The biggest political revelations from Kamala Harris' new memoir "107 Days"

Well, former Vice President Kamala Harris back in the spotlight ten months after losing to Donald Trump in the race for president. Harris out today with 107 Days, a memoir that takes readers behind the scenes of her abbreviated campaign to succeed Joe Biden. Revelations from the book reverberating through the political world. With more, we're joined once again by Politico senior political reporter Melanie Mason. Melanie, good to see you again. Your article on 107 Days called it a score-settling, elbow-throwing, bridge-burning memoir. We'll get to the bridge-burning in a moment, but explain your initial reaction. What surprised you? And why do you think Harris wanted to tell her story now in September of a non-election year? Well, remember, she has been working on this book pretty much since she left office. And to me, I think that was in some ways the most surprising, you know, look, this is a politician who I've covered for many, many years. And she's always come across as pretty buttoned up, right? She's not necessarily somebody that's going to go off script, maybe really let us into what she's really thinking. And this, to some extent, I don't want to overstate it, but this is certainly a way more unfiltered version of the former vice president than I've ever seen. And so I think that that was quite surprising. And I think what it does is it tells us that she was using this book as a way for her to work through the many emotions that she had about this whirlwind campaign. And you know, Harris focuses on her truncated campaign on policy, but she's making the biggest headlines with her pointed antidotes of fellow Democrats, namely Pete Buttigieg, who she says was her first pick for VP over Tim Walz, but admits she could not risk choosing a gay running mate. Those comments causing quite a stir in the book and on the press tour. That's right. In fact, in her first major media interview last night with Rachel Maddow, she was asked directly about this. And in some ways, she partially walked it back. She maybe acknowledged perhaps she was being too cautious. But what she was giving us insight into her mind was that she saw herself as a black woman, a mixed race woman, as she says, with a Jewish husband that was running for president. And that perhaps if she was a straight white man, the idea of asking voters to make history in choosing an openly gay running mate might be palatable. But she worried that it'd be too risky with all of these various history making elements, all of these firsts on one election ticket. She thought that that might be too much. And what's been interesting is that I think she has faced some backlash from it, because I think there are people within the Democratic Party who find that to be a pretty surprising or difficult thought to hear. Yeah. Outside of the deep stakes, Harris also writes about not questioning President Biden's decision to run again. She says, in part, quote, of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. Was it grace or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. Others seizing on those words, including Josh Shapiro, who's asking why Harris didn't speak out sooner about Biden's capacity, a reaction. This was always going to be the hardest needle that she had to thread because she was the most loyal lieutenant, in some ways, to the former president, to former President Biden. But it also raises some real questions. If she worked as closely with him as she purports that she has, was she not being upfront to the American people about his status, about whether it was proper for him to seek reelection? And so I think it's very interesting, that word recklessness, it kind of landed with a thud as soon as we saw that in the excerpts, because I think that there is a real sort of reckoning that's going on, and not just with people in the Biden inner circle, not just with President Biden himself, but she said she's referring to herself there, that perhaps she should have been more upfront about her reservations, her concerns, and maybe this honest assessment of, look, maybe that wasn't the right move for him to go ahead with this reelection campaign. All right. And now to that bridge burning that Micah referenced earlier, Harris, does he praise on fellow Democrats? But what is the strategy of speaking out against Biden, against Newsom, Buttigieg, Shapiro and others who may have 2028 ambitions? David Axelrod has said that if there was a political strategy, it's a bad one. I think that that's the conversation that's happening among Democratic insider circles all across the country right now, is what was she trying to accomplish with this book? And I think based on conversations with people in her inner circle, from my experience with covering her for a long time, I think maybe the most honest answer is that there wasn't a strategy. I think this was really a kind of working through of this remarkable moment that she went through and trying to make sense of it all. I don't know if she was calculating so much of let's try and take down my rivals a notch or two, three years out of a potential 2028 primary. But look, I think that the Democratic establishment, it's a really small world. It's a really insular world. And so when you see these types of jabs, even if they are accompanied by lots and lots of praise, as it is in the book for a lot of these figures, even the slightest hint of a sharp elbow, if you were there, is really going to ruffle some feathers. Yeah. And those are the things they tend to remember. So what's next for Harris? Exactly. One Democratic operative told you in Elena Schneider that this seems like a good riddance to politics. Do you buy it? Look, I think that she's still trying to figure out what exactly she wants her future to look like. She did announce that she's not running for governor in California and she closed that door. And when she did that, she talked about how she looked at maybe looking outside of institutions as the next way for her to contribute. And it was very frank and interesting to hear somebody who has been in public service for decades to say that maybe her next chapter would be serving in a different type of way. But that said, when I asked people, should we interpret this as a I'm done burning it all down? They advised me against that. I think that she has not yet decided what she wants to do next. And so I think that she figures that this is a way to clear the decks, to answer some questions about what happened in 2024, so then she can figure out what her next chapter looks like. All right. Thank you so much for once again joining us, Melanie Mason, senior political reporter at Politico. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Melanie.