Saturday Magazine

7 Oct 2025

Saturday, 4th, October, 2025: Bruce Wolpe, The Conversation, Kamala Harris’ ‘ideal’ Vice President – and Why She Thinks She Lost’

Comedy, Current Affairs, Election, Gender, Health, History, Interview, Joy, JOY 94.9, Joy 94.9, Joy Media, Joy Media, Media, News & Politics, Podcast, Saturday Magazine, Society & Culture

LISTEN TO PODCAST NOW

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:20 — 13.0MB)

Saturday, 4th, October, 2025: Bruce Wolpe, The Conversation, Kamala Harris’ ‘ideal’ Vice President – and Why She Thinks She Lost’

Sally and Macca are joined live on air by Bruce Wolpe, a Senior Fellow (non-resident) at the United States Studies Centre.

Bruce is a contributor on US politics to Sky News Australia, appearing regularly across its programs and for breaking news. In recent years, Bruce has worked with the Democrats in Congress during President Barack Obama’s first term, and on the staff of Prime Minister Julia Gillard. He has also served as the former PM’s chief of staff.

He is author of a new book, The Committee, a study of President Obama’s legislative agenda in Congress (University of Michigan Press, 2018). From 1998-2009, Bruce was a senior executive at Fairfax Media in Sydney. He is also the author of Lobbying Congress: How The System Works (Congressional Quarterly Books, 1990, 1996).

His new book is TRUMP’S AUSTRALIA: How Trumpism Changed Australia and the Shocking Consequences For Us Of A Second Term. (Allen & Unwin 2023).

In his most recent article discusses Kamala Harri’s new memoir and who her ideal Vice-President would have been.

https://theconversation.com/kamala-harris-candid-memoir-reveals-her-ideal-vice-president-and-why-she-thinks-she-lost-266047

“Book review: 107 Days” – Kamala Harris (Simon & Schuster)

The first chapter, Sunday July 21, covers the day Joe Biden – who disintegrated before our eyes in his catastrophic debate with Trump – withdrew from the race, with no road to victory.

He did want to endorse Harris, but “not for a day, maybe two”. She told him that would be “ruinous”. She argued that she was not just “the candidate in the strongest position to win”, but “the only person” who would preserve Biden’s legacy. “At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him – and all the good he had achieved – under the bus.”

It takes courage to write about such an agonising, devastating defeat – after an historic, exhilarating campaign – so quickly and so personally. Memoirs are rarely written this quickly. (We are still waiting, five years later, for the second volume of Barack Obama’s memoirs.)

In writing this book, she got by with a little help from a “special friend”: Pulitzer prize winning Australian author Geraldine Brooks. Harris’ acknowledgements note her deep appreciation of working with Brooks, whose “ferocious and brilliant artistic insights were indispensable.”