The Times Magazine 45question. “That’s her real personality,” Emhoff
said, shaking his head, starstruck, at his wife.
“She smiles and laughs and has a good time.”
For much of Harris’s life she has been
single, with no children, focused on her
work. She married Emhoff, a corporate lawyer
in Los Angeles, at a tiny ceremony in 2014,
where Maya officiated and guests were sworn
to secrecy. When Harris is not on Capitol Hill,
or on the campaign trail, she and Emhoff live
together in Brentwood, with a freezer full of
containers of bolognese she makes ahead so
that he can always have home-cooked food.
(Emhoff enrolled in cooking classes before the
wedding.) He has two children from a previous
marriage. Harris’s Twitter account identifies
her as “Momala”, the name she says her
stepchildren gave her.
After Harris finished signing books, she
walked over to Emhoff. “How did you not
die from maximum cuteness?” he asked her.
Harris ignored the cloying remark and, noting
the presence of reporters, turned sober: a
policy point was coming. “Kids pay attention
to everything,” she said. “They remember it.
That was an element in my truancy initiative.”
The initiative, which threatened the parents
of chronically absent students with jail time
and fines, is a signature programme of Harris’s
tenure as district attorney. It is also probably
the policy that gives her critics on the left the
greatest cause for doubt.
Shortly before she became DA, a civil
grand jury reported that nearly a third of
high-school students in the San FranciscoUnified School District were absent at least one
day a week. A study her office commissioned
found that 94 per cent of the city’s murder
victims under the age of 25 were high-school
dropouts, and the statistics were similar for the
perpetrators. Public education, as Harris saw
it, was the last defence against a life of crime.
She sent letters reminding parents to get
their kids to school, and instructed prosecutors
to attend meetings between parents and
administrators, looking, she recalls, “as stern
as they could”. Harris established a truancy
court and by 2009 had prosecuted 20 parents;
eventually, she says, the rate of truancy in the
district dropped 32 per cent.
But the means were harsh, and she knew
it. A senior lawyer who worked under Harris
during those years says, “I’ve never known
her to shrink from something she thought
was right when on the surface it didn’t look
progressive enough.” Harris insists that her
intention was to force parents and schools tocollaborate, in order to protect children’s right
to an education. Imprisonment was not the
goal, she says, and no parent was jailed.
The criticism of Harris’s past is twofold:
that as an enforcer she was excessively
punitive, and as a reformer she was too slow.
Raised in a family of activists, Harris argues
for incremental change, backed by the muscle
of high office.
Harris said, “I’ll be the first to say, I didn’t
do enough.” But she resists the implication
that she has come lately to the issue of
criminal-justice reform. “I did not learn the
flaws of the criminal-justice system in law
school or college or by reading about it,” she
told me. “I grew up knowing the flaws and
how it was disproportionately impacting the
black community. It’s not academic for me.
When I decided to become a prosecutor,
it was with full awareness of what needs to
be fixed.” She reminded me of her lifelong
opposition to capital punishment. Months
after she became DA, a police officer was
killed by a gang member with an assault
weapon. Despite immense political pressure,
she refused to call for the death penalty.
From a young age, Harris says, she has
felt the weight of what she represents; that
awareness has made her almost unnaturally
self-controlled. “I know that when I make
decisions it will impact a lot of people,”
she told me. “That’s where I’m not going
to be modest. I also know that when I say
something there will be a lot of people that
will trust that I will have thought throughwhat I’ve said... I know that there are people
who count on me, and for that reason it is
really important to me that I have and take
into account all information, and if I was
wrong about something, I don’t let pride
associate. Because the consequence of what I
do and what I say can be profound.” Her voice
was quavering, and her eyes were filling. She
swatted my arm. “You got me!” she chided.
In her memoir, Harris writes that she
was “raised not to talk about myself” – such
displays were considered vain. But, if you don’t
want anyone else to define you, you had better
define yourself. In June last year, days after we
met at Blue Bottle, Harris decided it was time
to dispel lingering doubts (“I like her, but...”)
that liberals harboured about her record as a
prosecutor. She chose a predominantly black
audience at an event held in South Carolina,
the listeners who would be most receptive to
a discussion of race and policing and, perhaps,
the people she most needed to win over.
As a prosecutor, Harris learnt how to ferret
out lies. She also learnt to woo a jury. Nancy
O’Malley, who was once Harris’s supervisor,
says that she could take the most brutal,
intricate case and make it accessible. “She
had an authoritative, serious tone, but there
was a softness about the way she presented
the evidence,” O’Malley told me. “The jurors’
eyes were all wide open.”
Harris began her speech in the South
Carolina Baptist church by praising the other
speakers, the attendees and “the ancestors”.
She told the crowd, “My mother used to say,
‘You don’t let people tell you who you are.
Yo u tell them who you are.’ So that’s what
I’m gonna do. Because let me be clear: self-
appointed political commentators do not get
to define who we are and what we believe.”
She had become a prosecutor, she said, in
spite of her family’s scepticism, because she
wanted to fix problems from inside the system.
“I know and I knew then, prosecutors have
not always done the work of justice,” she said.
“Yet I knew the unilateral power prosecutors
had with the stroke of a pen to make a
decision about someone else’s life or death...
I knew that it made a difference to have the
people making those decisions also be the
ones who had children in our schools, and
knew our neighbourhoods. I knew I had
to be in those rooms, and that we always
have to be in those rooms, especially and
even when there aren’t many like us there.”
For Harris’s entire political career, she has
faced the question of whether it is her time. Is
America ready for a woman, a black woman,
to be president? At the house party in 2019
in Des Moines, she invoked the doubters.
“ ‘Nobody will be ready for you, it’s not your
turn, it’s not your time, nobody like you has
done this before, it will be too hard,’ ” she said.
“But I didn’t listen.” n‘THE CONSEQUENCE OF WHAT I DO
AND WHAT I SAY CAN BE PROFOUND’