Oh what a time to be alive in America. I’m reading 107 Days, Kamala Harris’s memoir of her 107-day presidential campaign and my gosh, I cannot believe that this all happened just a short year ago. Less than one short year, we are 70 percent down the road toward the fascism finish line, and the rest of the road is downhill and icy (in more ways than one).
I was about to say that I can’t believe how bad it’s actually been, but I absolutely can and do believe it. I’ve been expecting the worst since 2015, pretty much since the day Trump came down that infamous escalator. Ten years later, he is still wreaking havoc and still riding escalators and every day is proof of the idea that you can be shocked and unsurprised all at once. Every day, I’m shocked by what these people are doing to this country, but I’m never surprised.
*****
One of the many things that I find really humbling is that when I read books about recent history, I will realize as I’m reading that I remember little or nothing about episodes that were huge news just five or ten years ago. Same thing goes for biographies of contemporary figures, people I think I know a lot about - I find that I know pretty much nothing. But I read VP Harris’s earlier memoir, The Truths We Hold, just a few months ago, so I was pretty solid on her biographical details. As for the historical details of the 2024 campaign, I found that I remembered pretty much everything Kamala Harris describes almost exactly as she describes it, and as though it all happened yesterday. I mean, it DID happen yesterday, relatively speaking - it’s not even a year since the 2024 election. But it also seems like part of a bygone era. When I look back to the very recent time just before the 2024 election, it feels like I’m looking across a deep chasm, like we have crossed a line from the before time to now that we’ll never be able to cross back again.
*****
107 Days is written in short diary-like chapters, titled for the number of days remaining until the election. Most of the entries have an in-the-moment or just after the moment quality. The book reads as though Kamala Harris still hasn’t really processed the events of the summer and fall of 2024, and she probably hasn’t. Most of us haven’t. Some critics have complained that she blames others for the campaign’s (few and far between) mistakes and for the “loss” to Trump, but that is nonsense. I think Kamala Harris was near-perfect in that campaign, but she made a few minor mistakes as anyone would, and it feels like she’s still beating herself up over those mistakes.
A few takeaways: Tim Walz is great but she probably should have gone with Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro or even Pete Buttigieg even though he wasn’t on the short list. The Venn diagram of people who won’t vote for a Black woman and people who won’t vote for a gay man is a closed circle, so Buttigieg would not have harmed the ticket, and he is the smartest, sharpest politician in the United States. Mark Kelly is also brilliant, and he’s tougher than Walz. Kamala is 100 percent right that Tim Walz was far too nice to JD Vance during that debate; and that’s partly because he is a decent man who is nice to everyone but it’s more because (like a lot of politicians) he is still playing by the rules of two decades ago when we thought that “both sides” had the country’s best interests at heart. This is no longer the case.
*****
My son had a swim meet at Gallaudet University the weekend before the election last year. Gallaudet has an absolutely terrible swim team but the Gallaudet meet is great. Some of their swimmers are completely new to the sport, and it’s amazing watching them compete. Last year, a Gallaudet swimmer who is almost 30 years old took over two minutes to swim the 100 freestyle. Both teams applauded enthusiastically as he finally finished, jubilant and exhausted.
We walked from the NoMa-Gallaudet Metro stop to the Gallaudet aquatic center, just about a mile. It was a gorgeous autumn day. Harris-Walz signs were everywhere, right next to Halloween decorations that hadn’t been taken down yet. People were out walking and sitting on their front porches. People smiled and waved at us as we walked by, and we smiled and waved back. Marymount won the meet, of course, because a lot of high school teams would beat Gallaudet. The walk back to the Metro was just as lovely as the walk to Gallaudet, with the autumn sky turning pink and orange and purple and the leaves crunching underfoot on the tree-lined neighborhood streets. But that’s not why it was a perfect day.
*****
107 Days does not end happily, as we all know. As much as I enjoyed this book, I did not enjoy reliving the night of November 6, 2024, when Kamala Harris and her team and all of her supporters watching the returns on TV realized with growing apprehension and eventual horror that Donald Trump had “won” the election and that we were facing a second Trump presidency. And everyone knew that the second Trump term would be far worse than the first, and everyone who knew that was right.
When I think about how much has happened in just a few short months, I think back to that Saturday in November, walking the neighborhood streets from the Metro to Gallaudet and back and smiling back at all of the smiling, hopeful faces, and feeling not exactly sure but extremely optimistic about the prospect of Kamala Harris as our next President. It was a beautiful day.
No comments:
Post a Comment