Bitter and still lacking ideas, can Kamala Harris go away now?

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s book tour is going about as well as expected, which is not very well at all.

Throughout her many times as a political candidate and office holder, Harris has been dogged by allegations of incompetence and indecision, fueled by anonymous quotes and unbelievably bad public appearances.

This book tour shows nothing has changed.

Harris made waves recently with leaked excerpts from her book, “107 Days,” which aired grievances with fellow Democrats to place her own campaign’s failings on anyone but herself. She wrote that then-President Joe Biden’s initial desire to run for reelection was “recklessness,” that Gov. Gavin Newsom ignored her after Biden dropped from the campaign and that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was too ambitious to trust as a running mate.

In typical Harris fashion, she’s now doing damage control.

Harris considered a run for California governor in 2026 and passed and appears now to be considering another run for president in 2028 – though she repeatedly told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow this week that running for president is “not my focus” – which is usually code for “it’s all I think about.”

It seems Harris has learned nothing since her election loss to Donald Trump in 2024 and nothing from four years prior when she flamed out of the Democratic primary. Supporters, including former President Barack Obama, have blamed her loss on sexism and racism.

It has never been a particularly strong accusation, considering Obama, a black man, was overwhelmingly elected president twice and Harris, a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent, had been elected vice president once. It betrays a simpler and more obvious explanation that Harris was a weak candidate and VP to an unpopular president.

But that didn’t stop Harris. In the book, Harris argues that she really wanted to choose then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, as her running mate, but felt that the country wasn’t ready for all those firsts.

“He would have been an ideal partner – if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.”

Instead, she made the allegedly safe choice in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who brought little to the ticket except lively jazz hands, because she was convinced she needed a white guy with regional balance. Wrong again.

Harris’s unwillingness to look in the mirror and acknowledge her own faults is standing in her way electorally more than any perceived racism or sexism ever will.

In fact, CNN’s data guru Harry Enten cited polling this week showing that Harris’s favorability is -13 points in September 2025, compared to just -5 points a few weeks before the election, showing that she’s less popular now that she’s been on the road trying to set the record straight.

And what setting the record straight it’s been! Harris was asked on The View about a disastrous answer she gave during the campaign that “nothing comes to mind” as to what she would have done differently from Biden – at a time when around only 40 percent of the country approved of Biden’s job performance.

Instead of giving a substantive answer, or acknowledging any sort of remorse, Harris said she failed to “appreciate how much people wanted to know there was a difference.” In other words, she had no idea what the election was about and was entirely out of touch with the electorate – as she still seems to be.

Harris was routinely criticized for her inability to answer hard questions, or even easy questions, and instead dishing up heaping plates of word salad. Again, nothing has changed.

To ABC’s Michael Strahan this week, who asked if Biden would have been capable of serving a second term, Harris dodged the question and instead offered a tortured explanation of how she had concerns about his ability to handle a presidential campaign, but not so much with governing.

“My concern about his running for reelection was completely separate from my admiration and knowledge about his capacity to serve as President of the United States, which was consistent and never wavered,” Harris said.

See what she did there?

It’s all so strange anyway. It’s obvious now, even more so than it was at the time, that Biden was unfit to serve another term. Sure, Harris is right that presidential campaigns are grueling and a feeble, elderly man was not up to the task. But it’s insane to think that four years as president would somehow be less grueling – presidents age in dog years for a reason.

Harris says only now does she realize voters wanted change. That’s incredible. Unbelievable, even.

Harris is right that she was dealt a bad hand. Fairly or unfairly, she was saddled with Biden’s baggage (though she often took partial credit for the Administration’s actions) and she didn’t get much time to run a campaign.

It’s possible, likely even, that no other Democrat would have won under those conditions. But it’s also hard to imagine anyone doing worse.

Unless she takes a serious look at herself and adjusts accordingly, it’s unlikely a third time will be a charm.

Matt Fleming is an opinion columnist for the Southern California News Group. Email him at flemingwords@gmail.com and follow him on X @FlemingWords.