By Noah Rothman
Thursday, September 18, 2025
The big news here is that somebody read Kamala Harris’s
book. Secondary to that earthshattering revelation is that, in the book, Harris
apparently exudes the condescension that shone through during her run for the
White House and contributed to her failure to connect with a critical mass of
American voters.
The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire reports that, in Harris’s campaign memoir,
she admits that her “first choice” for vice president was “her close friend
Pete Buttigieg.” But she didn’t go with her instincts because “it would be ‘too
big of a risk’ for a Black woman to run with a gay man.”
Buttigieg “would have been an ideal
partner — if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes in a passage of her
soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that I saw. “But we were already
asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman
married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do
it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
We must assume that, at every step of the way along the
path to you reading those words, not one person intervened to suggest that this
represents an insult to the American people. Neither the author, nor her
editors, nor her publisher, nor her publicists, nor even the Atlantic’s
reviewer encountered a pang of conscience while disseminating this slight. The
apparently unquestioned assumption underlying it is that you are either sexist,
racist, or homophobic. Maybe all three!
Even more galling is the degree to which this supposition
has not encountered any dissent from the commentary class, who, for elusive
reasons, appear to think they’re exempt from the ugly verdict Harris rendered
on the American people. “Harris may have been right about this,” former CNN
host Chris Cillizza wrote of Harris’s assumption that you’re a
hopeless chauvinist incapable of rational thought. “But it also reflects a
broader risk-averseness that plagued her campaign.” Sure, that too. And yet,
among the factors contributing to her loss was her barely concealed contempt
for the voters to whom she was trying to appeal.
She didn’t see it that way. Nor, apparently, do her
advisors and the press. For the rest of us, however, it’s kind of hard to miss.
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