It appears no one was more taken aback over Donald Trump’s victory than former Vice President Kamala Harris, whose tight political circle had been enraptured with confidence on election night.

“It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that [my husband] Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in her new memoir, 107 Days, which functions as a reflective and candid postmortem.

The former Vice President Harris said the Biden team were cautious of her from the outset, due partly to the dynamic between the president and the vice president coupled with the fact that she challenged Biden about his opposition to federally mandated school bussing during a 2019 democratic candidate debate. As a result, Harris said getting Biden’s inner circle to publicly say anything positive about her work “was almost impossible” and even seemed to encourage negative stories about her.

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well,” Harris wrote. “That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassure me that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him.”

Harris was more than candid in discussing what she perceived as the intersection of race, gender and religion. She explicitly stated former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, was her “first choice” as running mate and he “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”

“We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” Harris wrote, noting adding a gay man to the ticket would’ve been “too big a risk.”

A sizable percentage of voters harbor conservative positions on homosexuality and abortion. Many who declare they have no problem with interracial or gay marriage in public make all sorts of derogatory remarks behind closed doors. We reside in a politically correct society that is nevertheless rife with hate, deception, and hypocrisy, on view every night on Fox News.

“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé,” Harris wrote. Her husband, former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, made his displeasure at what he perceived to be the shabby treatment of his wife well known. As Emhoff saw it, Joe Biden’s staff sidelined his wife and handed her “impossible, s– jobs.”

To her credit, Harris concedes to making mistakes, particularly a damaging appearance on The View last fall where she failed to offer a single thing she would have done differently than Biden. The truth is she was less articulate than one might expect from a politician with her experience.

The most revelatory and disturbing parts of the book are Harris’s recollections of being part of an administration that too often viewed her as a burden. Like many things in life, being the first is often challenging and burdensome. Kamala Harris was the first woman, Black person, and Asian American to be selected vice president.

Weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump, Harris became the first woman of color to be a major American political party’s presumptive nominee for president. If we are being honest, much of the derision directed toward the former vice president was rooted in the dual demons of racism and sexism. Many people, including white liberals, resented the fact that a woman of color had obtained the position of vice president, let alone garnered the nomination of her party for president. As many of them saw it, a white woman should have been the first choice for such an opportunity.

Vice president is a paradoxical position. It is one heartbeat from the presidency yet a considerable distance from much of the vital action. They linger in obscure shadows. Up until the early 1960s, the phone number of the vice president was printed in the phone book.

Throughout his presidency, Biden often said that choosing Harris as his running mate was “the best decision I made in my whole career.” That sounded like Biden’s endorsement of Harris as the natural successor to the oldest president in American history. Whether she decides to make another run for public office remains to be seen.

Regardless of her plans, Harris has accomplished more than most people and has no reason to feel inadequate.

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Copyright 2025 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.