Kamala Harris’ new memoir “107 Days” is drawing adjectives like “bombshell,” “juicy” and even “score-settling, elbow-throwing, bridge-burning,” to quote a POLITICO headline. Even though the former vice president cops to plenty of mistakes in her brief, surprise run as the Democratic nominee in 2024, she is being lambasted for pointing out the many ways that then-President Joe Biden failed her. The Democratic consultant class is rushing to denounce her as “divisive,” “embarrassing” and “a sore loser.”
But while doing their usual bit of shaping opinions under the guise of “optics,” most are avoiding a painful truth: Harris is right. Biden did set her up to fail. For all her flaws as a candidate — including being overly cautious, which made it all too easy for Biden’s team to manipulate her — she probably would have beat Donald Trump if she hadn’t inherited a situation made unmanageable by her former boss, who put his own ego before the good of the country.
Even without knowing a single behind-the-scenes detail, anyone can see that Harris is right when she writes it was “recklessness” for Biden to run for a second term, despite clearly being too old to handle even the most basic campaigning.
The details of how Biden, unwilling to accept that he had aged out of the job, sabotaged his predecessor are hard to refute. Even without knowing a single behind-the-scenes detail, anyone can see that Harris is right when she writes it was “recklessness” for Biden to run for a second term, despite clearly being too old to handle even the most basic campaigning. By dragging out his decision to drop out of the race for weeks after humiliating himself in a debate with Trump, Biden robbed Harris of even more time to make her case to the American people.
But the book adds even more disturbing details. Mere hours before her own debate with Trump, Biden called her and demanded to know if she’d been bad-mouthing him to donors. Former First Lady Jill Biden treated Harris poorly, haranguing her about loyalty. Biden’s team regarded Harris with suspicion, both before and after she replaced him as the nominee. They apparently couldn’t get past Harris’ attack on Biden for his opposition to busing during the first debate of the 2020 Democratic primary season. In “107 Days,” she describes Biden’s team as having a “zero-sum” outlook: “if she’s shining, he’s dimmed.”
All Harris’ flaws have been carefully detailed for years, but I would challenge anyone to perform well in such impossible circumstances. But even as she was being undermined by an egotistical boss at every turn, the former vice president did something remarkable that shouldn’t be forgotten. In the summer of 2024, polls showed that Trump would beat Biden in a landslide. By November, Harris had clawed her way back to a near-draw, leading in most surveys and losing the popular vote by only 1.5 percentage points — and even less in swing states. Everyone who now treats her loss as inevitable should reconsider. It’s easy to see how, if she’d entered the race with more internal support and more time — and without an unpopular boss resentfully undercutting her, who gave her more room to run against him — she probably would have won.
This dynamic, where a talented female leader inherits a collapsing situation, is so common in the business world that experts have a name for it: The glass cliff. The phrase is a play on the “glass ceiling,” an older metaphor that describes how structural sexism keeps women from reaching the highest levels of leadership. In glass cliff scenarios, however, women do get to the top — but only after male leaders have screwed things up so badly that the situation may be unsalvageable. As Jordyn Holman of the New York Times described it in 2024, it’s “a phenomenon in which a company in crisis appoints a woman to turn things around, often setting them up for failure.”
“It was clear from the start that this seemed to be a case of The Glass Cliff waiting to happen,” Sophie Williams, the author of “The Glass Cliff: Why Women in Power are Undermined — And How to Fight Back,” told Salon. “The party was in a moment of trouble, and they were turning to not only a woman, but a woman of global majority, to clean up the mess.” (“Global majority” is a term more commonly used in the United Kingdom, where Williams is from, to describe people with African, Asian or indigenous backgrounds.) She added that “the Glass Cliff disproportionately impacts women who aren’t white.”
In the business world, this usually plays out when a company hits a financial crisis, and male leaders are removed and replaced with women — and often women of color. Stephanie Pope recently became the CEO of Boeing after its high-profile disasters with 737 planes. Mary Barra was named the CEO at General Motors in 2014, after a government bailout. In 2012, Marissa Mayer took over a struggling Yahoo. Both Under Armor and Bed Bath & Beyond took on female CEOs when the companies faced economic collapse. At the height of the #MeToo movement, when male leaders across industries were being ousted for sexual abuse, nearly half of the people who replaced them were women. In politics, Theresa May was appointed the second female prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2016 after David Cameron resigned due to losing the Brexit referendum. When she failed to deliver Brexit in 2019, the Conservative Party turned to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who delivered a Brexit deal but made a shambles of nearly everything he touched. In 2022, the Tories turned again to a woman: Liz Truss, who won a leadership election but only lasted six weeks in office.
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Williams laid out a number of reasons institutions turn to female leaders in times of crisis. The ugliest is plain old scapegoating. If the male leadership messed things up beyond all repair, they often find it’s easier to pass it off to a woman right before the final collapse, so they can blame her instead of themselves. Biden did this aggressively to Harris, even going on TV after her loss and insisting, preposterously, that he would have won. There’s also an expectation, Williams explained, that women have more soft skills, like empathy and morale-building, which people hope will save them in a crisis. We saw this play out with the “Momala” meme, when pundits and influencers openly hoped that Harris was maternal enough to unite a party that had been torn apart by Biden’s mismanagement.
Perhaps the most sympathetic reason Williams gave for the glass cliff phenomenon is that sometimes an institution wants to signal they’re shaking things up by promoting someone who isn’t a cookie-cutter white guy. The high point of Harris’ campaign — when her announcement was aligned with Charli XCX’s’ “Brat” album and spawned viral “Kamala is Brat” memes — channeled this urge. The former vice president seemed so different from Biden, and it gave people hope. Her campaign only started to sputter after it seemed she couldn’t escape his vortex.
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None of this is meant to provoke pity for Harris, an ambitious woman who can handle herself just fine. But it’s self-defeating for Democrats to dismiss her story as sour grapes. Too many people are already drawing the wrong conclusions from Harris’ loss, which is that a woman can’t win a general election and Democrats should only nominate more old white men. Remember: It was an old white man who failed the party so badly that Democrats were barely able, at the last possible minute, to mount a credible campaign against Trump, a failed president loathed by many Americans.
A woman can win. Harris certainly did much better than Biden was ever going to do in 2024. As the “Brat” meme suggests, there’s even grassroots enthusiasm for female candidates, especially if people feel like they’re offering something different than tired 20th century hangovers like Biden.
But women can’t win if they’re set up to fail. Harris certainly could have made better choices, especially if she’d been more willing to reject the demands of people who created the Democratic Party’s crisis in the first place. Political parties, though, like companies, can’t survive simply on the gumption of the person at the top. Everyone will do better if the next female candidate comes in with the support and resources she needs to win, rather than simply being told to fix a hopeless situation on her own.
