Excerpts from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s quasi-confessional new book, released Wednesday, seem to beg the question: Is this the message of someone planning to run again for president?

Harris, who lost her 107-day campaign against Donald Trump last fall, has already announced she won’t run next year for California governor to replace Gavin Newsom. But another run for president in 2028 after a slim but dramatic loss to Trump? Still uncertain.

“It seems like she is edging away from running for president, step by step,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at UC Berkeley and USC. “This type of positioning looks more like playing for history instead.”

Harris’ most ardent supporters, who have stood by her since her first, short-lived run for president in 2019, feel otherwise, believing the candor and honesty she displays in her book, titled “107 Days,” show what true leadership should look like.

“It’s just a message of someone who wants to tell the truth and be honest about her feelings,” said Derreck Johnson of Oakland, a longtime personal friend who has volunteered with her campaigns.

Harris, the Oakland native who served as California’s Attorney General and U.S. Senator before Joe Biden named her as his running mate in 2020, is set to release the book on Sept. 23.

In excerpts released to The Atlantic, Harris said it was a mistake to allow Biden alone to decide whether to run for reelection, that he may have been “tired” but still sharp, and that her efforts to distinguish herself as vice president were undermined by a Biden team afraid of diminishing its aging leader.

“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps,” she wrote. “But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.”

In retrospect, she wrote, “I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.”

She also took aim at Biden’s team — though not Biden himself — for failing to defend her against media attacks.

“When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it,” Harris wrote. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”

Their thinking was “zero-sum,” she wrote. “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.”

Although it may be understandable to express frustration with an expedited campaign that began when Biden pulled out in July last year, “this isn’t the way a future President of the United States normally expresses themselves,” Schnur said.

The excerpts also suggest that Harris is casting blame on others rather than herself and her own campaign, analysts say.

“There are some fundamental, practical aspects of her as a candidate that are equally challenging to the weight of former President Biden on her potential candidacy,” said David McCuan, a Sonoma State political science professor.

She failed to capitalize on key assignments, like Vice President J.D. Vance did at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, McCuan said, and made blunders during her presidential campaign, including her remark that “not a thing” came to mind of what she would do differently than Biden as president, and forgoing an invitation to comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, where she might have picked up more voters among his millions of subscribers and followers.

The release of the book three years before the next presidential election is “cracking the door to a potential candidacy that I think is not there,” McCuan said. “I think her moment has passed, even though this is a traditional time that you would release a book if you were going to run for president.”

Longtime Harris supporter Elisa Camahort Page, a San Jose writer and entrepreneur, says that excerpts of the book released so far show that Harris “was very respectful” of Biden and perhaps Democrats should learn from Republicans, who primed Trump him for his second reelection attempt by supporting him in the interim four years.

“I would 100% spend the next four years pumping her up,” Camahort Page said. “Lots of people don’t win their first run for  president. Biden didn’t. Reagan didn’t. Lots of people try again and win, and that would be following a playbook that the GOP has used successfully.”

She doesn’t blame Harris for losing to Trump, though.

“You know who I blame most for Donald Trump being in office?” Camahort Page asked. “The Republican Party that had many chances to walk away from him and didn’t, and the people who voted for him.”