Since that catastrophic debate performance drove her boss out of a guaranteed 2024 candidature, Kamala Harris has been on a yo-yo string with Democratic Party bigwigs.
After Joe Biden displayed his weakness on national TV just over three weeks ago, the vice president became the most sensible substitute for him at the head of the ticket.
Allies spread a rationale for why Harris would be the natural successor: She could easily inherit the massive warchest of the campaign; her law enforcement experience is best suited to prosecute the political case against Republican Donald Trump; polling indicates she can win; and having been the first multiracial and woman VP could inspire a fresh generation of younger progressives.
From the beginning, however, there has been reluctance to fully accept the second-in-command of the nation; some Democrats have even publicly disregarded her. Harris was not mentioned when 24 former House Democrats wrote Biden last week advocating an open convention in August.
Harris was asked to reassure Black women, the party’s backbone, that the U.S. wouldn’t regress in this election on issues they care about, including economic and reproductive freedom, the day Biden found himself battling for his future in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Her message was not very consoling.
“Here’s the thing about elections,” Harris told a moderator at Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans on July 6, during a discussion entitled “Chief to Chief.” “The people who make decisions at that level often will pay attention to either who’s writing the checks or who votes. That’s a cold, hard reality.”
Apart from a generational change, the 59-year-old Harris would seem to be the clear strategic page turn for the party. Her life has been an acrobatic twist and turn, full of personal obstacles and successes and political testing in her own California comparable to what she and the nation confront now.
Some, however, question if a nation now seeming set to bring Donald Trump back to power is ready for a woman of colour to occupy the Oval Office, severely split by cultural problems around race, gender and family.
“Black women are judged more harshly by the right, by the left – by everyone,” said Aimy Steele, founder and CEO of The New North Carolina Project, which is dedicated to expanding voter engagement and access in the Tar Heel State.
Beyond race and gender, Steele said, Harris’s background includes aspects she feels liberal allies would overlook or criticise: she is a professional woman who went single most of her life and put her work first without having biological children.
Said Steele, who unsuccessfully ran for the North Carolina assembly in 2020, “I think we’re kidding ourselves to really believe that we are, even on the progressive side, in a post-racial democracy or a place where these types of things don’t matter.”
Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, advised USA TODAY that’s “all the more reason to make sure we stand with her.” We must have some standing for something.
“Misogyny, racism and other forms of bigotry are going to exist in this country; yes, they may even be exacerbated by having a woman of colour at the top of the ticket,” said Sofer, who advised Harris in the Senate on national security.
“But that is absolutely not a reason to cower or allow the fear of that hate to impede progress in this country; that’s actually driven Kamala Harris her whole career.”
Other progressives still wounded by the political fallout from the Barack Obama years stress that they agree: Harris is the face of the future of this nation. By 2045, the U.S. is expected to be majority people of colour.
Long aware of the prospective ticket flip, Trump and other Republicans have attacked Harris as inept, socially awkward, and accountable for major Biden administration mistakes. GOP insiders believe that is merely the beginning.
“We’ve not really gone into depths with the record of Kamala Harris,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said in a Fox News Sunday appearance this month.
Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley warned delegates she expected Democrats would attempt to throw the baton to Harris in the middle of the 2024 election last week at the Republican National Convention.
“I said a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for President Kamala Harris, for more than a year,” she remarked. ” Everyone knows it’s true after seeing the argument. Should Biden have four more years or one day of Harris, our nation will be far worse off.”
Dems not fully sold on Harris either:
Harris’s criticism is not solely from the other side of the aisle; Democratic critics question her viability should Biden back out.
In The Atlantic this month, a former Harris employee stated, “an automatic coronation of Harris would be a grave mistake.” She said supporters are too ready to dismiss viability issues as “racist and sexist” and urged for a procedure to battle-test her against others against Trump.
According to a fresh AP-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll taken last week, 58% of Democrats think Harris would be a fine president. However, the study reveals that 22% of Democrats believe she would not be as opposed to 20% who claimed they know insufficient about her.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., cautioned in an Instagram live Thursday that it would be erroneous to believe Democrats agree that Harris would gain the backing of those who want Biden to depart.
She stated, some people “are interested in removing the whole ticket.”
Other progressives caution, meanwhile, that turning away Harris could prove harmful for the party. Democratic strategist Bakari Sellers summed it up in an X post titled “Skip over Kamala Harris at your own peril.”
A child of immigrants with an intense, “extraordinary” mother
Born in Oakland, California in 1964 amid the Civil Rights Movement, Harris was born to immigrant parents: Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian cancer researcher, and her father Donald Harris, an economist born in Jamaica.
She writes in her 2019 book of her parents’ marriage failing when she was five and resulting in divorce. She admits she was moulded by her 5’1″ mother, whom she regards as “amazing,” and only saw her father during summers in Palo Alto while he taught at Stanford.
Moving her and her sister to Montreal from 1976 until she graduated from high school in 1981, her mother obtained a teaching post at McGill University when Harris was twelve.
Harris first grew fond of lawyers who broke through stereotypes like Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, Constance Baker Motley – titans of the civil rights struggle, she said in Canada.
Harris went back to the states to attend Howard University, where she thrived in the setting where “everyone was young, gifted and Black.” Among African Americans, she pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., the first of the venerable “divine nine” Greek-lettered groups. She studied at the National Archives, interned at the Federal Trade Commission, and guided tours of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
She first got involved in politics working for Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston, of California, then returned to Oakland to study U.C. Hastings College of Law and graduated in 1989.
An acknowledged setback for a self-described perfectionist, Harris said in her book she took the California bar test July and “to my utter devastation, I had failed.” She passed in February 1990 and started working for the Alameda County District Attorney.
Her political career started in 1994 when she married 30 years older than Harris but long separated from Willie Brown, the famed California politician who was the statehouse speaker at the time.
As he campaigns for re-election in San Francisco, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown speaks with a possible voter.
Former U.S. ambassador to Austria and lifelong Harris friend California entrepreneur Trevor Traina stated that relationship was a politically crucial one.
“Kamala is a lovely person with a lot of charm and charisma. And she is the protégé of the king of charm, Willie Brown, Traina stated in an interview with USA TODAY.Y. “And from him, she picked knowledge really nicely.”.”
Herb Caen, a prominent San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist, first mentioned her name in print that March when Brown and Harris were seen about the city.
Their affair nonetheless drew criticism in November when Brown appointed Harris to a state medical board and paid a high salary. Although the affair ended in 1996, the couple would be connected for decades and the focus of character attacks into the 2020 campaign.
Principal of Black to the Future Action Fund, a nationwide political advocacy group, Kristin Powell said women in politics usually have their sex and personal life dragged out in public as disqualifiers for higher position.
“She’s a Black woman, not just Black person, thus the threats against her will be astronomically higher than those against Obama,” she claimed.
Powell added that similar criterion isn’t applied to males, pointing that for years Trump has been accused of having extra-martial affairs and of sexual assault (which the former president angrily denies).
Harris came to City Hall by 2000 and soon turned her sights on the top prosecutor post in the city, contesting current Terence Hallinan in 2003. An archive of a radio discussion from that race showed the sharp-elbowed Harris in her first political contest concentrating on a 40 homicide case backlog.
In the testy section Harris remarked, “We are seeing an erosion of the criminal justice system, an absolute neglect of cases and they’re prioritising politics over professionalism.”
Mailers displaying the ten faces of past San Francisco DAs extending back to 1900 were distributed by Harris’ campaign. Male all, white all. “It’s time for a change,” the block red letter reading suggested.
She has kept underlining the need of U.S. leadership reflecting the increasingly diverse nation, including earlier this month at the annual mecca for Black women, the Essence Festival of Culture.
“Let us always celebrate the diversity, the depth and the beauty of our culture,” she declared.
Political activists like Powell think it would be revolutionary in 2024 if the vice president were to take front stage on a Democratic ticket under first name.
“There would be a lot of excitement, not just for her but also for a Black woman visiting the White House, her or someone else, since we deserve to have female leadership in this nation,” she remarked.
Recent polls, however, reveal Harris does not particularly outshine Biden in terms of Black voter enthusiasm, which would suggest she is in a lesser position than some fans would have us believe.