The making of Kamala Harris 10/11/2020, 10:08

The making of Kamala Harris

The US’s first female vice president-elect defies
easy definition because she resists it.
By Sophie McBain Follow @@semcbain

14 October 2020

She’s a left-wing radical. She’s a pragmatist, a technocrat, an old-school,

tough-on-crime liberal. She’s a trailblazer, a ground-breaker. She’s a sell-
out, she’s a cop. America isn’t ready to elect someone like her. She’s not
black enough. Perhaps pundits struggle to compute a part-Indian, part-
Jamaican American woman in public roles they’ve only ever seen filled by
white men. Perhaps, too, Kamala Harris defies easy definition because
she resists it.

The California senator and Democratic nominee for vice-president often

tells reporters she wasn’t raised to talk about herself. She can be evasive
in interviews and is dismissive when journalists attempt to label her
ideologically or place her on the political spectrum – that’s “a nice subject
for a graduate class,” she once told a Bloomberg reporter, “but it’s not
how people are living life”. Harris says her mother taught her to reject
“false choices”, and that she’s grown accustomed to forging her own
path. Harris is the first woman of colour on any major party presidential
ticket in the US; she’s been the first woman and the first black person in
almost any job she’s done.

The 55-year-old dresses elegantly, in a uniform of well-cut suits and

pearls, and has a brilliant, disarming smile. She is warm and personable,
but can also be steely and relentless – as during the congressional
hearings that raised her national profile. Her grilling of Donald Trump’s
judicial appointees, Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh and William Barr,

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went viral. She asked question after question, looking deeply

unimpressed, a little bored, sometimes amused. “I’m not able to be
rushed this fast, it makes me nervous,” Sessions told her during his
Senate confirmation hearing to become attorney general. Watching
Harris was like watching a cat that has pinned a squirming mouse under
its paw and decided it may as well play for a bit before killing it. Or maybe
it wasn’t like that at all. All three men got the job.

Political observers were already positioning Harris as a promising vice-

president for Joe Biden, the Democratic frontrunner, last spring, while her
own presidential primary campaign was in full swing. She was having
none of it. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she told reporters
in May. Her own presidential campaign foundered in the months that
followed, and she dropped out of the race in December. Her political
experience, national profile and identity as a black woman, able to speak
with authority on the Black Lives Matter protests roiling many American
cities this summer, meant that Harris was, most mainstream
commentators agreed, the natural choice to be Biden’s vice-president,
though he waited until 11 August to announce his pick. If he is elected in
November, Biden, who would be 78 by the time of his inauguration, will
be the oldest president in history. He has described himself as a one-
term “bridge” president, which makes Harris as much an understudy as a
sidekick.

***

“That I am here tonight is a testament to the dedication of generations

before me: women and men who believed so fiercely in the promise of
equality, liberty and justice for all,” Harris said at the Democratic National
Convention, when she officially accepted her vice-presidential
nomination. If Harris felt awkward delivering a speech to a mostly empty
room – the convention was held virtually because of the coronavirus
pandemic – it didn’t show. It was a masterful, rousing speech, which

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wove together her personal story with that of the civil rights movement
and described the upcoming election as “a chance to change the course
of history”. “Years from now, this moment will have passed. And our
children and our grandchildren will look in our eyes and they're going to
ask us: 'Where were you when the stakes were so high?' They will ask us:
'What was it like?' And we will tell them. We will tell them, not just how we
felt. We will tell them what we did,” she said.

In the speech Harris credited her mother with instilling in her the values
that would shape her political career. She was extremely close to her
mother, Shyamala Gopolan, who was born in Chennai, India, moved to the
US at the age of 19 and went on to become a breast cancer researcher.
Gopolan met Harris’s father, Donald, at graduate school in Berkeley,
California, where they were both involved in the civil rights movement.
Donald Harris, who is from Jamaica, is now an emeritus professor of
economics at Stanford. Kamala Harris was born in Oakland in 1964, and
mostly raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She often says her parents
gave her a “stroller’s eye” view of the struggle for racial justice. In her
autobiography, The Truths We Hold, she writes that once when she was
fussing as a toddler her mother asked her, “What do you want?” to which
she replied, “Fweedom”. Her parents separated when she was five and
Harris and her younger sister Maya, now a civil rights lawyer who worked
on Harris’s presidential campaign, remained with their mother in Berkeley.
Harris writes that Gopolan, who died in 2009, raised her daughters to be
“proud, strong black women” who also remained connected to their
Indian heritage.

[See also: the New Statesman’s US presidential election forecast]

Harris studied political sciences and economics at Howard University in

Washington, DC, one of the US’s historically black colleges and
universities (a HBCU). A legacy of segregation, HBCUs played a central
role in the formation of America’s black middle class and in the civil rights

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movement. That Harris chose to study at Howard is “central to

understanding her identity formation”, Andra Gillespie, an associate
professor of political sciences at Emory University, told me. It indicates
that “embracing her black roots, being proud of her black heritage, is
something that has been part of her life for her entire life”. Harris is the
first HBCU graduate on a major party presidential ticket, and she has
retained close links with her alma mater. She held her first presidential
campaign event there, wore a Howard hoodie while watching the
Democratic roll call at the Democratic National Convention and remains
involved with her sorority.

After Howard, Harris returned to California to study law. Harris has said
that many of her friends and family were “incredulous” that she wanted
to work for the district attorney’s office on graduation, knowing the role
state prosecutors play in enforcing the US’s punitive and racialised
criminal justice system, but she said she wanted to reform the system
from within. She no doubt also understood that these judicial roles are a
well-worn path to political power in the US. Harris started working as
a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California in 1990, focusing
on sex crimes, and worked her way up. In 2003 she became the first
woman and the first African American to be elected district attorney for
San Francisco. Seven years later, she was elected attorney general for
the state of California, another job that had only ever been held by a
white man. The attorney general race was so tight that on election night
the San Francisco Chronicle declared her opponent, the Republican
Steve Cooley, the winner. (Once all ballots had been counted, three
weeks later, it was found that Harris had won by 0.8 per cent of the vote.)

***

There is no easy way to characterise Harris’s record as a prosecutor. She

implemented a number of reforms popular with progressives at the time,
such as refusing to hand down the death penalty, even in a high-profile

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case of a 21-year-old who murdered a police officer; pioneering various

programmes aimed at reducing recidivism and providing alternatives to
prison sentences; and instituting implicit bias training and bodycams for
police officers. She took other decisions that contradicted these aims,
such as defending California’s death penalty in court, and declining to
investigate police shootings. She wrote a 2009 book called Smart on
Crime, setting out how she was rethinking criminal justice in the US – she
was neither “soft” nor “hard” on crime, only “smart” – and outlining some
of her policies, including an initiative that threatened the parents of truant
children with prison time. Harris, who is said to have a wonkish streak,
argued that because 80 per cent of murders are committed by school
drop-outs, this was an innovative community safety initiative; her
detractors saw it as yet another way to criminalise black families.

Phelicia Jones, a longstanding activist in San Francisco, recalls watching

Harris win a debate in a local jail during her district attorney campaign.
She remembers that “it was very exciting for black people to see a young
black woman who’s running for DA” but told me she ultimately felt
betrayed and bitterly disappointed. Jones says that when a 26-year-old
black man named Mario Woods was shot 20 times and killed by police in
2015, her letters to Harris’s office seeking justice went unanswered. “At
the time Mario was murdered, she was the attorney general, the top cop
of California. She could have instituted an independent investigation, she
could have had the courtesy to write back to us, she could have given us
the courtesy to meet with us. And she did not. And with the political
aspect of what goes on in the black community, when we are ignored the
message you send is that we’re not important,” Jones told me. Gil Durán,
who served as Harris’s communications director and senior adviser while
she was attorney general, told me that at the time she was “largely
unfocused and certainly not ready for prime time”. In a widely shared
New York Times op-ed, the law professor Lara Bazelon lambasted
Harris’s prosecutorial record, describing her as “on the wrong side of
history” and outlining several occasions when Harris fought to uphold
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wrongful convictions.

Harris’s prosecutorial career may leave her vulnerable to criticism from

the left, but it’s also one of her greatest assets. It is central to her political
identity and suffuses her rhetoric: her campaign slogan, "For the People",
echoes the phrase she uses to introduce herself in court, and she has
often spoken of wanting to “prosecute the case” against Trump. The
police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide Black Lives Matter
protests that followed have simultaneously amplified left-wing calls to
abolish the police and prisons, and increased the electoral appeal of a
perceived law-and-order candidate who can bring peace to the US's
burning cities.

For some voters, Harris’s background offers reassuring evidence that

she’s “tough” enough, and she often speaks of how she used her
prosecutorial powers to seek justice for the vulnerable. One of her
greatest victories as attorney general was securing a $20bn settlement
from the banks for selling subprime mortgages to Californians, having
negotiated up from an initial offer of just $4bn. “I’ve fought for children,
and survivors of sexual assault. I’ve fought against transnational gangs. I
took on the biggest banks and helped take down one of the biggest for-
profit colleges. I know a predator when I see one,” she said during the
Democratic Convention. She uses that last line a lot, and her tone makes
clear to whom she’s referring.

In 2014 Harris married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer. She has two adult
stepchildren, who call her “Momala” – a nickname that helps Harris free
herself from what the writer Rebecca Traister calls “the tight knot for
women in politics”: “Everything associated with motherhood has been
coded as faintly embarrassing… And yet to be a bad mom has been
disqualifying, and to not be a mom at all is to be understood as lacking
something: gravity, value, femininity.” Harris is a keen cook; in one of the
most charming of her many viral moments, she is filmed dispensing tips

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on how to brine a turkey in a 90-second commercial break before going

live on MSNBC. “Do the salt and pepper all over, just, like, lather that
baby up,” she says, massaging the air in front of her. Harris has used
cooking as a way to convey her cultural heritage, too, appearing, for
instance, in a video with the Indian-American actress Mindy Kaling in
which they make dosas together.

***

Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016, and in 2017 became the first
African American to represent California and only the second black
woman to sit in the upper chamber. As well as serving on the high-profile
intelligence and judiciary committees, Harris established her progressive
credentials as a vociferous critic of Trump, and by supporting several
left-wing initiatives, such as Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All bill and bills
to raise the minimum wage and overhaul the bail system. As protests
spread across the country this summer following the police killing of
Floyd, Harris introduced legislation to substantially reform the police and
to make lynching a federal crime.

She announced she was running for president on 21 January 2019, Martin
Luther King Jr Day. Her campaign showed early promise – her first rally in
Oakland attracted 20,000 people – but quickly faltered. She flip-flopped
on several issues of central importance to Democratic voters, such as
whether she would abolish private health insurance in favour of
Medicare-for-All, struggled to account for her mixed record as attorney
general in California, and failed to convey to voters what she stood for.
“There was a degree to which people perceived: what is your core here?
Do you know what your core is? Can you tell a straight story about your
past?” Durán, her former aide, told me. “I think people in 2020 respect
evolution. But for a long period of time, and maybe even now to some
degree, she tries for this revisionist version of her career.”

After she dropped out of the race, investigations in the New York Times
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and Politico detailed months of dysfunction and infighting in her

campaign. “Kamala Harris Supporter Insists Her Inspiring Message of
Something or Other Will Always Live On” a headline in the satirical new
website the Onion read. Speaking anonymously to New York magazine,
one of Harris’s allies offered a more sympathetic interpretation of her
predicament. “The political consultant class gnashes their teeth over this
– they have to market a product,” the friend said. “The problem that they
have is: she is what she is. She’s complicated.”

[See also: Emily Tamkin profiles Joe Biden]

As Durán sees it, in picking Harris, Biden had offered her “a lifeline” after
her own disastrous campaign, while also choosing a skilled and
experienced politician uniquely suited to the current moment. “Kamala
Harris’s gift as a politician is that she’s a symbol of hope for so many
people,” he said. Her vice-presidential nomination marked the
culmination of decades of lobbying and agitation within the Democratic
Party to acknowledge the importance of African American women, the
Democrats’ most loyal voting bloc, Andra Gillespie of Emory University
told me. “There was a reckoning that needed to happen within the party,
and that’s been going on for years, about whether African American
women were being supported and rewarded for their loyalty.”

The calls for Biden to select a black woman as his running partner
intensified after a disastrous interview in which he said that black people
“ain’t black” if they were undecided about how they would vote, and
grew louder still following the death of Floyd. Harris was one of several
black women said to be under consideration, among them the former
national security adviser Susan Rice, the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance
Bottoms, and the California congresswoman Karen Bass. Sharon Wright
Austin, a political sciences professor and expert in African American
politics at the University of Florida, told me she had been concerned that
Biden choose a black woman as a running partner, because a number of

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black people, especially black women, had indicated that they might not
vote for him otherwise. Austin also regarded Harris as the strongest
candidate: young, dynamic, attractive, with a track record of winning
difficult elections and – arguably – no major skeletons in the closet. “She
brought a lot of enthusiasm to the campaign that was lacking,” Wright
said. It is hard to overstate the symbolic importance of her nomination.
Phelicia Jones, the activist who was such a vocal critic of Harris’s record
on police killings, described the Democratic ticket as the “lesser of two
evils”, but when I later suggested she didn’t sound enthusiastic about
Harris’s nomination she corrected me: “It’s a warm feeling. I am excited.
She’s a black woman!”

***

During a presidential primary debate, Harris challenged Biden on his

record on race. “I do not believe you are a racist,” she began, but said
she found his support for segregationist senators “actually very hurtful”
and to her this was “personal”. Biden looked downcast and Harris’s
popularity briefly soared. Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, described Harris’s
“unexpected” attack on his race record as a “punch to the gut”. When
she is asked about the exchange now, Harris laughs it off. “You landed
haymakers on Joe Biden. I mean, his teeth were like Chiclets all over the
stage!” the CBS host Stephen Colbert said to her recently, asking how
the pair could be such “pals” now. “It was a debate!” she said, eight
times, laughing in an unnaturally insistent manner.

But Harris and Biden have known each other a long time – Harris was
close friends with his son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 – and
they do seem to enjoy an easy rapport. In their first joint interview, with
ABC in August, Biden said most of their differences were over “tactics”
rather than values and portrayed her as a progressive. “We both believe
Medicare, healthcare is a right not a privilege. We both believe that we
have to deal with the existential threat to humanity, called global

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warming… The question is how you get there,” he said. They are closely
aligned on foreign policy, having both spoken of wanting to restore
America’s international standing through a return to multilateralism, by
repairing relationships with the country’s traditional allies and taking a
tougher stance against human rights violations in Saudi Arabia and
China. They both, in other words, are seeking a return to Obama-era
diplomacy, although they will be navigating a very different political
landscape, a strengthened China, the resurgence of authoritarian
leadership across the globe, and an American public worn-down by US
military interventions in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

As Biden and Harris enter the final weeks of campaigning before

November’s election, they face a nation that is sad, angry and diminished
globally; beset by a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000
Americans and cost millions of jobs; roiled by civil unrest; and presided
over by an incompetent, divisive president who has spent four years
undermining democratic norms and institutions, and isolating the US
internationally. When Biden and Harris appear together, side-by-side but
6ft apart, the appeal they are making is that in contrast to Trump they
represent a reassertion of American decency, a politics underpinned by a
sense of moral responsibility and public duty. Biden – white-haired,
genial, empathetic – offers a reassuring sense of continuity. Harris –
charismatic, assertive, enigmatic – embodies the tantalising possibility of
change.

[See also: Emily Tamkin on the US vice-presidential debate]

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