THE JOY OF LOSING: Review: Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House:
Some books are destined to be bestsellers. Others are destined to end up on a cargo plane to Africa next to pallets of T-shirts celebrating would-be Super Bowl champions and Hillary Clinton’s “herstoric” victory. Indeed, sometimes it all comes down to which candidate wins the big election. Consider the recently published book of photographs commemorating Kamala Harris and her relentlessly “joyful” campaign for president. Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House was churned out in just six weeks (after extending the original deadline of four) by journalist Kevin Merida and photo historian Deborah Willis of New York University. It was never going to be a bestseller for a single reason: Harris was never going to win.
It was worth a shot. The word “auspicious” seems like an unfortunate choice in retrospect. The authors and their publisher, Simon & Schuster, presumably needed a title that would work in the highly unlikely (but theoretically possible) event that Harris was elected president. The brief introduction is sufficiently vague, applauding Harris for proving “the unthinkable could happen” and “with scant time to prepare for such an epic challenge, breath[ing] hope into a deeply divided America, and turning a moribund race for the presidency into a contest stocked with optimism and possibility.” She was “poised to win.”
The photos are fine to look at. For the obnoxious liberal, this book would make a serviceable addition to any coffee table or toilet tank. But it’s Merida’s formidable prose, though relatively scant, that shines through in this extraordinary (and at times utterly bonkers) work of political hagiography, and allows normal Americans to glimpse into a bizarre alternate reality that bears little resemblance to our own. “Over a lightning-swift 107 days, Kamala Harris completely rewrote the American political playbook,” Merida writes with unrelenting passion. “She took her perpetually underestimated self and sprinted across the 2024 presidential campaign landscape, giving voice to aspiration and ambition, bringing confidence to little girls, championing small businesses as part of her economic vision. … She even ordered a slice of chocolate caramel cake—caramel’s her favorite—at Dottie’s Market in Savannah along the way.”
Merida, the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times*, commends Harris on her successful quest to “popularize joy: A simple, sweet, infectious noun that became a kind of campaign anthem to rally around. The antidote to fear and hopelessness, and just maybe the inception of a saner kind of politics. The politics of decency.”
Strength through joy! Speaking of which, the book makes an excellent double-feature with this (also real) relic of the 2020 campaign and the vigorous youthful muscular administration it foretold:
* The owner of the L.A. Times clearly has his work cut out for him if he wishes to clean out the El Segundo Augean Stables: Los Angeles Times Owner Now Deeply Regrets Paper’s Endorsement of Bass for Mayor.