Rising star of the Democrats Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s trump card
It is now a well-established custom around American politics that anyone reaching for high office should first release their biography as a glossy hardback. They’re not always entertaining reads, being primarily designed to frame a personal narrative for a public who largely don’t care to read them, yet they’re often quite revealing.
The important bits usually come first. These are the things that define the politician or, rather, the things the politician believes differentiates them from their rivals. In the case of Kamala Harris (“pronounced ‘comma-la,’ like the punctuation mark”) that means family and her championing the right to individual liberty.
At times, it can sound like some potpourri of high-minded Sixties radicalism as befits somebody born in 1964, yet it’s significantly more than that. Harris is 55 years old, a child of the sixties but also the junior Senator for California lacking experience in Congress. As she detailed in her 2019 biography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, her parents were both immigrants. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in southern India. A gifted biochemist, she graduated from Delhi University at nineteen, and then applied to and was accepted by Berkley in “a country she’d never visited”.
That was 1958. It was there that she met Donald Harris, another gifted student (and later professor) of economics who had emigrated from Jamaica. They would marry and Shyamala would remain in the U.S., defying her parents who had already arranged marriage for her upon her return to India. As Kamala would describe it, “[h]er marriage—and her decision to stay in the United States—were the ultimate acts of self-determination and love.”
That point about self-determination clearly became a defining quality in the career of the couple’s daughter, who, as one early campaign manager put it, “has been telling her family’s story her entire political career.” Harris knew from an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer. “Some of my greatest heroes were lawyers”, she writes. “Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, Constance Baker Motley—giants of the civil rights movement. I cared a lot about fairness, and I saw the law as a tool that can help make things fair.” Howard University and the University of California led her to graduate with a Juris Doctor in 1989, admitted to the Californian Bar in 1990, and then become a Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County.
Here, we have the first peculiarity about her CV; that after graduation she didn’t become a defence lawyer but went to work as a prosecutor. She explains it like this. “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice. I knew this history well—of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people of color without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law. I grew up with these stories—so I understood my community’s wariness. But history told another story, too.”
That other history was one of those who worked from within the justice system to change it. She cites Robert Kennedy who, as Attorney General, “sent Department of Justice officials to protect the Freedom Riders in 1961, and sent the U.S. Marshals to protect James Meredith when he enrolled at Ole Miss the next year.”
It’s worth some liberal quotation to labour these points because they provide a valuable insight into Harris’s subsequent career. She would next become the District Attorney of San Francisco and, more notably, the Attorney General of California for six years (2011-2017).
That is not the traditional CV of a Democrat seeking high office and sets her apart from her running mate, Joe Biden, who began his career as a public defender, and, indeed, President Obama who initially worked in civil and voting rights. It’s this difference that would make Harris such a compelling figure once she joined the Senate in 2017, and then such a hard target for Republicans to demonise in recent months. Born in the Sixties, certainly, but no Sixties child.
Critics of Harris have always argued that her ambition outstrips her patience and that she seeks a higher pedestal before she’s even settled in any seat she’s just won. It’s certainly a criticism that has come into play this election cycle. Harris had only been in the Senate for just two years before she announced that she would run for the Democratic nomination. Yet her ambition is perhaps understandable. For all the talk of meaningful projects and idealism, Harris is a shrewd politician. She has that rare but valuable knack of knowing where the cameras are, as well as knowing when her own star is running hot, as it certainly did during the early years of the Trump administration.
As a Senator, Harris was pitched perfectly for the climate she found in Washington. She earned early plaudits for the way she excoriated successive officials in the Trump government. As part of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she made William Barr look shifty and evasive long before he’d earned his reputation as Trump’s shifty and evasive loyalist. It was also Harris who gave Brett Kavanaugh some of his more difficult moments during his confirmation.
Harris clearly has the wits to know that simplicity drives any point home better than endless verbiage. To Kavanaugh, her questions were analytical rather than performative, which is precisely why they were so compelling to watch. Kavanaugh repeatedly tried to be evasive but Harris remained focused on repeating simple questions – often leading to difficult silences – where other Senators preferred to use their time to scatter questions that barely penetrated.
If this was her legal training, then why, one might wonder, did other trained lawyers not use the same approach? The answer, one supposes, is that it’s not legal training but political acumen. Harris understands the power of brevity, the inherent drama produced by the camera’s gaze, in a way that, arguably, is only matched in the current race by Donald Trump (though, of course, in an entirely different way).
Moments such as these stood out and it was unsurprising when she declared her intention to seek the party’s nomination. Again, critics would argue that she was merely the candidate who ticked all the right boxes, especially for the Democratic ticket and she became the obvious choice for Vice-President once it became clear that they would be picking another old white guy to run against Trump. Yet that was always to demean Harris.
She certainly fits the crude requirements of a party obsessed with identity politics yet that was not the reason Biden chose her. Harris has proven herself to be a pragmatic politician, who knows how to tread lightly across a partisan landscape.
During her time as Attorney General, for example, despite her signature achievements around Big Tech and privacy rights, say, or gay rights, she kept a keen eye on her political exposure. She could advance progressive measures but also defend more traditional rules. Defending the state’s death penalty, for example, is precisely the kind of thing you rarely see Democrats do, just as during her time as San Francisco’s District Attorney saw conviction rates climb steadily. In many respects, she is not quite what her opponents anticipated.
This ability to surprise – to not play the role audiences might expect – followed her to the campaign trail. She stood out by being that rare creature: the Democrat who knew how to fight like a Republican. Certainly, she could often be clumsy, her lack of political polish at certain moments is itself indicative of her rapid climb, but those very moments when she was at her worst tended to be when she played the game that others would assign to her. She was the only black woman in the race, but neither quality was the reason why she was running.
In the Democratic debates, she held her own on an overcrowded stage but her great misstep was initially seen as her finest moment. When she played the identity politics card, her more radical supporters cheered, oblivious to how inauthentic it would sound to the wider electorate. She accused Biden of supporting a racist scheme called “bussing” (moving students around to redress demographic inequalities) when it was obvious that he hadn’t. It turned out, rather, that Biden and Harris shared almost the same views.
Harris should have learned a hard lesson that night but so did we. She’s weakest when she leans too heavily on identity politics, rather than trusting those innate qualities which had brought her into the public’s eye in the first place. Her campaign never recovered after that night and she surprised many by dropping out of the race early, in December 2019. She didn’t even make it to the primaries, which was shocking given her status as one of the early favourites. Yet it was, in the end, another shrewd move, getting out early to avoid ruining her standing among the party. She also waited until March before she endorsed Biden, underlining how important her endorsement had by then become.
From the start, the Biden-Harris ticket appeared the sensible choice and, much to many people’s surprise, Democrats managed to fumble their way to find that sense. Now we see Harris bringing a few qualities to the ticket that Biden lacks – sharpness and youth being the most obvious – but in other ways she complements him. She can convey empathy and humour, though, of course, often risks committing the usual Democratic sin of pushing both into sentimentality and shallow gestures.
If she can translate her Senate performances onto the stage at the University of Utah on Wednesday, she might help make it the first proper debate of this election. The contrast of Mike Pence’s 1950s Mad Men brand of grey conservatism with Harris’ 1960s power-dressed combative self-determinism should certainly be acute. These vice-presidential debates rarely impact the main campaign and, with Biden now stretching his lead to 16 points on CNN’s latest polls, Pence’s work looks like it will be entirely symbolic. It will, however, provide a welcome break from the Madness of King Trump and remind us, if only for an hour or so, what real politicians look and sound like.