling spreadsheet. It’s almost funny how naked it is.
Obama? Cool and detached, telling her she’d have to earn it. Translation: don’t count on me.
The Clintons? Bill’s basically panting with relief, Hillary eager to pack a bag and hop on Amtrak for her war council.
Pelosi? Somehow manages to drop a malapropism into what’s supposed to be a solemn endorsement: “We should have some kind of primary, not an anointment.” An anointment. Leaving that in the book is either incompetence or sabotage.
Bernie? Offers support but reminds her to focus on the working class — i.e., stop making every single policy conversation about abortion.
Gavin Newsom? Hiking. “Will call back.” He never did. That one honestly reads like a subtweet in memoir form.
She prints all of it, down to the petty digs and the faint praise, as though documenting who was groveling and who was lukewarm will somehow elevate her.
Instead, it just confirms the obvious: she’s keeping receipts like Regina George writing the Burn Book.
The Brat Rebrand
If you want a single, crystalline example of why the right has spent years calling her an empty suit, here it is. At 5:29 p.m., staff informed her that British pop star Charli XCX had declared, “Kamala is brat.” One syllable from a celebrity across the Atlantic, and suddenly her entire campaign branding pivoted. Lime green was in; “brat” was the vibe.
Think about that. The woman who wants to be the most powerful person in the world redefined her campaign’s identity not from her own convictions, not from her record, not even from American voters — but because a British singer-songwriter gave her a cheeky Instagram benediction.
This is exactly what her critics meant by empty suit. She doesn’t project a core identity so much as absorb one from whoever happens to be nearby. Today she’s brat, tomorrow she’s “fighting for the people,” the next day she’s whatever branding brainstorm her consultants dreamed up over cold brew.
She is perpetually defined by others, a political chameleon who treats borrowed vibes as substance. And because this pattern is so consistent, I won’t have to belabor the point every time it shows up again. I can just say: see the Brat section. That’s the template.
And if the Charli XCX episode weren’t enough proof, here’s the encore: she tells us the idea of running for president didn’t even cross her mind until Lawrence O’Donnell wandered over at brunch and tossed it out as a throwaway line. That’s all it took — a casual comment from a cable-news guy over eggs and coffee — and suddenly she’s off to the races.
So first a British pop star gives her a brand, and then an MSNBC host gives her a destiny. This isn’t a leader with an inner compass; it’s a balloon that drifts whichever way the nearest breeze blows.
A Hard Reset Button
To be fair, her reflections on the day after Biden dropped out do underscore that she had a uniquely difficult path.
She had just 106 days to take a campaign built for an eighty-one-year-old man who’d been in public life for over half a century and retrofit it into a campaign for herself — someone many voters still barely knew (though she doesn’t acknowledge that the lack of familiarity was her own fault).
Less than a month to redesign the convention, two weeks to vet and pick a vice president, and the unenviable job of doing all of this against an opponent who’d been effectively campaigning since he rode down the escalator in 2015.
It doesn’t erase the flaws elsewhere, but on this narrow point, the scale of the task was real. She inherited chaos and had to build a national campaign overnight — that much is true.
The Tennis Hut Chronicles
Here’s where her allergy to responsibility really shines.
For months, the Biden-Harris campaign team met in the White House “tennis hut,” where poll numbers were massaged and spun into soft lullabies: razor-thin margins? Don’t worry, no problem, nothing to see here.
And instead of cutting through the spin, asking hard questions, and insisting on clarity, Kamala sat there quietly — while kicking her husband under the table every time she got a non-answer.
That image alone tells you everything. The Vice President of the United States, too timid to demand accountability from her own campaign team, but passive-aggressively bruising her spouse’s shins like a middle schooler whispering “say something” in the cafeteria.
It’s shameful, really — a total abdication of responsibility. She wasn’t just any senator or some minor player; she was second-in-command of the country, with a campaign on the line. But in the moment? Silence.
And look, I get it. I am still learning, with the help of my therapist, to assert myself, to stand up for myself, to demand answers I’m entitled to.
So I do understand the hesitation to press, in the moment.
The difference is, I haven’t run for goddamn PRESIDENT.
Trick It Out
I’m only 11% of the way through this book, and since I’m writing as I go, I know I need to stop commenting on every little thing. But this one is just too much.
Here we have the Vice President of the United States, positioning herself to run for the highest office in the land, explaining her bold communications strategy: she put together a five-person Gen Z TikTok team and told them to “trick it out.”
Trick. It. Out.
That’s the language of a reality show contestant describing their new spray tan, not of a presidential candidate describing how they’ll reach the American electorate. It’s juvenile, unserious, and—whether she realizes it or not—part of the larger pornification of our culture, where even the language of governance gets borrowed from Instagram captions and club slang.
It would be laughable if it weren’t so revealing. Because once again, the choice of phrase says the quiet part out loud: there is no core here, no gravitas, no sense of the office she’s seeking. Just vibes, trends, and an eagerness to chase whatever makes her seem “with it” in the moment.
“Trick it out” isn’t a communications strategy. It’s an admission that the campaign is just another lifestyle brand.
The Biden Entanglement
This is the longest screenshot I’m going to use, but there’s a good reason. Go ahead and read it.
Her relationship with Biden runs through the book like a hairline fracture — not dramatic enough to be the headline, but deep enough that everything splinters around it.
She writes about him with warmth and loyalty, but also with the language of disappointment and hurt. She admits she spent the first third of her campaign speeches praising him — over and over — until David Plouffe had to sit her down and say, bluntly, “People hate Joe Biden.” Only then did she stop.
She couldn’t face the obvious until a strategist shoved it in her face.
That’s not leadership. That’s co-dependence.
It’s also another perfect example of her allergy to responsibility. She couldn’t own the reality that Biden had become a liability, so she clung to flattery until someone else told her to cut it out.
And notice the pattern: she casts herself as loyal to a fault, promising even in her own victory speeches that she would continue to “recognize Joe Biden.”
That’s not loyalty at that point — that’s erasure.
This isn’t just a side note about campaign dynamics. It’s central to understanding her.
She doesn’t lead; she mirrors.
She doesn’t assert; she defers.
She doesn’t define herself; she defines herself by proximity to whoever happens to be in the room.
The Biden dynamic is just the most glaring proof.
So this review is shorter than the book itself, going forward I’m going to refer to this section more and close-read-comment a bit less.
The Orange Man Bad Delusion
Here’s the part where her entire strategy — and her character — come into sharp relief.
Her basic line is that Joe Biden, even at eighty-one, was more knowledgeable, more capable, and more compassionate on his worst day than Donald Trump on his best. That’s the rhetorical core of her campaign: Orange Man Very Very Bad, and therefore anything else — no matter how decrepit, doddering, or incoherent — is preferable.
But this isn’t just lazy messaging. It’s disqualifying. Because either she genuinely couldn’t recognize elder abuse and presidential incapacity when it was staring her in the face, or she’s capable of convincing herself it was just “tiredness from travel.” Either way, that’s not leadership. That’s delusion or dishonesty.
And then comes the second screenshot. She actually writes: “They should have counseled him accordingly.” They should have.
They.
His inner circle. Anyone but her.
My God.
This is the Vice President of the United States, a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, claiming it was other people’s job to notice Biden’s incapacity and act accordingly. She absolves herself entirely.
“They should have.” That line alone is the perfect crystallization of her allergy to responsibility. She saw what everyone else saw — confusion, incoherence, debility — and her conclusion is that somebody else should have done something about it.
It ties directly back to the emptiness we’ve already seen: she takes her cues from others (Charli XCX, Lawrence O’Donnell, David Plouffe), mirrors instead of leads (the Biden codependency), and ducks responsibility (the Tennis Hut shin-kicking episode).
Here, she goes further — she openly admits she saw incapacity but insists it wasn’t her job to respond.
If you can’t see what’s obvious to the entire world, or worse, if you can see it and convince yourself it’s someone else’s problem, you don’t belong anywhere near the presidency. The Orange Man Bad reflex isn’t just tired. In her hands, it’s an admission that she has no core, no compass, and no business holding power.
Allergy to Responsibility: Exhibit Number 7,519
Allergy to Responsibility: Exhibit Number 7,520
The Border Non-Czar
Here we get to her infamous “border czar” role — and the section tells us more about Kamala than she probably realizes.
She complains that Republicans mischaracterized her role, that no one in the White House comms shop defended her, and that her actual work was winning billions in investment from Mastercard, Microsoft, and Nespresso. Instead of enforcing the goddamn law, she decided her job was to funnel corporate money into Central America. That’s not border enforcement; that’s economic development cosplay.
And the kicker? Even that she frames as victimhood. She wanted to “get the good news out,” but White House staff told her to wait. So she sat on it, grumbling that her story “remained untold.”
Classic Kamala: co-dependent on others to validate her, timid about pushing back, always shifting responsibility.
It’s the same pattern we’ve seen again and again: she can’t assert herself in the moment, so she casts herself as the misunderstood victim after the fact. At the border, this timidity and codependence translated into a refusal to deal with enforcement — because that would require owning responsibility. Instead, she chose the easier path: hand out money, avoid hard choices, and then whine that no one gave her credit.
It wasn’t border policy. It was PR with a corporate sponsorship package.
Israel, Gaza, and Responsibility Dodged Again
Here I’ll give her a little credit: she at least acknowledges Israel’s right to defend itself, and she’s not blind to the complications of having Netanyahu at the helm — a man who can be a jackass and still, in the wake of a pogrom like October 7, has only a narrow range of responses available. That’s more nuance than some in her party will allow.
But then, predictably, the allergy to responsibility reappears. She recounts being rattled by pro-Hamas protesters chanting “We won’t vote for genocide,” and her conclusion is that their threats were reckless. What she never does is the hard work: confronting the reality that a virulent, anti-Semitic wing of her own coalition was openly trying to blackmail her. She never names it. She never grapples with it.
Instead, it’s the same pattern: externalize the blame, complain about how unfair it all is, and move on. The nuance she can muster for Netanyahu evaporates when it comes to her own base.
Once again, responsibility is someone else’s job.
The Chaos of the Page (and the Podium)
The book itself is a mess — badly organized, jumping back and forth in time, tangling anecdotes with reflections in a way that makes it hard to track. To be generous (and I am being very generous here), maybe this is intentional. Maybe the jumble is meant to echo the chaos of a campaign compressed into just 107 days. That’s possible.
But the more obvious explanation is that she — or the ghostwriter — just couldn’t impose order on the material.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the cluster of sections covering the final 90–100 days before the election, which read like a scrapbook of insecurity rather than a coherent narrative. Three examples stand out:
First, the VP selection. She earnestly tells us Pete Buttigieg would have been her top choice — but dismisses him because America supposedly couldn’t handle a ticket with “a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man and a gay man.” My view: what nonsense. A gay VP wouldn’t have cost her votes in 2024. Swing voters were swinging on Trump. A Buttigieg pick might even have given some of them a virtuous reason to swing towards her. Passing on him wasn’t savvy caution. It was timidity, dressed up as realism.
Second, the convention. She frames it not as an opportunity to present a governing vision, but as the moment she would “reclaim [her] narrative and [her] identity.” That’s not statesmanship. That’s branding. And it crystallizes the “empty suit” problem better than anything her critics could have written.
Third, the debate prep. And here, the ghostwriter really earns their paycheck. She recounts being told not to be a “wonk,” not to worry about substance, and to remember that the person “having the most fun” is the one who’s winning. To remind herself, she drew a smiley face at the top of her notepad. I cannot imagine a more on-the-nose caricature of her critics’ view of her — unserious, shallow, all vibes.
Taken together, these snapshots are remarkable. In the most consequential stretch of the campaign, she reveals herself not as someone driven by vision, but as someone preoccupied with optics, allergic to risk, and more at ease doodling than defining.
If the chaos of the book mirrors the chaos of the campaign, it does so a little too well.
A Glimpse of What Could Have Been
Every so often, the book offers a flash of something better — something that hints at what Harris might have become had she ever built a genuine core around her instincts. One of those flashes comes in her description of how she vetted her VP finalists.
Instead of relying only on résumés or staged interviews, she brought in her residence manager, Storm Horncastle, a woman with no political agenda but a finely tuned sense of dignity and character. Harris wanted to see how the finalists treated someone they might otherwise perceive as less powerful.
That is, frankly, smart. It’s the kind of test that reveals more than a debate performance ever could, and it reflects an insight rooted in her own family’s experience with being underestimated or dismissed.
For once, the instinct is not about branding, or vibes, or self-preservation. It’s about whether someone carries respect for others into the small, unseen moments.
And Harris deserves genuine credit for it. If she had taken this seed — this sensitivity to the treatment of those without power — and nurtured it into a coherent set of principles, she might have become a very different kind of leader.
But she didn’t. Instead, the flashes like this remain isolated, swallowed up by the larger pattern: the branding obsession, the allergy to responsibility, the disorganized narrative, the endless score-settling.
In another world, this small section could have been the foundation of a book that revealed genuine moral seriousness.
Instead, it’s the exception that proves the rule.
The VP Pick: A Masterclass in Abdication
The vice presidential pick is one of the few decisions in a campaign that actually belongs to the candidate alone. It’s supposed to reveal judgment, priorities, and backbone.
Which means this part of Harris’s book is devastating — not because of what she admits outright, but because of what she reveals without realizing it.
By her own account, Pete Buttigieg was her first choice. She gushes about his résumé, his ability to spar with Fox News, and the sheer competence he brought to the table. And she admits he would have been the ideal partner — if only he had been straight and white. That’s not my gloss; that’s her reasoning in black and white.
But let’s be sane: a gay VP would not have cost her votes. Swing voters in this election were swinging because of Trump fatigue, and pairing herself with Pete could have given them exactly the kind of virtuous self-congratulation that helps swing votes land. Instead, she let fear drive the choice.
Josh Shapiro made her nervous for the opposite reason: he wanted to be in the room for every decision. Her response? “Every day as president, I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”
That’s not leadership. That’s an allergy to strong colleagues — an admission that she’d rather have someone who won’t challenge her than someone who could actually help govern.
And so we come to Tim Walz.
Walz wasn’t threatening. He wasn’t ambitious. He wasn’t going to be a “problem.” And Harris all but admits that the final choice wasn’t hers anyway. She leaned on her staff. She polled her family.
She even asked a 17-year-old godson what he thought. His verdict? “Auntie, I like him.” And that — along with the unanimous comfort of her senior staff — is what carried the day.
She literally ignored her own instincts, passed over the candidate she herself wanted, and defaulted to what the people around her, including a teenager, told her to do.
And then she made a pork roast.
Good grief.
Just In Case You Forgot This Is About Score Settling
Because nothing says “leader of the free world” like grinding a personal axe about J.D. Vance loitering on the tarmac.
Or That She’s Got All the Seriousness of A Teen Vogue Columnist
She says this: At my very first convention, in Los Angeles in 2000, I’d been a committed young Dem who hadn’t yet run for anything. My bestie, Chrisette, who later introduced me to Doug, attended with me, sitting high up in the rafters, cheering for Al Gore.
I get that friends come in varying degrees of importance and intimacy, and communicating that can matter.
But this woman ran for President. President!
If I’m talking about
, who I’ve literally trusted with my life and who knows more of my secrets than anyone but my therapist, I might say “my dear friend” or even “my very dear friend.” With others, I might say “my friend” or “my good friend.”But “bestie”? That’s bubblegum stuff — the vocabulary of brunch selfies, not of someone who wanted the nuclear codes.
And it doesn’t stop there. She also tells us that even though it’s not tradition for the nominee to speak on the first night of the convention, she planned a “surprise” appearance to welcome everybody and praise “our incredible president.”
Translation: a TikTok-tier stunt staged for applause, dressed up as if it were strategy.
Less commander-in-chief, more theater-kid energy.
The Convention Speech
I remember being impressed — it was a good speech, delivered well.
But in her book, Harris lets slip that it went through twenty-seven drafts. And I believe it. Because it probably did take twenty-seven drafts to make her sound like an adult woman instead of a vibes-based intern.
And the insecurity behind it shows. She admits that a professional voice coach had offered to help her “limber up” her vocal presentation, which meant standing there emitting animal noises. Instead of owning it, she dragged her entire staff into the exercise — “we could all be embarrassed together.”
That’s not leadership. That’s hiding. Twenty-seven drafts, a chorus of grunts and trills, and still the through-line is the same: she can only project confidence when other people scaffold it for her.
The First Interview
The first big interview after securing the nomination should have been Harris’s moment to prove she could stand on her own. Instead, she insisted on having Walz at her side — not out of strategy, but because she “felt off [her] game.” Bash barely asked him anything, and the whole setup just fed into the narrative that she couldn’t go it alone. It was much ballyhooed at the time for making her look dependent, and her own account confirms exactly that.
She tries to frame her answers with little post-facto wisdom, like this: “I should have simply said, I haven’t done those things because I am not president—yet.” On the surface, it sounds tidy, even plausible. But here’s the problem: that explanation would only work if she had ever shown any spine in separating herself from Biden, or even admitted the obvious truth about his incapacity.
Instead, it’s not an explanation at all. It’s an excuse — one more way of outsourcing responsibility for her own failure to stand up straight when the lights were on her.
The Debate
I’ll give her this much: Harris won the debate. Not decisively, but enough to claim the edge. (Remember Trump’s answer on healthcare, that he had “concepts of a plan”? Yeah, she did outperform him. Sorry not sorry.)
She landed a few sharp jabs, stayed standing, and did what she needed to do — aided by him having quite a bad night. (Concepts of a plan.)
But the way she describes the run-up to it in her own book exposes a deeper insecurity she never quite shakes.
She frames the pressure as though she were a prizefighter walking into the ring — but unlike a fighter, she couldn’t even cut off a phone call from someone distracting her at the worst possible time. She let it rattle her, made it “all about him,” and needed Doug to calm her down like a coach soothing a spooked athlete. Why not just say, “I have to go focus now”? Why not set a boundary?
That’s the pattern: even in moments where she performs well — and in this case, she did — the book itself betrays how much scaffolding, reassurance, and outside support it takes to get her there. It’s hard to read it and see strength. What you see instead is someone who wins narrowly, but only after being carried to the stage.
It was a narrow win, but instead of building on it with clarity and confidence, the chapters that follow collapse back into her default mode — Orange Man Bad, blame-shifting, and responsibility-dodging — setting up her telling of the VP debate as though that, too, were mainly about what she could avoid rather than what she could own.
I’ve said over and over that she’s a parody of herself, and then she goes and proves it: she literally validates her own life through a Saturday Night Live sketch, proudly noting how “uncanny” it was in portraying her evening.
The following weekend, Saturday Night Live did a sketch in which actors posed as Doug and me, sitting on our couch, watching the debate. While I did not in fact spit out wine, it was otherwise uncanny in its portrait of our evening.
The View
If there’s a single episode that crystallizes the themes I’ve been hammering — Orange Man Bad, allergy to responsibility, lack of core, and timidity dressed up as virtue — it’s her chapter on The View.
And the kicker? It’s a super short chapter, almost as if she herself didn’t grasp the gravity of what had just happened.
She walked onstage to applause, basked in Whoopi’s glowing introduction, and answered a question about how she differed from Biden with a pile of platitudes.
When Sunny Hostin pressed her — “What would you have done differently than President Biden in the past four years?” — she had notes in hand with several good answers.
She even had one prepped line that would’ve made news for the right reasons. But instead she defaulted to her core instinct: deflect, blur, avoid.
She said, “There isn’t a thing that comes to mind.”
That one answer, of course, was a gift to the Trump campaign. It was replayed over and over, chaining her to Biden’s unpopularity. Later, she admits in the book that she knew people wanted a separation, that she underestimated how badly, and that she should’ve said something.
But she can’t even describe this moment without layering excuse on excuse: she didn’t want to be cruel, didn’t see a way to separate without “embracing the cruelty of my opponent,” wanted to stay in the “zone of trust” with Biden.
In other words — the allergy to responsibility, yet again.
Her campaign staff had to stage an intervention. David Plouffe spelled it out: “People hate Joe Biden.” But even then, she frames the whole thing as though she were the victim of impossible constraints, not the protagonist of her own candidacy.
The brevity of the chapter almost reads like an unconscious confession: she didn’t want to dwell on it because the truth is plain.
The View moment was her chance to show spine, to demonstrate independence, to prove she wasn’t a placeholder.
Instead, it was the perfect display of her deepest weakness: she can’t bring herself to take responsibility, even when the stakes are existential.
The They/Them Ad
Here’s the one place in the book where Kamala Harris finally shows a spine — and of course, it’s in defense of the indefensible.
She devotes her passion, her righteous fury, not to protecting children, or confronting corruption, or demanding responsibility from her own party, but to defending the so-called “right” of parents to have their children undergo irreversible medical interventions that those children cannot possibly consent to.
Let’s be plain about the moral stakes here. Advocates want 12-year-old girls — who cannot legally consent to an adult touching their breasts — to be permitted to consent to having those same breasts surgically removed by an adult.
They call this “love.” It is, in reality, moral insanity. Child abuse dressed up in the rhetoric of compassion. A textbook Cluster B reversal: cruelty and mutilation reframed as kindness, dissent recast as bigotry.
And yet here is Harris, fiery and unyielding in her defense of it. The single sharpest, most forceful passage in her entire book is not about national security, not about Biden’s incapacity, not about the border, not even about the campaign itself — it’s this.
She reserves her spine for the cause of institutionalized child mutilation, and dares to cast it as an issue of parent’s rights!!
This isn’t just about Harris. It’s about the Democratic Party itself. The transgender craze owns them, body and soul, and they still haven’t figured it out.
They can’t back away without detonating their own coalition, and so they double down — even at the presidential level, even when the political costs are obvious. Harris’s book proves the point: this was the one place she managed to write with conviction.
And it’s on behalf of a movement that demands the surgical sterilization of children.
Joe Rogan
The Rogan chapter is one of those “you almost feel bad for her” sections.
Almost.
She recounts how her team had been negotiating with Rogan’s people for weeks, only to find out that on the date she was told he was “taking a personal day,” Rogan was in fact taping a marathon interview with Trump.
And you know what? I believe her. Rogan’s judgment is abominable in enough ways, and he’s surrounded by enough sycophants, that her version of the story sounds entirely plausible.
But here’s the thing: whatever the scheduling snafus, whatever the last-minute demands about location and timing, this was a chance she couldn’t afford to miss. Rogan’s audience is overwhelmingly young, male, and not otherwise inclined to tune in to a Kamala Harris stump speech.
If she wanted to reach them, this was the one way in.
And she admits she wanted to do it. But then she lists all the reasons why it couldn’t work — her Houston rally, travel logistics, her team’s concerns. In the end, Rogan went with Trump, and that became the story.
My take? They should have made it happen, even if it meant swallowing Rogan’s terms whole.
Was it a risk? Sure.
Would it have been uncomfortable? Absolutely.
But it was the kind of risk you take when the stakes are this high. Instead, she did what she always does: leaned on the excuses, found reasons not to push harder, and wrote it all up later as if the missed opportunity were inevitable. It wasn’t.
It was just another moment where she couldn’t summon the will to break the pattern.
The Garbage Debacle
This is one of those passages where you almost can’t believe she thought it was a good idea to put it in print. Biden goes on a call with Voto Latino and says, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
Predictably, it blows up — instantly reframed as Hillary’s “deplorables” on steroids. The Trump campaign weaponizes it, Marco Rubio runs onstage at a rally to hammer it, and within hours it’s a full-blown problem.
And Harris? She actually writes that the real issue was that “on a Zoom call, no one can hear a possessive apostrophe.” I am not making that up. That’s her explanation: Biden really meant Trump’s supporter’s garbage — as if the whole fiasco could be smoothed away by grammar pedantry.
This is the allergy to responsibility in its purest form. Instead of admitting that Biden screwed up, or that the campaign failed to manage the fallout, she doubles down on wordplay and insists the problem was perception.
It’s unseriousness dressed up as analysis. The garbage debacle wasn’t just a Biden gaffe — it was another window into Harris’s instinct to excuse, deflect, and pretend words mean something other than what everyone heard.
Election Day
If the book had even a flicker of honesty about her own character, Election Day would have been the place to show it. Instead, what comes through most clearly is weakness.
She describes the day in painstaking detail: Doritos for volunteers, meditation passages about “standing,” a family dinner with baba ghanoush and cupcakes iced with “Madame President.” And then — the unraveling. Early Fox calls going badly. Georgia slipping. The dawning realization that the path to victory was narrowing to nothing. Her staff scrambling to pull lines from drafts while she sat upstairs, stunned.
The line that says it all is the one I highlighted, the only one from this chapter: “It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book.”
Read that again. The night she was running for president, the night she supposedly bore the weight of democracy on her shoulders, she collapsed so completely she couldn’t even talk to her own husband about it.
Not for weeks, not for months, not until she turned it into content.
That’s not resilience. That’s not leadership. That’s fragility. And the fact that she presents it here as a sort of poignant confession — as if it reveals depth — only underscores the problem.
Once again, the story isn’t about facing hard truths, taking responsibility, or even finding the steel to fight through.
It’s about evasion, silence, and, ultimately, weakness dressed up as memoir.
Afterword (Hers) and Conclusion (Mine)
The afterword is exactly what you’d expect: one last screed about how Orange Man is Bad, democracy is fragile, and America must be saved from itself. It’s repetitive, it’s predictable, and it reads like it was lifted wholesale from a stack of DNC talking points.
Nothing new. Nothing surprising. Nothing earned.
And that, really, is the story of this book.
It is not the memoir of a leader.
It is the diary of a codependent striver who somehow convinced herself — and too many others — that evasion and excuse-making were qualities of statesmanship.
Page after page, it’s Orange Man Bad, punctuated by moments of almost breathtaking fragility and self-absorption. She cannot own a mistake, cannot separate herself from Biden, cannot summon a core identity beyond curating friends and issuing platitudes. She is, in these pages, the parody of herself I’ve been describing all along.
But here’s the poignant part: it didn’t have to be this way. The flashes of potential — her recognition of how people treat those they perceive as powerless, or her appreciation for Tim Walz’s knack for noticing who isn’t in the room — show that there was a seed of something that could have been real.
She could have become a principled, grounded leader. There’s some instinct there, certainly intelligence — just no depth. And depth only comes from responsibility: from screwing up, owning it, and learning how to do better.
She has no depth.
Instead, she gave herself over to the politics of performance, the reflex of excuse, and the cult of Orange Man Bad.
The result is this book: 107 days of excuses dressed up as explanations, of timidity masquerading as humility, of weakness reframed as trauma.
It is both boring and revealing, both petty and pathetic.
And if the question is whether Kamala Harris should ever again be entrusted with national leadership, this book gives the clearest possible answer.
Not just no. But God, no.
Making history demands courage.
Kamala Harris offered excuses about silent apostrophes and smiley faces in her debate notes.
Unserious.
Fragile.
And exactly who her critics said she was.