The Joy of Losing

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." She delighted Americans with her "cool elegance," the "bigness" of her "persona," and "the way she lifts her eyebrows to convey empathy." Harris proved she has "bravery and intellect in her DNA." She is "expert at the specificity of gesturing." Her "hugs have a warmth to them." She stares "longingly at her man." At this point it's worth reiterating that Merida is the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, where staffers threw a tantrum last year after the paper's billionaire owner (and 2024 Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year) Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked them from endorsing Harris. Merida departed months earlier after failing to meet subscription targets and is currently working on a series of essays about LeBron James for the Washington Post.

The further one delves into the various chapters, with titles such as "Powerful Rooms," "Joy & Intimacy," and "The Selfie," it becomes impossible not to suspect that Chat GPT or some other AI bot played a major role in crafting the introductory passages and photo captions. They simply couldn't have been written by a real human who actually watched Kamala Harris campaign for president. Could they? "Her ability to convey a common touch with hugs and hand placement is a notable feature of her campaign style," one caption reads. Another describes a campaign event with rap artist Megan Thee Stallion, author of the hit songs "Big Ole Freak" and "Wet Ass Pussy," as a sign that "Harris would build cultural excitement around her campaign."

The disconnect between the book's contents and the results of the election is deeply amusing at times. For example, Merida writes that Harris was "steadfast in her loyalty" to Joe Biden and "demonstrated her toughness and how cool she was under duress" by repeatedly lying about Biden's fitness to serve another term in office. Her decision to do just six interviews in the first two months after Biden dropped out was "exceedingly strategic," rather than a sign of weakness or incompetence. "She was like a disciplined boxer," the alleged author gushes, "bobbing and weaving and toying with an opponent who seemed to be flailing." These assessments, like the existence of the book itself, would have made a lot more sense if Harris had won, which she emphatically did not. Surely the unacknowledged AI author would have understood if they'd asked it to tone down the enthusiasm to a reasonable degree.

Merida and Willis have been doing what they can to move copies of their ill-fated book, but one gets the sense that Harris's unique speaking style—using as many words as possible to say absolutely nothing—has rubbed off on them. "The inspiration was the story," Willis said during a recent appearance on Morning Joe. "It was an important story to follow through my interest in photography as well as to tell a photo-biographical moment of the vice president who had the desire to run for office. ... I was really interested in looking for ways to tell the story through community and through that expression." Merida added that their goal was to "study the complexity of [Harris] through photography" from her private moments to "just the way she takes selfies, and what I would call her 'selfie game.'"

At the very least, this book will be a useful reference for historians studying the outrageous degree to which America's cultural elites and so-called experts have become so detached from the normal Americans who don't obsess about politics and find preposterous the idea that someone like Kamala Harris could ever bring "joy" to their lives.

Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House
by Deborah Willis and Kevin Merida
37 Ink, 208 pp., $28.99

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