Kamala Harris has no lessons for the Democrats – or herself
Thursday September 25th, 2025 at 9:31 PM

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Kamala Harris is a politician I have always admired, so I didn’t expect her book 107 Days – an account of her ill-fated 2024 run for US president – to make me feel as disappointed in her as it did. I know that this reaction might not be entirely fair: the viscerally negative feelings the book ignited in me stem as much from my anguish about the state of the world as they do from anything she has, or hasn’t, written. And yet, I had hoped for so much more from this book than it delivers.

Part of the problem, I think, is timing. Reading it actually induces a degree of cognitive dissonance. The world has shifted so fundamentally on its axis since Donald Trump’s re-entry to the White House that it is extremely hard to compute that the 107-day period she recounts happened just one year ago. As recently as this time last year, we were still in the midst of it. Not enough time has passed for the events she narrates to be classified as “history”, and yet the turmoil that has unfolded since makes the book feel like a missive from a bygone age – interesting in an academic sense, but not particularly relevant to the here and now.

It is intended, I know, as an account of what happened, not an analysis of why it happened. And in fairness, a rehashing of the nuts and bolts of the election is not uninteresting to a political junkie like me. Harris’s accounts of the campaign stops, the numbers turning up to rallies, the process of selecting Tim Walz as her running mate (interestingly, he disappears almost completely from the book after his debate with JD Vance – she thought it a disaster), what happened behind the scenes of her preparations for the head-to-head debate with Trump – all of that is fascinating and well written. It also matters for the historical record. But in this moment, from Kamala Harris, is it enough? I don’t think so.

The situation in the US is getting darker by the day. The country is creeping (a less diplomatic but more honest word would be “galloping”) towards full-blown autocracy. Given America’s outsized influence on the world, this has grave implications for all of us. Whether in the rise of Reform or the provocative intervention in our politics of Elon Musk, we can already see evidence on our own shores of the truism that what starts in America rarely stays there. On both sides of the Atlantic, too many leaders of the centre left seem unable to properly meet the moment.

In this context, was it too much to expect the woman who was vice-president for four years and whose defeat allowed Trump to burst back into the Oval Office to indulge in some honest reflection on what she might have done differently? Or to attempt a substantive analysis of what has gone so wrong in America that someone like Trump can not only be elected but, in the space of less than a year, with virtually no opposition, dismantle so much of what passed for democracy? Or to offer us any hope that the Democrats might be in even the foothills of working out how to start fighting back?

Harris does none of these things in any meaningful sense. We read, for example, that “it was devastating to learn after the election that I lost some ground with voters under 30, especially young men”. But we get nothing of any substance from her on why that happened.

In a somewhat glib afterword to the book, she observes (rightly) that “the dismantling of our democracy did not start with the 2024 election”, that “the rightwing and religious nationalists have played the long game” and that “their plans have been amplified by the rise of a rightwing media ecosystem built to operationalise their agenda through massive propaganda, misinformation and disinformation”. All of that is true, but, to be blunt, we didn’t need a Kamala Harris book to point it out. What she could have offered are cogent thoughts on how we got to this point – on the watch of Democrats as well as Republicans – and what needs to be done to start turning the tide again. On the latter point, the best she can muster is this: “At the heart of my vision for the future is Gen Z.”

When we strip the book back to its core – and this is my biggest frustration with it – the only explanation she really gives for her defeat is lack of time. It is her repeated refrain that the campaign just wasn’t long enough for voters to get to know her or understand her policies. Indeed, this is the payoff line to the whole book: “One hundred and seven days were, in the end, not long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency.” At this point, it dawned on me that the book’s title isn’t just a description of what she is writing about – it is her excuse. She does genuinely seem to be saying that with just a few days, weeks or months more, she would have won. Does she really believe that? Because I’m not sure anyone else does. I know I don’t.

Even if we were to buy into her theory about the brevity of the campaign, Harris takes no responsibility for its ineffectiveness. Given that she had been vice-president for four years under Joe Biden, it seems valid to ask why voters didn’t know her better. All we learn is that it wasn’t her fault. It was because Biden and his team had sidelined her. She admits that Biden was allowed to stay in the race for far too long and concludes that this was “reckless”, but also absolves herself of any blame: “I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out.”

She does seem to be saying that with just a few days, weeks or months more, she would have won. Does she really believe that?

She is surprisingly unsparing in her criticism of Biden – citing, for example, briefings by his team and a bizarre phone call he made to her as she prepared to go on stage opposite Trump. I am certainly not without sympathy for the occasional frustrations of being a deputy leader – however, some of her comments struck me as a touch self-pitying for a woman who was second in command of the most powerful nation on earth.

There is much in this book that I found exasperating, but aspects of it depressed me too. Without appearing to recognise it, Harris seems to embody one of the failings of modern politics: the constant quest for positions calculated to offend the fewest voters. Obviously, compromise is a virtue in politics – and an art that seems lost in today’s world – but triangulation often ends up sounding too much like moral equivocation. On Gaza, while I am sure it doesn’t reflect how she really feels, she gives the impression of having cared more about finding the formulation that would lose the fewest votes than she did about the clarity, or justice, of her stance. She also expresses irritation that the young people turning up to her rallies to protest against genocide couldn’t see what, in her mind, was the bigger picture: “The threat to withhold their vote got to me. It felt reckless.”

On gun control, she had me in despair. She talks movingly about the shooting at Apalachee high school in Georgia in September 2024 – an atrocity that claimed four lives and left more injured. She tells us that it was the 84th school shooting that year, that America is “the only country in the world where the leading cause of death for children is guns” and that “one in five Americans has a relative who was killed by gun violence”. Brutal, searing stuff. But then she says this: “As a gun owner myself, I am not coming to take away anybody’s guns.” To which the only sane answer must surely be: “Why the hell not?” Of course, I know this is an issue deeply rooted in the American psyche. It is unfair to put it all on her. It is also no doubt another example of her trying to straddle an awkward issue in order not to lose votes. But it is dispiriting that even someone of her intelligence and empathy can’t see that this debate needs to move beyond “assault weapons bans” or “universal background checks” or better “safety drills in schools” – which is what she does argue for – and challenge head-on the very notion of gun ownership as a fundamental human right.

Despite all this, there are reminders here of what we should admire about Harris. Her political compass is broadly set in a good direction. Indeed, on some issues – immigration, abortion, trans rights – she takes admirably strong positions. She is an incredible role model, especially for black women. I also feel huge sympathy for – and empathy with – her. I understand the challenges of being a woman in politics – a subject on which she writes powerfully. I know how it feels to be vilified by the rightwing media. And I get, from my own experience, how hard it is in today’s polarised politics to stand up for what you believe in while also trying to be a unifying leader. Yet, for all that, the hard reality is I felt more despondent after reading this book than I did beforehand. I also can’t shake the feeling that the purpose of writing it may be more about testing the ground for another tilt at the White House than making sense of the last attempt. If I was to make up my mind about the prospect of that on the strength of this book alone, I’d have to conclude that it is not a good idea.

107 Days by Kamala Harris is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £21.25. Delivery charges may apply

Editor’s note: our recommendations are chosen independently by our journalists. The Observer may earn a small commission if a reader clicks a link and purchases a recommended product. This revenue helps support Observer journalism

Photography by Getty Images

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Eldercare, Family Caretaking, and End-of-life Logistics: Stuff I Learned | Cogito, Ergo Sumana
Wednesday September 24th, 2025 at 10:45 PM

Cogito, Ergo Sumana
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People with complex chronic illnesses need you to take notes, read medical stuff, and catch things that would otherwise fall through the cracks, because you cannot count on any doctor or other medical professional to do it.

You may have heard of the phrase “patient advocate.” When you accompany someone to a doctor’s office visit, or stay bedside when they’re in the hospital, you can be their patient advocate, and sometimes provide institutional memory beyond what’s in the medical information systems. There can be, and usually are, frequent changes in which specific doctors and nurses care for your patient (more about this in “keeping up during a hospital stay”). So you have the opportunity to vastly improve the quality of care they get.

Part of that is because simply having a witness in the room who isn’t the patient generally causes doctors and other medical providers to act better. They cut fewer corners.

Plus, you can just plain speak up and ask questions, sometimes better than the patient can. They’re probably exhausted, and emotionally processing the bad things happening in their bodies, and perhaps apt to minimize their symptoms, reticent about admitting how things have gotten worse. You can make notes with them ahead of time about questions they want to ask, and then help make sure the provider answers them.

Let’s take a moment to consider pain, as requested by Liz Henry: It’s often hard for patients to communicate well about their pain. Many patients habitually understate how much pain they’re in, or need to adapt their explanations of their chronic pain to customary “1-10” pain scales that don’t offer much nuance. Pain can also cause incoherence, agitation, confusion, and other issues that get in the way of them communicating at all. So you also have to keep aware of these patterns and ensure your loved one is getting pain relief, which means sometimes gently contradicting them in front of the doctor (example: “Actually, I think the pain gets worse than that at night, doesn’t it? [describe specific recent experience]”).

But another huge thing you can do is to pay attention, take notes, and develop and maintain a continuing understanding of your loved one’s health and treatments - and a relationship with the supporting medical team. And if you don’t do it, likely no one else will.

At least in the US, you usually can’t depend on your medical providers to thoroughly keep track of all of a patient’s conditions, medications, etc. and keep them in mind when treating the patient. Any one doctor, nurse practitioner, physical therapist, etc. sees a lot of patients, whether in or out of a hospital. Ideally, they’d thoroughly review the chart before a visit, and then accurately update it during or afterwards. It’s hard for them to do that – and the “one size fits all” templates in electronic health records often make it hard for them to delete incorrect or obsolete data, or highlight what’s most important.

And a person with serious illness often has something like eight or more providers (example: primary care provider, dentist, ophthalmologist, pharmacist, physical therapist, home health care aide, cardiologist, and neurologist). Ideally, they would all share information with each other and provide what’s called “continuity of care” so that nothing falls through the cracks, they don’t prescribe duplicative or contradictory medications, intermittent symptoms don’t get forgotten, and so on.

But it’s very likely they aren’t all affiliated with the same hospital or other organization, so they don’t share electronic medical records with each other. Even once a patient has been admitted to a hospital, that hospital’s medical records probably don’t reflect test results and notes from some specialist visits, because those specialists aren’t at that hospital.

(Unfortunately, these patterns are not limited to the United States, as this account from Australia demonstrates.)

So, you – the patient advocate – are continuity of care. You - one person, or a family-and-friends-team - are the person or group who absorbs all the comments and advice and photocopied handouts from medical providers, who reads the test results and compares them to each other, who regularly reviews symptoms and medications and ongoing treatments, and can thus notice all the patterns. You are the person or group who has an overall intuition for the brittle interconnected systems – cardiovascular, digestive, neurological, etc. – in a person with serious health problems. And so you are who is likely to notice errors.

I have, at least once, caught a catch-22 problem where Specialist A was waiting for Specialist B to confirm Status S before A could perform Procedure P on my mom, but Dr. B was waiting for Dr. A to do P before confirming S, and neither of them had realized they were at an impasse. And you can’t count on anyone else to notice that sort of thing. It’s a bad situation, but the faster you accept it the less you’ll run into bewildering and painful “why didn’t they catch that?!” problems.

Therefore: Sometimes you’ll need to ask probing questions or push back on behalf of your loved one. And this is a big reason my sister pointed out, when reviewing these notes, that another important component of patient advocacy is developing and maintaining good relationships with the care team. The mercenary way of talking about this is that you don’t want the doctors and nurses to get sick of you, so you need to be extra-nice to them to make up for sometimes being extra-pushy. The more humane way of understanding this is: give them a chance to get to know you as a loving, friendly, trustworthy person, so they’re better prepared to understand why you’re causing friction, and it’s emotionally easier for them to trust that you’ll appreciate if they bend a policy or otherwise go the extra mile for you. In India, I’m off-balance and don’t get the rhythms of this stuff right. In the US I do well by using fairly standard How To Win Friends And Influence People and Getting To Yes sorts of approaches: genuinely listening to them, explicitly appreciating them, explaining where I’m coming from when I have a concern, and so on. Sweet treats also help; see “Easy-to-eat food, and letting your friends help you” for more.

I’ve been pretty simplistic in this description of patient advocacy; it’s a complex skill. And I haven’t talked at all about what a patient advocate or “health advocate” can do to help someone navigate insurance, bills, and health care bureaucracy, and the fact that you can hire someone to do this. Nathan Matias recently published a blog post about that.

But a big part of all this is taking and referring to notes. Which leads to…

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Rising NATO military spending to cause huge spike in emissions, report warns | Canada's National Observer: Climate News
Tuesday September 23rd, 2025 at 6:10 PM

Canada's National Observer
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This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

A planned expansion of military spending by NATO countries could generate an additional 1,320m tonnes of planet-heating pollution over the next decade — on a par with the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated by Brazil, the fifth largest emitter in the world, according to a new report.

Military activity is fossil-fuel intensive, yet official country data on military emissions is patchy or non-existent.

Now a review of 11 recent academic studies by Scientists for Global Responsibility has found that each additional $100bn of military spending leads to an estimated 32m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) being dumped into the atmosphere.

The emissions come from direct sources such as fuel-guzzling combat planes, warships and armored vehicles, as well as indirect emissions from transporting equipment, complex global supply-chains and the effects of war fighting itself.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a political and military alliance between 32 European and North American countries. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and mounting threats by Donald Trump to abandon historic allies — NATO announced plans to increase military spending to 3.5% of gross domestic product (GDP), as part of a broader security spending target of 5% GDP for each member country.

Meeting the 3.5% target will add 132m tCO2e into the atmosphere, which is about the same amount of carbon pollution generated annually by 345 gas-fired power plants — or the entire oil producing country of Oman, according to the report. The planned rise comes on top of the $200bn funding boost between 2019 and 2024, which already increased NATO’s military carbon footprint by an estimated 64m tCO2.

The increased military spending of NATO and nations such as Israel is likely to drive emissions to even further highs. In 2019, the total military carbon footprint was already 5.5% — more than the combined output of civilian aviation and shipping.

“It is extremely difficult to see how the current and planned military spending increases can be reconciled with the transformative action necessary to prevent dangerous climate change,” according to SGR, a UK-based membership organization that promotes responsible science and technology.

Military emissions are vast but difficult to track, in large part due to a lack of transparency and mandatory accounting. Predicting how budget increases will be spent is fraught with uncertainty.

Still, the total military carbon footprint was estimated at about 5.5% of global emissions in 2019 — excluding greenhouse gases from war fighting and post-conflict reconstruction. This is more than the combined contribution of civilian aviation (2%) and shipping (3%).

Since then, global military expenditure has surged, hitting $2.72tn in 2024 — the highest since the end of the Cold War, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israel’s military budget jumped to $46.5bn in 2024 — the largest increase in the world as it continued to bomb Gaza, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Lebanon, while the Pentagon’s 2026 budget is set to surge to $1tn thanks to Trump’s tax and spend bill, a 17% rise on last year.

The SGR report is the most comprehensive assessment so far of the impact of increasing military spending on greenhouse gas emissions, as the planet hurtles towards climate catastrophe and governments fail to take meaningful action.

The findings, which draw on the methodologies used by the 11 studies analyzed, suggest that military expansion will play a significant role in breaching the Paris climate target of curtailing planetary warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

“There is an urgent need for rapid decarbonization to prevent the most dangerous effects of climate change. But recent and planned rearmament programmes and wars are pushing the world in the opposite direction,” said Dr Stuart Parkinson, author of the report and a leading researcher in the field.

The report recommends that nations with military spending above 0.5% GDP should be mandated to report robust data to the UN, assist with estimates of conflict-related emissions and put in place plans to transition off fossil fuels through both technological and non-technological measures including peace building agreements, arms control, and disarmament initiatives.

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Feds, BC are shifting LNG risks to public purse, report claims by Rochelle Baker
Tuesday September 23rd, 2025 at 6:04 PM

Canada's National Observer
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The federal and provincial governments are on track to provide almost $4 billion in existing support to the LNG sector on the West Coast by 2030.
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America’s accelerating exit from itself
Tuesday September 23rd, 2025 at 5:38 PM

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(3) Not quite leveling down - by Joseph Heath - In Due Course
Tuesday September 23rd, 2025 at 10:42 AM

In Due Course
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I was saddened to note this weekend the passing of Nadir Mohamed, former CEO of Rogers Communications, and all-around Canadian worthy. I cannot say I ever knew the man. I did, however, once have the opportunity to dox him in a doctor’s office. This gave me what I personally think is the funniest story I’ve ever had the opportunity to retell. It was published in The Walrus over a decade ago, but the version on their website is crappy, so I thought I might reprint it here. (I should perhaps mention that the events recounted here occurred more than a dozen years ago and had nothing to do with the illness from which he eventually passed away.)

Forced solidarity in the waiting room

Last summer, I had a Canadian moment. It was at the doctor’s office in Toronto. In the waiting room, to be specific. It was a nondescript place, one that looked as if it hadn’t been renovated since the late ’70s. I had to wait while the receptionist checked in the man who arrived just before me. She was talking to him in great detail about her cellphone plan, and from the tenor of the conversation I sensed that he must work for Rogers. I also noticed that he was wearing a finely tailored suit.

After I signed in, I found myself sitting in the waiting room just across from him. Having overheard his last name, I subtly googled him on my phone. It turned out I was seated opposite Nadir Mohamed, the president and CEO of Rogers Communications.

I paused for a moment to consider that he (who, according to Forbes magazine, made more than $8 million in 2010) and I (who, according to everyone, made significantly less) shared the same doctor. It occurred to me that in the United States, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies probably don’t go to the neighbourhood clinic. Yet here I was in Toronto, with the CEO of Rogers, sitting in the same waiting room.

My thoughts were interrupted by the woman next to me, who started fiddling with the television and asked the receptionist if she could change the channel. “I was hoping to catch the opening of Wimbledon,” she said, before launching into a rant about her Rogers cable package, which didn’t include TSN, the only station broadcasting the opening. But if she changed packages, she said, she would have to pay for all sorts of other garbage she didn’t want, and so on.

Toward the end of this little tirade, the receptionist said helpfully, “You should talk to him about that,” jerking her thumb in Mohamed’s direction.

From a patient confidentiality standpoint, this was probably inappropriate. But the consequences were entertaining. After a perfunctory “You work at Rogers?” the lady lit into him for a good ten minutes, with a long list of accumulated grievances and venom. She got worked up in the way people only get when discussing cable companies and income taxes.

And there he was, the CEO of Rogers, stuck in his chair with no obvious avenue for escape, forced to listen to one of his customers’ complaints. I tried not to laugh. I toyed with the notion that hell might contain a special room reserved for cable executives, done up in late-’70s decor and filled with disgruntled customers.

Truth be told, when she finished he gave her a set of fairly cogent excuses, about CRTC regulations, and new Internet technologies that will improve everything. And before the woman could get a second kick at the can, the doctor called his name and he quickly exited the room.

This left me thinking how strange and wonderful it is to live in a society where cable executives and cable customers are forced to share the same waiting room before they see their doctor. This may be one of the underappreciated features of Canada’s single-tier health care system.

Of course, it is important not to get too carried away by this thought. Many arguments in support of a single-tier system are “levelling-down” claims, which seek to promote equality by limiting opportunities for those at the top rather than improving things for those on the bottom. One should never argue this way. It is wrong to stop the rich from buying better health care merely because it would result in their getting better health care.

And yet a democratic society requires certain experiences, and certain institutions, where everyone is on an equal footing and everyone is treated the same: standing in line to vote, or to get a driver’s licence, for instance. Some theorists have called these situations points of “forced solidarity.” Among other things, they serve as a check on the tendency for the ultra-rich to drift off into their own little world, to insulate themselves from the travails of the ordinary person.

In Canada, most of the health care system constitutes a point of forced solidarity.

By contrast, the institution that seems to perform this function in the United States is the justice system. Down south, they really do throw anyone and everyone in prison—as Martha Stewart and Conrad Black discovered, much to their apparent surprise. Stewart, given a five-month sentence for her role in a stock trading scandal, was caught lying to investigators; while Black was convicted of obstruction of justice, for removing boxes from his Toronto office in contravention of a court order. It was as though it took each of them a while to realize that the charges against them were serious, that they were expected to live by the same rules as everyone else.

This tendency of elites to lose touch with the rest of society can be widely observed. One could see the underlying pathology on display in the wake of the Occupy movement, when a spate of articles began to appear, written by members of the top 1 percent, explaining that they weren’t all that rich, what with the price of private schools, BMWs, real estate, yoga classes, and so on. What became obvious is that the rich tend to gauge what it means to be rich by comparing themselves with the people around them. And if they never interact with anyone outside their social class, then they don’t feel particularly rich. Hence the genuine befuddlement over how anyone could feel resentment toward them, much less expect them to pay higher taxes.

Much can be said for preventing the most powerful members of society from moving into this sort of parallel universe. Back at the doctor’s office, I thought about how Mohamed might have felt about the experience. The staff were not overworked, and there was no waiting list. At the same time, there was nothing posh about the care either. It was decent, in every sense of the word. If every society requires at least one major institutional locus of forced solidarity, having it be the health care system is not such a bad way to go.

(June 12, 2012)

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