The making of Kamala Harris: does she have what it takes to win?
The Vice President and likely Democratic nominee has enjoyed a stratospheric rise to power but has floundered in high office | VIDEO
Kamala Harris’s propulsion to the verge of the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination caps a rollercoaster career in which she has soared to great heights and plummeted to record-breaking lows before emerging now as the favourite to take on Donald Trump.
The California-born vice president, who was endorsed by President Joe Biden Sunday (Monday AEST) as his successor, faces the daunting task of uniting the party, energising voters, crafting her own message and defeating Trump. All in the space of four months.
Harris, 59, needs to convince a sceptical party and dubious electorate that she is the best person to lead the country - an unprecedented demand, not least because her time as vice president has not been easy.
Once a formidable prosecutor, she was suddenly unable to hold her own in interviews. On her first trip abroad, to Guatemala, she was asked why, as Biden’s border tsar, she had yet to visit crisis-hit areas on the frontier with Mexico.
“I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making,” she answered, leading to a torrent of criticism. Her remarks - “it’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day” - were a gift for late-night comedy shows and the Trump campaign will surely highlight them.
Palace intrigue dominated headlines about her. Thirteen senior aides quit her office in the first 18 months. She was described as difficult to brief, and presiding over an unhappy team in an office that was “rife with dissent,” sources told Politico in June 2021. One called it “an abusive environment”.
At times as second-in-command of the US, she appeared rudderless. In June last year, an NBC News poll found her to be the most unpopular first-term deputy since polling began in 1989.
In recent months, though, she appears to have found her stride, becoming the main defender of abortion access, to largely favourable reviews. But abysmal approval ratings, as low as Biden’s at about 38 per cent, must have come as a shock to the once high-flying prosecutor and senator, who became the first female vice president and first person of colour to hold the office.
Even as a child, she told The New York Times, she had the “radical notion” that she could do anything she set her mind to. “I grew up when Aretha Franklin was telling me I was young, gifted and black,” she said in October. “I have never believed that I don’t belong somewhere, and I was raised to believe that I belong anywhere I choose to go.”
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a scientist who researched breast cancer, moved to the United States from India at the age of 19. Her father, Donald Harris, a Stanford University professor of economics, moved to the US from Jamaica in 1961.
They met as students at the University of California, Berkeley, and married in 1963. Kamala was born in Oakland the following year, and her sister Maya in Illinois two and a half years later. The couple divorced in 1971 and the three women moved back to California; Gopalan died in 2009, aged 70.
Harris studied law and became the district attorney for San Francisco, then California’s attorney general. In the mid 1990s she had a year-long relationship with Willie Brown, 31 years her senior, who later served as San Francisco mayor. He had been separated from his wife for a decade but was still married.
In 2003 she became district attorney in the city, while he was still mayor, leading to accusations, repeated to this day, that she “slept her way to the top”. She has since described him as “an albatross hanging around my neck”.
Brown, now 90, said in January 2019: “I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians.”
Newsom, like Harris, counts Brown as a mentor. And the pair, in the past seen as rivals for the presidential nomination, remain on cordial terms, having known each other for decades.
Harris campaigned on being tough on crime, or “smart on crime” as she described it. She wrote a book in 2009 of the same title, arguing that parents should be prosecuted for chronically truanting children, the police should be celebrated and arrests still made for drug use and prostitution. Left-wing Californians derided her as “a cop”.
Her time as California’s attorney- general coincided with the president’s eldest son, Beau Biden’s tenure as Delaware’s attorney-general, with the pair becoming friends.
In another book, The Truths We Hold, she wrote that Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, aged 46, was “an incredible friend and colleague” who had the “principle and courage” to take on banks in Delaware, during the 2010 house repossession crisis. “There were periods, when I was taking heat, when Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day,” she wrote. “We had each other’s backs.”
She said that it was Beau who informed her opinion of his father. “He spoke with so much love about the father that raised the man who he was,” she wrote.
Elected to the Senate in November 2016, she impressed with her grilling of witnesses during committee hearings, including Donald Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court. Harris used that prosecutorial skill against Biden in June 2019, when she challenged him for the nomination and attacked him over the issue of race.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day,” Harris told him on the debate stage. “And that little girl was me.” Biden, wounded, reportedly leaned over to Pete Buttigieg - his rival, now his transportation secretary - and whispered: “That was some f***ing bullshit.”
By December 2019, she had dropped out of the race. The following March Biden said his running mate would be a woman, and by August 2020 he had named Harris. Her move back into the Biden fold will be another line Republicans use. They will hope to nullify attacks on JD Vance, Trump’s running-mate, who once described the former president as “America’s Hitler”.
When the 2020 presidential election results were announced, Harris was out running and stopped to speak to Biden. “We did it, Joe!” she says, in a viral moment videoed by her husband, Doug Emhoff. An entertainment lawyer, he married Harris in 2014, and she became stepmother - or “Momala” - to his two children: Cole, 28, and Ella, 25. He became the first “first gentleman”, and first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president and gave up his law practice to Washington and support her.
Jill Biden, previously “second lady” during the Obama administration, praised Emhoff. “I think he likes people, he likes dealing with people, he connects with people, and I think that is really important,” she said.
The first lady, however, has never been close to Harris - indeed, some claim she has held a grudge against Harris since the fateful debate clash.
Yet since the disastrous June 27 debate, and the frenzy of calls for Biden to step down, Harris has seen her popularity increase. An Economist-YouGov survey last week found that 79 per cent of Democrats would support her as their nominee, if Biden withdrew.
It looks increasingly likely that she will be only the second female nominee of one of America’s two main parties. The last, Hillary Clinton, beat Trump in the popular vote, but lost in the electoral college. Harris has 105 days to turn the tables.
The Times
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