In recent weeks, Kamala Harris has achieved what many Democrats hardly thought possible: she has sparked euphoria – and given the party hope that it can still beat Donald Trump in November. The incumbent vice president has now been confirmed as the Democratic candidate. On Tuesday, she also put an end to the guessing game about her vice presidential candidate. The fact that she chose Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, surprised some. The 60-year-old from the rural state in the Midwest was never considered a favorite, but in recent days he has made a name for himself with his incisive media appearances and shirt-sleeve anti-Trump rhetoric.
Amidst the celebrations, however, it is lost that not everyone in the party is happy with how quickly the ranks closed behind Harris after Joe Biden’s withdrawal. Even left-liberals see her weaknesses. And Trump supporters see her as a real hate figure. Why is that?
Harris has already failed once
It is the year 2019. Kamala Harris has been representing her home state of California in the US Senate for two years. The law graduate has gained respect as a member of the Judiciary Committee by cornering candidates nominated by Trump for high-ranking offices with ruthless questions. Buoyed by positive press, she enters the race for the presidency in January. But her campaign never really takes off, and reports of internal mismanagement in the campaign team circulate. There are resignations, money becomes tight. Harris retires in December.
It is Joe Biden who saves her ambitions for the White House by making Harris her running mate. After her election victory in 2020, she is celebrated by leftists. She makes history as the first black vice president, the first woman in office, and the first with South Asian roots. But Harris can hardly distinguish herself beyond the symbolism that is important for the progressive camp. When Biden gives her the thankless task of combating the causes of flight in the Central American states, Harris experiences a trauma that haunts her to this day. The Republicans portray her failure to reduce the rapidly rising migration numbers as Harris’ failure. The accusations are justified. When she is confronted in an interview in June 2021 with the fact that she has still not been to the southern border, she counters irritably: “I have never been to Europe either.” All efforts to find a compromise between the concern to protect the border and at the same time meet legitimate asylum claims are lost in the public discourse. To this day, migration policy remains Harris’ weak point.
Harris promotes the Democrats’ radical abortion agenda
But she is getting a second chance to raise her profile: In June 2022, the Supreme Court will overturn the controversial landmark ruling “Roe v. Wade”, and legal sovereignty on the abortion issue will return to the individual states. Harris has always seen herself as a fighter for equal rights for women – which she also understands to include a “right” to abortion. Since Biden is having difficulty with the issue, she is going to the front. As part of a so-called “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour, she is traveling to swing states that are crucial to the election – and promoting the Democrats’ radical abortion agenda. This also plays a central role in the current election campaign.
The conservative Christian milieu accuses Harris of having an explicitly anti-Catholic stance. Although Harris never publicly criticizes the Catholic faith, she has shown little consideration for the freedom of religion and conscience of Catholics over the course of her career. In 2018, for example, at a Senate hearing, she accused a candidate for a district judge of being a member of the Knights of Columbus, as the Catholic lay organization is opposed to the “right” to abortion. Many conservative Catholics therefore vehemently reject Harris. The fact that the 59-year-old stands for a sociopolitically left-wing agenda is also demonstrated by her commitment to same-sex marriage during her term as California’s Attorney General. In 2013, she even personally married the first same-sex couples at the registry office in San Francisco.
Harris married lawyer Doug Emhoff in 2014. The couple had no children together, but Emhoff brought a son and a daughter into the marriage. Both are now adults. Harris quickly built a trusting relationship with her stepchildren, as she describes in her autobiography “The truths we hold”. Before she met Emhoff, Harris was so focused on her career that she barely had time for a relationship. From a young age, companions described her as ambitious and committed.
The mother as a role model, supporter and source of inspiration
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964. Even though she spent the formative years of her childhood in the neighboring city of Berkeley, Harris repeatedly emphasized that she was originally from Oakland. Berkeley is considered the heart of the left-liberal West Coast elite, while Oakland is dominated by the African-American population. She always sought proximity to centers of black culture: at Howard University in Washington, DC, a renowned black university whose history stretches back to the second half of the 19th century, she studied political science and economics. She completed her law degree at the equally prestigious UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, also studied there. Harris worked as a prosecutor for several years, prosecuting drug dealers, sex offenders, and violent criminals. She quickly moved up the career ladder: in 2003 she was elected district attorney of San Francisco, in 2010 she became California’s attorney general, and in 2016 she was elected to the U.S. Senate.
The most important people at her side are usually women, especially her mother Shyamala Gopalan, who comes from the highest Indian caste of Brahmins and emigrated to America in the 1950s to study. She earned her doctorate at the University of Berkeley, later worked as a cancer researcher and was her daughter’s role model, supporter and source of inspiration throughout her life. In her autobiography, Harris writes: “There is no award or honor in this world that I value more than being Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daughter.”
Her father, Donald Harris, who left his native Jamaica for the USA in the early 1960s and rose to become a professor of economics at Stanford University, played a minor role in Harris’ life. Her parents separated when Harris was five years old. Her mother took care of her upbringing. She was also responsible for Harris’s multi-religious upbringing: on Sundays she sent the children to a Protestant church, but also attended a Hindu temple with them. Today Harris belongs to a Baptist church, the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco. She has a close relationship with its pastor, Amos Brown. When she entered the presidential race after Biden’s withdrawal, she called the 83-year-old and asked him for a prayer. However, Harris rarely spoke publicly about her faith, and it did not play a primary role in the election campaign.
Compared to the average black population of the post-war era, Harris grew up in privileged circumstances. At the same time, she was influenced by the culture of protest and the fight for equal rights of the black minority. Her parents were active in the civil rights movement, and she experienced her first demonstrations in a stroller. And even though racial segregation had been abolished, at least on paper, by the time she was a child, Harris learned first hand that the road to real integration was rocky. Since Berkeley continued to be divided into black and white neighborhoods, she was bused to a white school every day as an elementary school student along with other black children. “Busing” was the common practice at the time to overcome racial segregation.
In the 2019 primary campaign, this childhood experience led to some remarkable scenes: Harris accused her intra-party rival Biden in a televised debate of having previously rejected “busing.” A rehearsed attack against the future president that initially cooled her relationship with Biden – but hardly helped her in the long term.
What Harris really stands for often remains unclear
Looking back, Harris’ failed candidacy in 2019 can also be attributed to the fact that her demands moved significantly to the left. For example, she advocates the abolition of tuition fees, fines for companies that pay women and men unequally, and even the abolition of the immigration authority ICE. She also throws previous positions overboard or tries to gloss over them when they no longer correspond to the Democratic majority trend – for example on the issue of marijuana consumption, which she suddenly wants to legalize, or the death penalty, which she opposes. What Kamala Harris really stands for often remains unclear.
Her actions in law enforcement are also controversial. Was she “tough on crime”, i.e. did she take a hard line in the fight against crime, or did she treat offenders more laxly? Her record does not paint a consistent picture. To this day, some representatives of the African-American community resent her for pursuing a career as a prosecutor as a black woman. The nickname “Kamala the cop” still sticks with her.
Harris only won an election against a Republican once, that of California’s Attorney General. Can she be trusted to beat Donald Trump? It will depend on whether Harris manages to maintain her current momentum until November. And whether she can count on the votes of independents and moderate Republicans who value her line of transatlantic cooperation, her clear commitment to NATO and her support for Ukraine.
Harris will soon be touring the swing states with her running mate Tim Walz. They have almost 100 days of campaigning ahead of them. Compared to the length of other campaigns, it’s a sprint – but it will probably feel like a marathon.
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