The Kamala Show

If you’re looking for threads of consistency spanning Kamala Harris’s career in public, start with this: the Democratic nominee for President likes to work and hang out and have fun and be seen with her close kin. Maya Harris, her younger sister—a Stanford-educated lawyer, a former law-school dean, and a policy adviser for Hillary Clinton in 2016—chaired Kamala’s 2020 Presidential campaign and can often be seen at her side. Maybe it’s this instinctive family intimacy, so hard to fake, that keeps me replaying a video of Kamala and Maya, chatting with an unseen interviewer from the Daily Beast, in 2012. Maya’s talking about how her sister’s climb up the political ladder has caused a teasing fracas between the sisters on the topic of ceremonial titles. Kamala was, at the time, California’s attorney general.

“When they’re attorneys general?” Maya says, her voice brimming with mock exasperation, “they call them ‘General.’ ”

“Yes, they call me General Harris,” Kamala says. “And she hates that.”

Maya goes on to set her boundaries. If Kamala becomes President someday, then, sure, she’ll switch to “Miss President.” It’s not exactly “Madam,” but still: you can hear a formal ring. Until then, she’s just Kamala.

Kamala, feigning sternness, says, “No, I’m Big Sister.” Then, loosening a bit around the eyes, letting her face bloom into a joke: “Big Sister General.” Both women lose it—their eyes go skyward, and their heads lurch forward. Their laughs synchronize: a fluttering cackle, quick and light and precise as a bird’s heartbeat. It’s the kind of bust-out, stomach-hurt, jaw-sore mutual guffaw you really only see in nineties broadcasts of the standup showcase Def Comedy Jam—they crack each other up.

It’s genuinely endearing to watch these sisters enjoy each other like this. But the little moment sticks out for me because its elements—formality and informality, family business and public duty, the tension between title and role—are fundamental to Kamala Harris’s odd, protean presence. She’s always musing, in public, on her deep identity—her inheritance, political and familial—and how it might fit with the jobs she’s sought and, more often than not, won.

The Vice-President often talks about when she told her family that she’d chosen to be a prosecutor. Her mother, a biomedical scientist, and her father, a leftist economist, met as youthful participants in the civil-rights movement, always “marching and shouting about this thing called justice,” as Harris often said during her 2010 attorney-general campaign. They venerated lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Constance Baker Motley. But none of these were prosecutors. Prosecutors don’t set captives, Black and otherwise, free—they’re the ones who put them away in the first place. Harris’s answer, then and now, was that, by her mere presence, “I would have the power to make decisions. . . . Prosecutors have so much power.” The problem, her argument might go, was never with prosecutors per se, just with who was allowed to sit in the office—whose sister might get called “General” now and then.

To hear Harris tell this origin story is to watch all of her speakerly tics parade by. When she says that she had to defend her vocational choice “as one would a thesis,” she chuckles through that intentionally baroque bit of syntax. When she starts talking about presence and power—the twin pillars of her political philosophy—she gets steely around the mouth. Once, back in 2010, speaking about her first book, “Smart on Crime,” she sprinkled in a bit about “a whole lot of folks”—murderers, rapists, molesters—“spending a very significant amount of time in state prison” at her behest. Then she smiled, the smile of common sense, explaining to her audience that wrongs get rectified when the right person—she, Kamala Harris, or someone similarly invested with good will and good sense—is in a position to act.

You might call this the “Hamilton” theory of political action: the principal thing is to be in “the room where it happens,” as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s song goes. It’s not simply a banality or another way to suggest that a politician is devoid of positive values. It’s an entire school of center-left, post-civil-rights thought, a well-trodden path forward after the great emotional and legislative heights of the fifties and sixties. That tense meeting of the Harris clan over Kamala’s career is a metaphor for a generation of idealists passing the torch to their more cold-eyed kids.

It’s always been a mistake to think of Harris as a next-gen version of Barack Obama, as commentators who are fixated on color and on vibes sometimes do. (Look elsewhere for that: younger white male politicians such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Governor Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania, do quite unabashed physical and vocal impressions of Obama.) Instead, Harris takes an approach to politics that’s better compared with, say, that of the latter-day Al Sharpton. He’s a man of many causes, to be sure, but one who knows how to keep on the right side of the street—he shrewdly decided to make nice with Obama, to be an inside man instead of an outside critic. He stayed in the game and had his small say. Harris is also a spiritual child of the Congressional Black Caucus, a business-friendly bunch who nonetheless have claimed for themselves some of the moral sheen of the anti-capitalist Dr. King—utter loyalty to the Democratic establishment and its donors is the reason for the caucus’s continued power. If Harris has a televisual twin, it’s Clair Huxtable, of “The Cosby Show,” played by Harris’s fellow Howard University alumna Phylicia Rashad. Harris and Huxtable are both attorneys who sometimes get telegenically tough, and who portray upward mobility—in politics as in life—as totally compatible with the day-by-day dictates of justice.

Harris isn’t a particularly good orator, in part because her persona behind the podium doesn’t seem like an extension of her personality away from it. The best speakers make it appear as if their speeches are being delivered by the same person who, hours earlier, was enjoying beers in a Cedar Rapids bar, or scarfing down a burger in a Manchester diner. Harris is different. Especially when she’s reading her speech from a teleprompter, you always feel a gap between the speaker and her text. Big Sister General is in there somewhere, but she’s walking on a track that feels narrowly constraining. Harris is a person in a role, and sometimes, while speaking, she wears that role the way a groomsman wears a tux he doesn’t like. The function of her nonverbal gestures—especially that big, bright laugh—is to ask you to trust your eyes more than your ears. Famously, she often repeats an injunction to “believe in what can be, unburdened by what has been.” Fundamental to her appeal is a similar, unstated formulation: “Believe in me, unburdened by what you think about this speech.”

 

 

Maybe this is why, until very recently, Harris’s zenith as a figure on political television came during sessions of Senate questioning. The hearing room is a nakedly ceremonial space, where individuals go to act out their parts—where “sister” and “general” come together. The point, if you want to stand out, is to make your real motives show through all the official choreography—to be the right person flexing power in the right job, however visible the strain.

During the notoriously dramatic Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Harris pressed the nominee hard. She set her face neutrally and peered intently at him, asking questions meant less to gather information than to speak directly to the TV-watching audience: “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Her voice was low and mellifluous and strong: a prosecutor’s sharklike gravitas. There wasn’t a good answer to the question, which was the point. Kavanaugh, whose own face, those days, was a mask of semipermanent bewilderment, looked as if he might puke. “Uhhh,” he said, perhaps hoping to be rescued before he could finish an answer, “I’m happy to answer a, uh, more specific question.”

“Male versus female,” Harris answered, nodding her head rhythmically. Kavanaugh knew what she meant, and so did everybody back home. Her star turn in the Senate—and, specifically, on C-SPAN and cable news—was a vindication of the thought process that led her, all those years ago, to be a prosecutor. Get in where you fit in, use your power where you can.

The test of that credo came during what almost everybody agrees was the low point of Harris’s life in public, the first three years of her tenure as Joe Biden’s Vice-President. Her 2020 Presidential run had petered out before it even got started, weighed down by halting speeches and a vague approach to policy that left her lost in a large field. Now, though, ensconced in the Vice-Presidency, she had another chance to use her presence to affect change, even in a position of questionable worth. But: no dice. Unlike the true autonomous power of a prosecutor, the power of a veep is totally dependent on somebody else’s whims—so much ceremony without a real hammer to produce results.

The nadir came during an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, in response to a question about the constant quagmire at the U.S. southern border—an area in which Harris had notionally been given power by Biden, but manifestly no actual agency. Holt, reason emanating from his estimable forehead, asked what sounded like the easiest question in the world: “Do you have any plans to visit the border?”

“I’m here in Guatemala today, I—at some point . . . you know, I—” She paused, as if stranded in thought. “We are going to the border; we’ve been to the border. So, this whole—this whole—this whole thing about the border: we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”

“You haven’t been to the border,” Holt said.

Another frozen pause. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris said, laughing. “I don’t understand the point that you’re making.”

The real answer to Holt’s question was that, even in one of the most visible roles in the country—in the world—she didn’t have much freedom to act. She couldn’t answer because, even though she was ostensibly on the hook for the immigration crisis, she wasn’t the one calling the shots. She’d calculated long before that acquiring institutional power was the way to complete the work that her parents and many others had begun during the civil-rights era, and now she was learning, excruciatingly publicly: not always.

These days, by contrast, Harris looks unbounded, emancipated, often genuinely happy. In her speeches, she seems tickled to have another chance at the Presidency, and energized by the prospect of running against Donald Trump and all he stands for. She often looks overcome by joy, ready to crack Maya up again, this time laughing alongside any Democratic voter who’s willing to take the ride. Since choosing Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as a running mate, she has often revelled in the unlikely identities represented by the ticket: “Two middle-class kids: one a daughter of Oakland, California”—here a brilliant smile as the crowd goes wild—“the other a son of the Nebraska plains who grew up working on a farm. Think about it. Think about it! Only in America is it possible that the two of them would be running together all the way to the White House! Only in America!”

Harris is, all of a sudden, in her favorite position, as a politician and as a performer. There’s an obvious role to play. She’s still a prosecutor, poised to use her position for one good reason, the rest be confounded: stop Donald Trump from settling in behind the Resolute desk ever again. It doesn’t matter, by her lights, what the Presidency means, only what she means to do with it. In a matter of days, at the Democratic National Convention—her biggest TV date yet—she’ll have a chance to tell us how she’ll fend off chaos, how she’ll wield her power. I think she’s having fun.