Kamala Harris Makes Her Case

[DesertRat]

Learn more about Kamala Harris' history, her family, SF days, career, the 2020 race and more in this interesting, long read.

In the past two years, Harris has been visible to the American public mostly through viral clips of her performances on the Senate Judiciary Committee: stumping Judge Brett Kavanaugh, grilling Attorney General William Barr. A former prosecutor, she deploys an interrogation style that is impatient and knowing, almost amused. The eyebrows go up, a faint smirk plays around the lips: you might as well fess up. “Someone likened her to the mom that knows exactly what’s going on and you’re all in trouble,” Jim Stearns, a political consultant in San Francisco, who has worked with Harris, told me. Pinned by her gaze, the representatives of the Trump Administration are almost pitiable. The former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, pleaded with her to slow down—“I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous!”—as she levelled questions at him about his contacts with Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign. After Barr testified, the hosts of “Pod Save America” joked that the other senators should give all their questions to Harris. From the safety of TV, Trump has begun calling her “nasty,” practically an anointment.

By the time she was forty, Harris—who got her start as a sex-crimes prosecutor in Alameda County—had been elected district attorney of San Francisco, the first woman and the first person of color to hold that position. In 2011, she became attorney general of California—again, first and first. She won her Senate seat in the election that gave Donald Trump the Presidency. Now she is a leading contender in the Democratic effort to unseat him, the only black woman in a field that, with six female candidates, is distinguished by an unprecedented number of women. “My Shot,” from the musical “Hamilton,” often plays at her events.

Harris, who is fifty-four, has a billboard smile, and brown eyes that soften easily but just as readily turn skeptical. President Obama once called her “by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.” (His point, it would seem, was that most of the rest of them were old white men, but it sounded sexist, and he apologized.) Early on, when it became clear that Harris’s political trajectory was likely to take her beyond California, some in the media started referring to her as “the female Obama.” Weren’t both of them accomplished, telegenic, and biracial, with names they had to teach people to pronounce? (She is “Comma-la.”) She and Obama were close—she was among the first to endorse him in California—and he was the transcendent political figure of the new millennium. Harris wanted no part of it. “One thing that above all else drives her crazy is getting reduced to a demographic stereotype,” Sean Clegg, a longtime adviser, says. “She was a prosecutor. They didn’t have the same life experience. She told us, ‘Don’t define me based on something a man did.’ ” Recently, when a reporter asked her about carrying on Obama’s legacy, she said, “I have my own legacy.”

As a black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some liberals, while professing a strong desire to see a woman of color in the White House, fear that California’s former “top cop” won’t fulfill sweeping progressive goals. To them, she seems like a defender of the status quo posing as a reformer. Others are less bothered by her past as a prosecutor—after all, Democrats often struggle to cultivate “toughness”—but believe that the best person to stop Trump’s reëlection is another white man in his eighth decade. To this way of thinking, which contends that the prospect of a liberal black woman President may present too much of a challenge for mainstream America, Harris would make an advantageous Veep. But when, in May, matchmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus speculated about the possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket, she had a snappy retort. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she said.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/kamala-harris-makes-her-case