Page 12 of 107 Days
I took the stage to a standing ovation. Again, I led with Joe.
“So last night, our president addressed the nation. And he showed once again what true leadership looks like,” I said. “And over his entire career, Joe has led with grace and strength, and bold vision and deep compassion.”
In the meat of my speech, I hit our key policy differences with Republicans: “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.” I gave teachers the love they so deserve: these dedicated, underpaid professionals who change lives.
I spoke of the teacher who’d changed mine: my first grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, the remarkable woman who had stayed in my life and shown up for my law school graduation.
Afterward, the motorcade drove to the airport through a downpour, water running across the highway in cataracts.
It made me concerned for Houston, for the impact of the next Beryl, and the next hurricane after that; concerned for all the great American cities and communities under threat from the weather disasters made more frequent and more intense by climate change.
Everyone who said we couldn’t afford to make the necessary changes to achieve net-zero carbon emissions didn’t seem to grasp that we couldn’t afford not to.
What sort of American economy would we have in a future where even Wall Street itself could be drowned by rising water?
I had been the deciding vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which was the most consequential climate bill ever enacted into law.
My senior policy adviser, Ike Irby, is a climate scientist. It’s an issue about which I am passionate and one on which the US president needs to lead.
Part of the challenge with this very short campaign was that we had to focus on needs that felt more immediate, like how to deal with the grocery bill or the cost of childcare.
Talking about the benefits that would flow from our green energy investments was too distant.
We had offered generous rebates to low- and middle-income families to help them install heat pumps and other energy-efficient appliances that would lower emissions and utility bills, but people hadn’t yet had a chance to feel those savings.
It was hard to get people excited about the prospect of much lower utility bills in the future—that the battery technologies we’d invested in would be cheap enough for every home to make and store its own power from sunlight.
People were focused on the cost of things today .
I needed to emphasize that I had plans that would swiftly lower the cost of housing, that would stop price gouging.
Climate policy was a much longer, more complicated conversation.
It had to include explaining our plans for a just transition, one that wouldn’t leave workers employed in the fossil fuel economy behind.
I knew that one in five voters, and an even higher percentage of younger voters, identified as being very concerned about climate change.
On my college tour young people had spoken frankly to me of “climate anxiety”—their fear that my generation’s failure to act was robbing them of a healthy planet, a healthy future.
I knew I risked leaving those votes on the table by not talking more about this issue.
In this short campaign, I just didn’t have time.
I had to triage issues so that key information could sink in.
Sometimes I felt like the triage nurse who makes the call in The Pitt : each one of those souls is important, but with the limited resources you have, you must choose among them.
It was frustrating that I had to leave so much out.
But as the advertising industry has long known, people must hear the same message three times before it even starts to penetrate.
After the exhilaration of being with the teachers, people I greatly admired, I was heading to a meeting with Netanyahu, about whom I was more ambivalent.
What I’m not ambivalent about is Israel’s security.
As a young girl I carried around a little blue box for the Jewish National Fund, soliciting support to plant trees in Israel.
I believe Israel was right to respond to the atrocities of October 7.
But the ferocity of Netanyahu’s response, the number of innocent Palestinian women and children killed, and his failure to prioritize the lives of the hostages had weakened Israel’s moral position internationally and created angry dissent within Israel itself.
People like me, who understand the importance of a Jewish homeland, who value Israel as a democracy and as an ally, sincerely believed that the scale of the response and the denial of food and medical supplies to civilians were doing Israel grave harm.
I’d been on almost every phone call between the president and Netanyahu since October 7.
Soon after the pogrom, I met with the distraught parents of American hostages.
Many in Israel feared that Netanyahu’s priority was his own political survival, not the desperate predicament of their captive children.
I had low expectations for our bilateral meeting.
It was important to demonstrate our continuing support for our longtime ally especially after such an atrocious attack.
It was also critical to show that we were continuing to press our plan for a ceasefire that would bring the hostages home to their families and spare innocent Palestinian civilians.
But as I stepped off Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews, I was forced back into campaign mode.
Trump, being Trump, had backed off on his willingness to stick to the September 10 debate he’d agreed to.
He’d been rubbing his hands at the prospect of another round with Joe.
Now that it was me, he suddenly wasn’t so keen.
I stood under the wing on the tarmac and told the assembled reporters:
“You have been asking me about the debate and I’ll tell you I’m ready to debate Donald Trump.
I have agreed to the previously agreed upon September 10 debate.
He agreed to that previously. Now, here he is backpedaling.
I’m ready, and I think the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on a debate stage. ”
With the Israeli prime minister due at my ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, I walked to the waiting SUV without taking questions.
I met Netanyahu in the vast, beautiful space containing Teddy Roosevelt’s mahogany desk.
The inside of the top drawer has been signed by every vice president since the 1940s.
It is an eloquent testimony to national pride in the peaceful transfer of power through the years.
Netanyahu’s hooded gaze and disengaged demeanor made it clear to me that he was running out the clock.
He denied Gazans were starving and blamed Hamas for looting food.
I interrupted to reiterate the need for an immediate ceasefire and a day-after plan that gave Palestinians some kind of political horizon.
Netanyahu wanted only a temporary ceasefire to get hostages back but did not want to end the war.
It was clear that nothing would be accomplished.
We’d outlined the terms of negotiation for the ceasefire back in May and made frustratingly little progress with either Israel or Hamas.
Netanyahu was bent on undermining Joe Biden, one of Israel’s staunchest allies.
I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians.
But he couldn’t do it: while he could passionately state, “I am a Zionist,” his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.
That loyalty meant nothing to Netanyahu. He wanted Trump in the seat opposite him. Not Joe, not me. Netanyahu wanted the guy who would acquiesce to his every extreme proposal for the future of Gaza’s inhabitants and add his own plan for a land grab by his developer cronies.
It was distressing to see how this issue was dividing Americans.
Ten thousand incidents of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism, and more than 150 physical assaults.
A six-year-old Palestinian child stabbed to death, his mother wounded, by their own landlord in Illinois.
Synagogues, temples, and Jewish community centers scrambling to protect themselves with new security measures.
Three Palestinian college students shot in Vermont, leaving one a paraplegic.
Posters of Israeli hostages defaced and torn down from walls in New York City.
Campus protests, some of which harassed and threatened Jewish students and created an atmosphere of tension and fear.
These rising expressions of hate were chilling.
Long before October 7, Doug had become a leading voice in our administration combatting anti-Semitism, speaking at the United Nations and representing the United States at Holocaust commemorations in Poland and Germany.
Doug was proud of his Jewish heritage and its history of social justice.
He was proud that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had marched beside Dr. King.
Doug worked to inspire and reinforce that pride in young Jews, taking the press with him to visit his old summer camp and talking to the kids there about celebrating their identity.
He believed in the idea of tikkun olam , the obligation to repair the shattered world, small shard by small shard.
We were the first family at the vice president’s residence to have a mezuzah on the doorpost. The one we affixed came from a synagogue in Atlanta where Dr. King preached when it opened its doors to Black worshippers after their church was burned by segregationists.
For any enduring peace, we have to let go of extreme rhetoric on both sides.
The war in Gaza is not a binary issue, but too often the conversation about it is.
I wanted to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, and history of the region, but it seemed very few people had the appetite for that or the willingness to hold two tragic narratives in their mind at the same time, to grieve for human suffering both Israeli and Palestinian.
Loud voices on either side claimed there were no innocents on the other, a position I found inhuman.
And I know Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who was tirelessly hauling himself from Jerusalem to Doha to DC, sincerely wanted to end the suffering on all sides.
Right from the beginning of the campaign, protesters who thought we hadn’t done enough for Gazans tried to disrupt my rallies.
I was born amid dissent. Civil rights were won through protest. My parents took me to demonstrations when I was still in my stroller.
The people at my rallies had every right to do what they were doing.
I understood them, I understood why they were angry.
Usually, the crowd drowned them out, and I went on with the business of my speech.
But at a rally in Detroit, as I was detailing Trump’s threats to climate policy and the Affordable Care Act, a noisy group chanted: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide.
We won’t vote for genocide.” The threat to withhold their vote got to me.
It felt reckless. Either Trump or I would be elected.
The issue was not binary, but the outcome of this election certainly was.
“You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Why weren’t they protesting at Trump rallies? I wondered. I wished they would understand that sitting out the election or voting for a third candidate would elect Trump and kill any effort for a just peace, any hope for a two-state solution.
I wrapped up that unproductive meeting with Netanyahu in under an hour and walked out to address the press. I sincerely reaffirmed my commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself. I added that how Israel did that mattered.
I said that Hamas triggered the war when it massacred 1,200 innocent people and committed horrific acts of sexual violence. I listed by name the five American hostages still living and the three whose remains were still held by Hamas.
Then I told the press that I had discussed with the prime minister the dire situation of innocent civilians in Gaza.
I described the agonizing “images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.” I said, “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” I described our discussions on the proposed ceasefire.
“To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done.”