BTN News: Kamala Harris’s quintessentially Californian story took a surprising turn in Montreal, far from the San Francisco Bay Area where the U.S. Vice President was born and raised as the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. Her parents met within the political activism circles of the 1960s but divorced early. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was already a renowned cancer researcher when she received an offer from a Canadian university that she couldn’t refuse. “I was 12 years old, and the idea of moving from sunny California mid-school year to a French-speaking foreign city covered in nearly four meters of snow was daunting, to say the least,” Harris recalls in her memoirs.
After overcoming the initial shock, young Kamala joined a dance group called Midnight Magic, where she perfected a dance style that has made the unexpected Democratic presidential candidate the latest sensation on TikTok. When Wanda Kagan, her best friend from high school, confided that her stepfather was abusing her, the Harris family, which included Kamala’s younger sister Maya (now a public policy expert), took her in. That experience, Kamala later said, made her decide to become a prosecutor to “protect people like Wanda.”
“She more than fulfilled her purpose,” explained Dan Morain, a reporter who began following Harris’s career in 1994 and authored an excellent biography about her. “Kamala returned from Montreal, completed her studies, worked in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, and became the District Attorney of San Francisco and the Attorney General of California. She then jumped to national politics as a senator.” Now, she stands on the brink of potentially becoming the first female president in U.S. history.
Harris (Oakland, 59) did not include her friend’s abuse story in “The Truths We Hold” (2019), her memoirs that combine autobiography with political reflections, a literary genre common in Washington. However, she resurrected the story during her failed 2020 Democratic primary campaign. Though that campaign was a disaster, it eventually led Joe Biden to choose her as his vice-presidential running mate. In 2021, she became the first woman and the first person of Black and South Asian American heritage to hold the position.
Interestingly, in her memoirs, Harris only briefly mentions Biden once, noting that she was sworn in as a senator in his presence when he was a month away from ending his vice presidency, a point of inflection in his long political career that ended just last Sunday. In a surprise message on X (formerly Twitter), Biden announced that he would not seek re-election and endorsed his vice president to defeat the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
Harris received this sensational news just before the rest of the world. History caught her in her official residence, a Victorian-style house hidden within the grounds of the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington. Without time to change her clothes—she was wearing sneakers and a Howard University t-shirt, her alma mater—she began calling congressmen, senators, and prominent party members. She also secured enough delegate votes for the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago, a task she accomplished in just over 24 hours. Her aides, summoned urgently that sleepy Sunday in July, estimate that the vice president made about 100 calls in 10 hours. “That gives an idea of perhaps her defining trait: ambition,” says Morain. “It’s not necessarily bad; all politicians are ambitious. In her case, her goal was always to rise as high as possible.”
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Harris is proving she won’t let this opportunity slip by. Before Sunday, she was a vice president with one of the worst approval ratings in history, in one of the toughest jobs in U.S. politics, a position she ascended to with high expectations that she quickly disappointed. This week, she has emerged as a candidate capable of rallying the party heavyweights, from Nancy Pelosi to the Obamas, who finally endorsed her on Friday. She has generated enthusiasm among Democratic bases, especially women, made Trump nervous, shown there’s still a contest in crucial states Biden had written off, excited young and minority voters, and sparked a flood of millions in donations.
Harris has also exceeded expectations on the cultural phenomenon front. Beyoncé has lent her a campaign song, and British singer Charlie XCX has given her a fluorescent lime-green color and a compliment, calling her a “brat.” In this context, “brat” signifies a certain carefree and daring femininity. Meanwhile, a legion of netizens is working tirelessly to propel her to the White House through memes, with the famous and somewhat surreal “coconut tree video” leading the charge. In the video, she recalls her mother, who she describes in her memoirs as her greatest influence: “She used to say, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. Do you think you just fell off a coconut tree? You exist in the context of what you live and everything that preceded you,” she explains, followed by one of her contagious laughs.
“Before Biden’s resignation, we were rowing with two oars in a boat,” summarizes Juan Verde, a strategist who has worked on every Democratic presidential campaign since Bill Clinton, is a member of Biden’s presidential advisory board, and met with Harris this week to get to work. “Now we’re trying to adjust sails in a cyclone. I sense a hope that somewhat reminds me of Barack Obama. The challenge will be maintaining that enthusiasm and letting voters get to know the real Kamala, a woman whose immigrant experience makes her very empathetic but who is also tough as nails.”
To decode the enigma that is Harris, her biographer suggests remembering that she exerts “enormous control over her public image.” So far, she has focused on her past as a jurist, aiming to frame her confrontation with Trump as one between a prosecutor and a convicted criminal, guilty of 34 felonies in the Stormy Daniels case, with at least two more criminal trials pending.
This strategy has unnerved Trump and his campaign; it seems obvious they were better prepared to handle an 81-year-old Biden than a 59-year-old Harris. Republican attacks on the candidate have focused on two contradictory fronts. This mental experiment, somewhat akin to Schrödinger’s cat, involves accusing her of being both too tough and too lenient on crime. [Harris titled her first book in 2009 differently: “Smart on Crime”].
The first of these criticisms comes from the leftist circles advocating for criminal justice reform in California, where they acknowledge that as a prosecutor, she refused to send prisoners to death row (in a state whose system hasn’t applied the death penalty since 2006), pursued sexual predators, and bravely stood up to banks during the Great Recession, which was still ongoing. However, they also regret her record of wrongful convictions, her tendency to imprison Black men, and sending inmates to prison for marijuana possession.
The second criticism paints her as lax on crime and too progressive to function outside California. Trump, with his knack for personal insults, seems to have run out of ideas these days, resorting to insinuations that her rise is due to affirmative action, mocking the pronunciation of her name and her infectious laugh, and repeating that Harris is a “San Francisco liberal” and “the most leftist vice president in history.”
Lawless San Francisco?
“I’m afraid these Republicans don’t understand anything that happens west of the Rocky Mountains. And it’s convenient for them to portray San Francisco as a lawless city,” says Oakland writer Ishmael Reed in a phone conversation. A legend of African American literature, Reed belongs to the generation of Black thinkers who influenced Harris when she was just a child accompanying her mother to the Rainbow Sign cultural center, where the future vice president attended talks by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman, novelist Alice Walker (The Color Purple), and poet Maya Angelou.
Reed met Harris shortly after she won the election for California Attorney General. “It was at a fundraising event for the San Francisco Jazz Center,” recalls the author of “Mumbo Jumbo.” “I asked her, ‘When do you plan to run for governor?’ To which she replied, ‘We’ll see, Ishmael.'”
It’s often said that the initials “AG” for Attorney General really stand for “Aspiring Governor.” Harris went even further when she ran for senator in 2016 and won by a wide margin. Her biographer attributes her leap from law practice to politics to two reasons: her years at Howard, a historically Black university in Washington known as the Black Mecca, where she got involved in the fight against apartheid, and her 1990s relationship with Sacramento Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, whom Harris doesn’t mention in her memoirs. “She learned a lot from watching how he ran his campaign for mayor of San Francisco [a position he held from 1996 to 2004],” explains Morain, placing the vice president in the tradition of “a glorious generation of Bay Area politicians,” including Nancy Pelosi, Senators Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, whose Washington seat Harris assumed.
“She stopped counting the times she was underestimated in an electoral campaign,” her biographer recalls. “She thrives when underestimated. It worked well when she ran for Attorney General, and it might work now.” Morain explains that in that election, her Republican rivals felt the urgency to defeat this thirty-something woman breaking the mold of the typical white-haired male incumbent to nip a promising career in the bud. “They didn’t succeed, and they still regret it.”
Angélica Salas, executive director of CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles), remembers her arrival at the Attorney General’s office as decisive in making California a “sanctuary state” for undocumented immigrants. “She ordered the police not to hold immigrants until immigration agents arrived, supported our people in evictions against banks, and workers against labor exploitation,” she clarifies. Salas also recalls that when Harris ran for the Senate, she sought the endorsement of CHIRLA’s political action committee. “There was another candidate, Loretta Sanchez, more centrist, who came and said, ‘Support me, I’m the one who speaks Spanish.’ Kamala, on the other hand, came very prepared, and we felt she really needed us. We were heavily criticized, but we supported her,” says Salas.
Life in Los Angeles
Harris won the Senate election on the same day Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, and the memory of that bittersweet night serves as the opening of her memoirs, dedicated to her husband, Doug Emhoff, “always patient, loving, understanding, and calm.” They married in 2014. Emhoff, 59, is an entertainment industry lawyer with two children from a previous marriage, whom the vice president helped raise. The couple divides their time between Los Angeles and Washington, where it’s not uncommon to see her grocery shopping, searching for jazz records (a passion inherited from her father), or ordering anchovy pizza to go. On the West Coast, they live in a five-million-dollar home in Brentwood, an exclusive neighborhood in northern Los Angeles. Their neighbors, who endure street closures when the couple arrives on weekends, include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jim Carrey, and rapper Dr. Dre.
Her public breakthrough as a senator came in 2018 during the confirmation hearings for conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, whom a woman accused of attempting to rape her when they were high school students. Harris delivered a masterclass in calm and intelligent interrogation. She wanted to know if Kavanaugh was joining the Supreme Court with the mission to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973), the landmark decision protecting federal abortion rights. “Do you know of any law that gives the government the power to make decisions about a man’s body?” she asked the senator. The magistrate replied, “I can’t think of any right now.” Four years later, Kavanaugh, one of three judges appointed by Trump, voted with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe and set back women’s rights by half a century.
Defending reproductive freedom became one of the most important themes of her vice presidency. It’s an issue she feels comfortable with and promises to be crucial in the upcoming November election. “It’s a matter of utmost importance to voters,” says Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the political arm of the organization that runs about half the abortion clinics in the country. “I’ve had the privilege of working and campaigning with her, and I can assure you she is one of the most steadfast voices in defending our rights. She has spent a lot of time and energy talking to doctors, patients, activists, and advocates, so I believe she will elevate the conversation about abortion rights to unprecedented levels in a presidential campaign.”
Angela Romero, leader of the Democratic minority in Utah’s state House and a delegate for Utah, one of the states that quickly rallied around Harris’s candidacy, recalls a meeting with her and other legislators a couple of years ago, shortly after the Supreme Court decision. “That’s when we saw she had a deep understanding of the issue,” explains Romero, who was one of Harris’s guests at her debate against then-Republican Vice President Mike Pence.
That night was a missed opportunity for the candidate to step out of the low profile she maintained throughout the 2020 campaign. She didn’t live up to the high expectations that, once again, were too high. The same can be said for her first two years as vice president.
Harris’s handling of Biden’s first assignment—coordinating diplomatic relations with the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) to address the “root causes” of migration—was disappointing. During her first international trip, she directed two words to migrants in Guatemala, “don’t come,” which drew criticism. As the immigration crisis worsened, she said in a TV interview that she didn’t see the urgency to visit the U.S.-Mexico border. Republicans, now trying to label her as the “border czar,” have criticized her for this. Romero, president of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators, defends her, saying, “It wasn’t an easy task. Without Congressional action, which is paralyzed, there’s little that can be done. It’s a broken system.”
The vice president was accused of not having chemistry with the president, doing irrelevant work even for a role that thrives on not standing out, and being a terrible boss (dozens of staffers have left her office during this time). “She struggled to find her footing in Washington,” admits Verde.
In the past two years, her image has improved thanks to her role in defending abortion rights and as doubts about Biden’s physical and cognitive abilities intensified, culminating in his disastrous June 27 debate in Atlanta against Donald Trump, a painful display of lapses and unfinished sentences that opened the floodgates for Democrats to demand his resignation.
Two days after the debate, Harris delivered a speech at a Los Angeles fundraiser hosted by filmmaker Rob Reiner, showcasing the speech she perfected after Biden’s debacle: a delicate balance between showing loyalty to the president’s re-election bid and presenting herself as ready to replace him if necessary. “In those uncertain moments, some, including myself, continued organizing fundraisers for Biden,” James Costos, a Hollywood executive and former U.S. ambassador to Spain, told EL PAÍS this week. “After the president endorsed her, donors acted quickly and decisively.”
Costos was among the hosts that June night, along with his husband, interior designer Michael Smith, at a party commemorating the tenth anniversary of marriage equality in the U.S. Among the guests were Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, a lesbian couple who launched a crusade against California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in 2008, a fight that received crucial support from then-Attorney General Harris. The case reached the Supreme Court, which declared the ban unconstitutional.
Perhaps the most repeated phrase in Morain’s biography is: “No one could have imagined then.” That June night, no one could have imagined that a month later, Harris would have turned her life and the presidential campaign around so dramatically. Perhaps because it was never easy to imagine that the daughter of a young woman from New Delhi who arrived at Berkeley University at 19 and met Donald Harris, a brilliant Jamaican student and future Stanford professor, would end up knocking on the White House door in just one generation. That daughter writes in her memoirs that one of her mother’s favorite sayings was: “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are. Tell them yourself.” “And that’s what I did,” she adds.
Once again, it’s up to her to do it again. She has just 100 days to tell her compatriots on both sides of the divide that splits a divided nation who she is and why she should be the first female president in U.S. history.
