42 The Times Magazinene day in early June 2019, Kamala
Harris, the junior senator from
California, tapped the glass of the
bakery case at a Blue Bottle coffee
shop in Beverly Hills. No one
seemed to know who she was- another polished professional,
grabbing an afternoon coffee –
which was fine by her. She had
chosen the spot, presumably,
for the anonymity. A few minutes later,
her assistant delivered her a cookie: caramel
chocolate chip, covered in a light snowfall
of flaky salt. As Harris broke off small pieces
and popped them into her mouth, we talked
about her early life, rummaging through the
layers for identifying details.
The child of immigrant academics who
divorced when she was young – her mother,
a cancer researcher, came from India, and
her father, an economist, from Jamaica - Harris grew up near San Francisco, but
also spent time in college towns in the
Midwest and a few years in Montreal, where
her mother was teaching. “A very vivid
memory of my childhood was the removals
truck,” she told me. “We moved a lot.” She
speaks some French. She loves to cook and
enjoys dancing and puns. She tells her own
story uneasily. “It’s like extracting stuff from
me,” she apologised. “I’m not good at talking
about myself.”
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. 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 mum that knows exactly
what’s going on and you’re all in trouble,” Jim
Stearns, a political consultant who has worked
with Harris, told me.
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. The hosts of Pod
Save America joked that the other senators
should give all their questions to Harris. From
the safety of TV, Trump began calling her
“nasty”, practically an anointment.
By the time she was 40, Harris – who
got her start as a sex-crimes prosecutor – had
been elected district attorney of San Francisco,
the first woman and the first person of colour
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. My Shot, from the musical
Hamilton, often plays at her events.
Harris has a billboard smile and brown
eyes that soften easily but just as readily turn
sceptical. 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 apologised.)
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 colour in the
White House, fear that California’s former “top
cop” won’t fulfil 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”. 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
in May 2019, when 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.
It was a striking comment for a candidate
who was polling at 8 per cent (to Biden’s 39).
I asked Harris whether she thought Americans
had different criteria for presidential candidates
depending on gender. “I’m not carefully
enough watching – and I probably should- how men are being treated compared with
me. I’ve had this experience so many times
that I don’t let it distract me.”
Harris has shown that she can rivet a
crowd. Some 20,000 people turned out for
her first rally, in Oakland, and in late May
2019 she drew one of the largest television
audiences of the early election season with
O
When Kamala Harris stood on stage next to president-elect
Joe Biden on Saturday, it was a historic moment. Dressed in
a white suit, with a nod to the suffragettes, the 56-year-old
told the audience in Wilmington, Delaware, “I may be the
first woman in this office... I won’t be the last.”
Eighteen months earlier, in the first debate of the primary
season, Harris mounted a finely staged ambush on the man
she now serves as vice-president-elect. It was June 2019.
Biden and Harris were rivals for the Democratic nomination- the elder statesman and the senator from California.
Harris interrupted a discussion of police violence against
black people. “As the only black person on this stage, I’d
like to speak on the issue of race.” She reprimanded Biden
for working with segregationists in the Senate to oppose
mandatory bussing in the Seventies. Looking at the audience
she said, “There was a little girl in California who was
bussed to school every day. That little girl was me.”
It was an electrifying moment, reminiscent of her pointed
questioning of the Trump administration during Senate
hearings. Biden’s wife, Jill, later called Harris’s attack on her
husband a “punch to the gut”. Not least because she’d been
good friends with the Bidens’ elder son until his death from
cancer in 2015. Harris’s poll numbers surged. In 24 hours, she
raised $2 million. Her campaign started selling T-shirts of
her as a seven-year-old and the phrase, “That little girl was me.”
Her campaign would eventually fizzle out and she would
go on to endorse Biden in March 2020. But that moment in
the debate secured her reputation as a formidable politician.
She was out jogging when news came that Biden, 77, had
won the election. Footage of her ecstatically calling her boss- “We did it. We did it, Joe!” – went viral.
“That little girl from California” is destined to move into
Number One Observatory Circle, the official residence for
America’s vice-presidents, in January.
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