Harris' brutal days in hot seat

Former vice president chronicles a rough campaign in a new book short on hope.

- LEIGH HABER

ROBERT GAUTHIER L.A. Times IN "107 DAYS," Harris takes President Biden's inner circle to task.

Without a doubt, it is important to capture the reflections of a vice president who found herself in an unprecedented situation after the president was pressured to withdraw from the 2024 election.

And “107 Days,” a taut, often eye-opening account — written with the help of Geraldine Brooks — takes you inside the rooms where it happened, as well as what led up to Kamala Harris’ remarkable run.

For one. apparently MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell first gave Harris the idea she should seek the presidency in 2020. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were having breakfast at a restaurant near their Brentwood home when O'Donnell “wandered up to our table to talk about the dire consequences of a second Trump term.” Harris, then in her first term as a U.S. senator, recounts that O'Donnell bluntly suggested: “‘You should run for president.’ I honestly had not thought about it until that moment,” she writes in “107 Days.”

Later, Harris also reveals that Tim Walz was not her first choice for running mate: Pete Buttigieg was, though she ultimately concluded the country wasn't ready for a gay man in the role. "We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man," she writes.

She assumes Buttigieg felt similarly, but they never discussed it.