With “107 Days” and “Independent,” Two Black Women Fight Over the Custody of Joe Biden’s Legacy
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While on the presidential campaign trail, one of her staffers brought Kamala Harris in on a little secret: “People hate Joe Biden.” This had apparently not occurred to the vice president, even after the formation of the Uncommitted Movement, or the then ongoing college protests, or the dozens of disruptions at various political events in response to Biden’s unfettered support of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Gaza Strip. Or not even as she stood in the midst of her history-making run for the White House. “It was hard for me to hear that,” Harris writes.
In her new memoir, 107 Days, Harris devotes an extensive amount of time to writing about her relationship with President Biden, as she assumed the position of Democratic nominee for president after Biden’s abysmal performance at the presidential debate in June 2024 heightened criticisms around his age and cognitive health. “The rapport between Joe and me was genuine. For two people who seemingly couldn’t have been more different, our values were incredibly aligned,” she writes.
It's a significant shift from when people first saw the pair interact in 2019 on the debate stage, where Harris zeroed in on Biden about his views on busing and desegregation. It was one of the early moments in her campaign that made the California senator seem like the destined choice to become the party’s nominee. In the years that followed, however, after Harris ended her first campaign for president before primary voting even began and later became Biden’s vice president, some people have used that moment in the debate to question her fealty to the president.
In one terse exchange that Harris details in the book, the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, confronts Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, about his and Harris’ perceived disloyalty to the president during the weeks when pressure for Biden to step down was mounting. “‘They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them. Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people,” Emhoff says to Harris after his conversation with Dr. Biden. “And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?”
You learn early and often thereafter, while reading 107 Days, that loyalty is the trait Harris most defines herself by. She even uses a lyric from Kendrick Lamar’s song “DNA,” where he raps, “I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA,” as one of the book’s theme setting quotes. It’s loyalty, she says, that led her not to suggest that Biden shouldn’t seek reelection, even as his health came into serious question. Even as she insists that if she saw something that concerned her, she would’ve spoken because, as she writes: “As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
One gets the impression that we’re meant to greet the information of Harris’ undying deference to Biden with admiration, but it only dredges up the same feelings of frustrated pity that any story about a woman being loyal to a man who doesn’t deserve it brings up. Especially as she writes about all the ways in which her allegiance was not reciprocated.
She writes at length about how, during her tenure in the White House, it was “impossible” to get Biden’s communication team to say anything positive about her work or to defend her against what she characterized as baseless attacks. She even went so far as to say that Biden’s staff often added “fuel to negative narratives,” such as with stories about her high staff turnover or when republicans accused her of being a “border czar.” She attributes much of this behavior to it being some sort of hazing ritual for having “gone after him” during the 2019 debates. “It seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”
The vice presidency isn’t a sexy role. Its proximity to totalizing power can sometimes obfuscate that fact. For Harris, she wrote that she thought of the job as an “apprenticeship.” But even as one occupying the role achieves a chance at mobility, they are often shrouded by the decisions of the previous incumbent. There was the infamous moment in her interview on The View, where host Sunny Hostin asked Harris: “If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Harris replied: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” “Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?” she later writes.
Harris’ career has long been subsumed by the legacies of others, stymying her ability to forge her own path. In 2009, when Harris was promoting her book Smart on Crime on The Today Show, journalist Matt Lauer asked her to respond to claims that she had the makings to be a “female Obama.” It was a thin comparison that relied heavily on the two of them being Black biracials with vaguely progressive politics, but such a compliment at the time was akin to a golden elevator to the top. In the years that followed, Harris was fully embraced by Obama as she was invited to speak at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. She even became the subject of controversy after the 44th president apologized for commenting on how attractive she was.
But the qualities that made for an excellent Obama protégé in 2009 proved to make for a poor candidate in 2024. Even before the recent right-wing campaign against DEI, there had already been a growing left-wing fatigue over the representational politics that animated the Obama years. Being the “first” [insert marginalized identity] isn’t a testament to one’s own personal accomplishments as much as it is a statement on an institution's loosening of its previous rigidity, oftentimes as a means of self-preservation.
Harris was bestowed the honor of being vice president after it was reported that South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn urged Biden to pick a Black woman as a gesture of appreciation to Biden’s Black female supporters. (“The pressure was on [Biden] to pick a Black woman running mate,” Harris would later confirm in her book.) It's also not lost on many people that Harris’ nomination came at the height of protests against police brutality in 2020. Harris’ time as a self-described “top cop” had proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for some voters to overcome in the tail end of the Black Lives Matter era when she was running for president. Biden, who was still trying to rectify his own legacy regarding mass incarceration, especially in regards to the 1994 Crime Bill, continued to leverage his relationship with the Black managerial class as a way to circumvent any real confrontation on the matter.
Harris’ unconditional loyalty to Biden is emblematic of a more pernicious ideology. That institutions are to be defended, no matter how archaic they are or how little they reciprocate. In an interview with Stephen Colbert leading up to the release of 107 Days, Harris confessed that she now believes that the system is broken and that she’d be most useful working outside the system. It's a reversal, she says, of the previous mindset that she had since the early years of her career as a prosecutor, when she believed that one could change the system from the inside. But 107 Days proves that Harris is uninterested in actually dismantling the system or denouncing her previous participation in it.
Even as Harris rests in the purgatorial space between private citizen and public servant, she still chooses to take center-right positions on hot-button issues. She says she is “concerned,” like many parents and athletes, about the fairness surrounding allowing transgender student athletes to play, while also defending her record of representing the state’s case against a transgender inmate who sued to receive gender affirming care.
Her writing on the genocide in Gaza, arguably one of the most consequential issues in the election, will not assuage the feelings of anyone who wondered if she would break from Biden on the matter if she had become president.
She insists that she pushed Biden to “extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians,” but never shows any of this grace herself. She accuses protestors of specifically targeting her throughout the campaign, which led to the infamous moment where she tells a disrupter at a campaign rally: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then just say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking!” She questions in the book why there weren’t ever any protests at Trump rallies, which is untrue, but the kind of thing she has to say to keep what’s left of her diminishing base riled up.
She brings up the controversy around the fact that a Palestinian was not invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention, but never details why that was. She repeats reports that Hamas had committed mass rape against Israeli women on October 7th, which has long come under question for its accuracy. She relays a statistic about how there’s been “ten thousand incidents of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism, and more than 150 physical assaults.” She doesn’t cite her source for these figures, but one Google search leads you directly to the Anti-Defamation League’s website —- an organization that admitted that they include “certain expressions of animus toward the Jewish State of Israel” in their definition of anti-Semitism.
She goes on to juxtapose the murder of Wadee Alfayoumi, a six-year-old Palestinian boy in Illinois who was killed by his landlord with "synagogues, temples, and Jewish community centers scrambling to protect themselves with new security measures”; The shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont with “posters of hostages being defaced and torn down from walls in New York City.” On the various campus protests that erupted in response to the genocide, she writes that it: “created an atmosphere of tension and fear” amongst Jewish students. How were the Palestinian students faring during these protests? She doesn’t say.
She recalls Biden and her meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and how frustrated she was with the Israeli prime minister for being “bent on undermining Joe Biden, one of Israel’s strongest allies.” Elsewhere, she writes about Biden’s financial support of Israel as being merely a “perceived blank check,” even though Biden routinely circumvented Congress in order to approve arms sales to Israel. “That loyalty meant nothing to Netanyahu,” she writes.
Much like Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre also thinks the system is broken. The former press secretary for Biden goes a bit further than the former Vice President by declaring that she’s now politically independent. “After being a party insider for twenty years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within,” she writes in her new book.
In Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, Jean-Pierre details her breakup with the Democratic Party, prompted by the three weeks following Biden’s June presidential debate, where Democratic leaders led a soft coup to remove him as the nominee. “I was angry and sad,” she writes. “I was enraged and heartbroken that this man had given more than fifty years of his life to serving the American people, and in the end, he’d been treated poorly by members of his own party.”
It's unclear what being independent actually means in practice for Jean-Pierre, and her book offers no clarity. It's only been about eleven months since her time at the White House working under a democratic administration ended. There hadn’t even been an election for her to vote in by the time this book was released for her to flex her new political identity. What exactly would she know about being an independent enough to impart her wisdom onto the American people?
It’s for reasons like these that make it difficult to expend too much intellectual energy on Jean-Pierre's thoughts on the futility of the two-party system when she can’t even commit to an interesting enough grift. Breaking up with the democrats to become even more politically feckless? Really compelling stuff.
She writes that being an independent means “to be unaffiliated with any party, free to cast your vote depending on the individual candidate or issue rather than in allegiance to a dictated party line.” But she confesses that she would never vote republican and that she doesn’t “think supporting a third-party candidate is a good idea.”
She cites people like Bernie Sanders (a registered democrat), Oprah, LL Cool J (two noted non-politicians), and Robert Kennedy Jr. (c’mon now), as examples of the ideological diversity of independents, without ever clarifying the figures that most align with her political sensibilities.
Her vision for being an independent leads her to advocate for strategies that ultimately strengthen the democratic party instead of dismantling it. She said people can hold democrats accountable by “becoming an independent, making [the democrats] fight harder for our support and priorities.”
Many of the inconsistencies throughout the book can be attributed to her ultimate reasons for breaking with the Democrats. It cannot be overstated how much of her newfound angst against the party stems from how upset she is about Biden being forced to step down as the party’s nominee. Independent politics feels like a mere contrivance for Jean-Pierre to expel her feelings about how quote unfair unquote the party was in its treatment of Biden. She writes breathless defense after breathless defense of Biden’s fitness, characterizing anyone who questioned his cognitive capacity as antagonists. She described George Clooney’s Op-Ed, where he urged the president to drop out of the race, as a “gut punch.” She accuses journalists who asked questions about Biden’s mental fortitude after the debate of “waiting for something to happen because they were looking for something to happen.” She goes into temporary shock when Biden breaks the news to her and other members of his team that he has decided to step down. “I was numb,” she writes.
After reading 107 Days, which was announced months after Independent, it's downright egregious to read another account from a Black woman going on and on about how it's Joe Biden who is the ultimate victim of the 2024 election. Are we really meant to take seriously anyone who thinks people being mean to her boss is a much bigger issue than literally anything else going on in the world right now, that it compels her to write a book and go on a media tour about it?
Biden has had his illustrious decades spanning career, and time will write and rewrite his legacy over and over again. Instead of investing in a shred of self-preservation over their own dwindling careers by using their books to write a new chapter in their lives, both Harris and Jean-Pierre use the bulk of their memoirs to exalt Biden, something one could reasonably suspect they’re doing primarily because the only worthwhile parts of their legacies are inextricably tied to his. It feels inept to even call them boring careerists when they both have habitually shown to dim where someone with an ounce more ambition would’ve shone.
Even how they see one another is compromised by their allegiance to Biden. Jean-Pierre writes about her relationship with Harris, recalling a time in 2019 she physically protected the then senator from an animal rights protester who barged on stage. When Harris called her the next day to check on her, Jean-Pierre was caught off guard by the kind gesture. Jean-Pierre would even go on to become Harris’ chief of staff.
When Harris became the official democratic nominee, however, Jean-Pierre said that she “realized once again Biden had made history,” a truly odd way to greet the news that a Black-Indian woman had become the face of a major political party. It’s not dissimilar to say sort of deligtimization that she accuses others of doing to Harris. Further, she writes that it showed how “loyal and strategic” Biden was by “passing [Harris] the baton.”
Harris recounts things differently in her book. She recalls having to practically beg Biden to endorse her immediately after he stepped down, when he told her that he originally planned to wait a few days when he would address the nation to do so. “That would be ruinous, and I said so.”
Jean-Pierre’s most damning revelation comes when she says that she didn't believe Harris could win. Even with these feelings, however, she couldn’t believe that there were people within the party who wanted to have an open convention, going as far as to say the decision would've been “disrespectful to Black women, the ride or die foot soldiers of the Democratic Party.” It is those same “ride or dies” who have experienced some of the brunt of Trump’s cruelty, with over 300,000 Black women being pushed out of the workforce in response to republican led backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
But it's fine. Jean-Pierre couldn’t speak up about Harris’ inability to beat Trump. Harris couldn’t speak up about damn near anything during her time in the White House. But both of them want to assure us now that they have rid themselves of their past cowardice long enough to guide us all out of fascism.
