This profile of Kamala Harris and her journey to US vice-president was first published in February 2021. We’re resurfacing the article after Joe Biden resigned as the Democratic presidential nominee, backing Harris as successor.
Out she steps in suffragette white, the radiance of her pantsuit giving her an almost celestial air – as if she is the gatekeeper to some other world. COVID-19 has turned this into a drive-in victory party, so supporters are honking their horns, cheering muffled cheers out of the half-open windows of their SUVs, and waving American flags from the cargo beds of their pick-up trucks.
Kamala Harris has been elected to a job that has long been the butt of jibes and punch lines, many of them uttered by the 48 men who have served as vice-president. Some of Harris’s first memories, she has recounted, came from watching protest marches from her pushchair and shouting “Fweedom” when asked what she wanted. Recently, however, it has been claimed this anecdote was plagiarised from Martin Luther King, jnr, who talked once of seeing a little black girl in Birmingham, Alabama, then telling a white police officer she wanted “Fee-dom”.
“I cannot say that I thought she stood out. She’s an inspiration because she has shown what you can achieve by working hard.” Kamala Harris in 1970 with sister Maya and mum Shyamala, who separated from her father, Donald, when Harris was five., her personal life merged with the political. In 1994, she started dating Willie Brown, a flamboyant African-American Democratic powerbroker who was then serving as the speaker of the California state assembly. They became the talk of the town: the glamorous young prosecutor and the rascally showman pollie 30 years her elder, who had separated from his wife but not divorced her.
Kamala Harris brought to her new job a belief in the majesty of the law – on foreign trips, she makes a point of visiting the supreme court building of that country – and also an insider’s knowledge of the failings of the criminal justice system. In an approach reminiscent of Tony Blair’s famed Third Way dictum, “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” she sought to strike that same balance.
It is testament to her astuteness as a politician that she not only remained viable, but continued on an upward trajectory. But, then, as her Indian-bornin 2004: “A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women.” That year, Harris won election as California’s attorney general, becoming the first woman to occupy a statewide office that made her one of America’s most powerful legal figures.
In that transactional manner in which American attorneys are prone to interact, they decided to commit to each other for six months. They were married the following year, in a ceremony blending her Indian heritage and his Jewish faith. She became the stepmother to Emhoff’s two grown-up children, Cole and Ella, from his first wife. They call her “Momala”, and have described the couple as “vomit-inducingly cute”.
Prior to mounting her run, Harris had already built a reputation as one of Washington’s rock star lawmakers, best known for the prosecutorial rigour she brought to committee hearings. Trump Administration officials, such as the former Homeland Security secretary John Kelly and the then attorney general Jeff Sessions were treated like perps. “I’m not able to be rushed this fast!” complained Sessions during one particularly uncomfortable grilling. “It makes me nervous.
Afterwards, Harris became a darling once more of the punditocracy on CNN and MSNBC; after all, cable news has built an entire business model on contrived confrontation. Yet she stumbled as a frontrunner. Her campaign lacked a galvanising theme. Her stump speech sounded like political muzak, background noise that never cut through. With black voters gravitating towards Biden, Obama’s loyal deputy, she did not have a base.
Military trumpeters are also on hand, who blast out a fanfare to herald her entry onto the inaugural stand. From the press riser, I watch her mask-kiss her young niece, and joyfully fist-bump Barack and Michelle Obama. “So proud of you,” he mouths. Then she hugs her husband, who is about to become the country’s first Second Gentleman.
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