How Kamala Harris has stacked up as Joe Biden's No. 2 // How ‘Generation Jones’ Shaped Kamala Harris

 

VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

How Kamala Harris has stacked up as Joe Biden's No. 2

 

The California senator has been largely kept under wraps, to the frustration of her supporters. Will that change tonight against Mike Pence?

  

By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO

10/07/2020 04:30 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/07/kamala-harris-biden-veep-debate-426898

 

A couple years after being elected attorney general of California a decade ago, Kamala Harris was sitting in San Francisco with a handful of aides when one speculated about her becoming president someday.

 

The room fell silent, and the half-dozen staffers turned to the Democratic up-and-comer to see how she would react. Harris was already being discussed for bigger roles on the national stage.

 

“I would never want to be president,” Harris said, according to a person in the room, who recalled that she dismissed the highest office in the land as “a terrible job.”

 

 And then, with impeccable timing, Harris delivered the punchline.

 

“Now,” she said, pausing briefly. “Vice president? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

 

After Harris’ primary bid last year — a grueling and mostly joyless exercise carried out by the self-described joyful warrior — campaigning to be the No. 2 has suited Harris just fine. On Wednesday night, she'll square off against Vice President Mike Pence in perhaps the biggest moment of the campaign for her.

 

Joe Biden’s selection of Harris has excited Democrats. She's helped him raise money at a record clip. She is Biden’s highest-profile surrogate to swing-state cities like Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia, with a particular focus on courting voters of color, including African Americans and Latinos.

 

Harris appears solo and alongside Biden in TV ads, a rarity for a VP contender, and stars in digital videos pumped out by the campaign. She’s become the 77-year-old nominee's emissary to pop culture, making appearances with musical icons, sitting for podcasts geared toward non-political audiences and drawing millions of views for brief videos of her stepping off the plane in Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers.

 

The verdict: Harris, with a few exceptions, has hit her marks.

 

But circumstances so far — namely, Biden's avoid-the spotlight campaign strategy coupled with the coronavirus — have conspired to make Harris the least visible vice-presidential contender in recent memory. That has frustrated some fans and allies who want to see more of her and believe it would help the ticket.

 

 In another year, in another campaign, Harris would be headlining rallies covered by a horde of news reporters. Instead, she is often beamed in to supporters and donors from a makeshift TV studio the campaign built at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington.

 

When she does venture out on the road, hitting restaurants, florists and barber shops, the events are limited to local reporters and the traveling pool of journalists who must fly commercial to catch up with the vice-presidential nominee.

 

Some of her diminished profile is inherent in the role of No. 2. And to be certain, she isn’t alone on the ticket in laying low. Biden himself has kept a limited public schedule, in part because of the coronavirus, but also because he wants voters to render a judgment on Trump's performance, not his own conduct on the trail.

 

And if Biden is keeping his head down, Harris has to duck even lower.

 

But in interviews, Democrats and people close to Harris said there are opportunities to leverage her appeals as a trailblazing candidate and skillset as a hard-driving prosecutor to round out the picture.

 

“I know the traditional thinking around vice-presidential picks is you want someone who can excite folks and you want someone who’s not going to cause harm. And I think Sen. Harris has demonstrated that she is not one of these people that you have to worry about — forgive the reference to Sarah Palin — ‘going rogue,’” said Kim Foxx, the state's attorney for Cook County, Ill., who stressed that she recognizes the challenges of campaigning amid the virus.

 

“But it is all upside with her," Foxx added. "So, my hope certainly will be, in these closing days of the campaign, that they maximize what she brings to this ticket. And not just what her apparel choices are for the day, but really getting deep into the issues in articulating the vision for the country.”

 

Harris’ biggest opportunity comes in Utah in the debate with Pence.

 

Harris aides have long viewed the debate as the biggest stage to showcase her slashing style. And Trump’s return to the White House after spending the weekend in the hospital with the virus is seen as a boon to her. She’d planned to make his record the focus of her attacks, aides said, but with the president touting his improved condition, those strikes can be delivered with less hesitation.

 

“She can be tough on Trump without worrying about it,” said a person close to the campaign. “I believe she’s going to treat Pence as a witness in the prosecution of Donald Trump.”

 

Harris, for her part, joined with some of those around her in trying to lower what they view as artificially high expectations for her.

 

“Let me just say something. He's a good debater. So, I'm so concerned, like I can only disappoint,” she told donors last month.

 

She might have another turn in the spotlight later this month, at Senate hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Harris is on the Judiciary Committee, and her questioning of Barrett is the most anticipated moment of the hearings.

 

The desire for more Harris is a sign of how far she’s come in a few months. By the time she dropped out of the primary late last year, her favorability rating hovered in the low-to-mid 30s. She helped set the tone for her political comeback before Biden picked her to be his VP. Over the summer, Harris bounced back by becoming one of the most prominent politicians to back police reform in Washington, carrying legislation and appearing at protests as the nation confronted a reckoning on race.

 

Though she was the early frontrunner for the VP post, some Biden allies and Democrats in her home state warned the campaign that she would struggle to be a team player, even as her advisers argued it would go against her interests not to.

 

Harris has worked hard to overcome those perceptions, and Biden's campaign has labored to stamp out any signs of drama around the candidate.

 

Once back on the campaign trail, Harris has been careful about discussing her role, even in private conversations. But before her travel schedule picked up, she shared impressions with friends and donors about the lighter road schedule than she had in the primary, expressing relief and suggesting it's given her more time to prepare.

 

In recent weeks, her average favorability has climbed into the mid-40s, topping out at 50 percent in a CNN poll released Tuesday.

 

While Harris has largely avoided the scrutiny she faced in her own campaign, particularly around her own record, she hasn’t entirely avoided hiccups. She’s been criticized for prioritizing local interviews and non-political outlets over questions from traveling press.

 

Her refusal to say whether she would take an approved Covid-19 vaccine ahead of the election — pointing to her distrust in Trump and the need for assurances from health experts — exposed the ticket to criticism that they were rooting against a potential treatment for the virus.

 

"Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us," Harris told CNN when she was asked whether she would receive a vaccine before the election.

 

Biden later stepped in to clean up Harris' remarks.

 

In another exchange, Harris was tripped up by questions that came after she and Biden announced support for a national mask mandate. She said they merely supported a standard. Biden later came back and said the president’s authority to impose a mask mandate was unclear and also used the “standard” language himself.

 

And Harris equivocated when asked about expanding the Supreme Court, an idea she previously was open to. Biden said during the primary he opposed adding justices to the court, but now refuses to give an answer on it, contending anything he says will serve as a distraction.

 

But by all accounts, Harris has managed so far to allay the concerns of naysayers when she emerged as a favorite for Biden’s second-in-command: that she would overshadow Biden.

 

"Biden is leading," said one donor to the campaign, "and she’s enforcing the message."

 

VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

 How ‘Generation Jones’ Shaped Kamala Harris

 

The VP candidate grew up in a cultural moment that demanded a foot in different worlds. Is that a strength or a weakness now?

 

Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., sitting in a barber chair, speaks at

 

By TERESA WILTZ

10/07/2020 04:26 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/07/kamala-harris-generation-veep-debate-426994

 

Teresa Wiltz is a politics editor at POLITICO.

 

Kamala Harris is a Prince fan, and while you may think you already know a lot about her, her adoration of the Purple One is truly all you need to understand her in the context of 2020’s political craziness. She grew up in a subgeneration of integration babies, sandwiched between Boomers and Gen Xers, post civil rights, witnesses to hip-hop’s earliest days.

 

Prince, early Prince, was rock and funk, throwing parties for folks of all colors—White/Black, Puerto Rican/Everybody just a-freaking—the patron saint of bougie Black kids who grew up straddling the jagged line between the white world and the Black world. Prince made being Black and sounding white cool, with all the complexities that entailed.

 

Much has been made of Harris’s more obvious “firsts”—first Black woman on a ticket, first with an Asian background—but she’s also from a very particular moment in American cultural history. At age 55, the child of intellectuals in Northern California, she’s part of a cohort often ignored by demographers, Generation Jones, those of us who came of age during the Reagan years. We missed out on the Black Power Movement, the sexual revolution and women’s lib, Vietnam and Woodstock.

 

All this shapes Harris the politician, for good and for not-so-good. As a Generation Joneser, she’s the Jan Brady of American politics, the perpetual middle child, wondering why we can’t all get along.

 

And tonight, on the debate stage, facing off against Vice President Mike Pence, another (older) Joneser, she’ll be trying to thread a needle that’s getting harder to thread every year. She’ll have to toggle between condemning Trumpian policies, charming moderates on the fence—and convincing the younger and the less patient that she’s in step with the times.

 

But we integration babies are used to dancing to a complicated beat. Our parents had fought a different kind of fight. They were the ones beating on the door until white folks were forced to let them in, bracing themselves against Bull Connor’s fire hoses, letting the world know we shall not be moved.

 

Or they were immigrants, hailing from the Caribbean or West Africa or South America, banging on that door, pushing past restrictive immigration laws that all too often excluded those of a darker hue.

 

We were the ones who were already in the door, thanks to their fights. White folks weren’t mysterious beings barricading the door. They were the kids we were sitting next to in algebra class, tumbling next to us in gymnastics, staying up with us until the wee hours at sleepovers. We took showers together, comparing notes on our progress through puberty: Did you get your period yet? White kids weren’t mysterious. How could they be when you already saw them naked? White kids were just part of the crowd.

 

 

In our middle-class world, Black was an ever broadening umbrella, both by necessity in this country’s bifurcated color caste system, and by choice, as life changed under the Supreme Court’s 1967 landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling. You could, say, have an Indian mom and a Jamaican dad, and you’d still be Black. You could have a Filipino dad and a Black mom so light-skinned she made you do a double-take, and you’d still be Black. Your mom could be a white lady from the Netherlands and your dad could be a Black man from D.C., and you’d still be Black. You could have two deep dark chocolate parents and sound like a Valley Girl, and of course, you'd still be Black.

 

Like Harris, I’m a middle-class Generation Joneser, a Black preppie who also swore allegiance to his Purple Majesty. Some of us, like Harris—and like Prince—were bused to all-white schools from majority-Black neighborhoods. Others, like me, grew up in the ’burbs and boroughs next door to white kids, attending prep schools or Catholic academies or the local public schools, part of a hugely optimistic, messy national experiment. (Never mind that folks had been crossing the color line for years, often by force, creating a rainbow of phenotypes among African Americans.)

 

This didn’t always make for some rosy kumbaya moment. We grew up with the specter of nuclear war hanging over our heads, when it really felt like it could all end with the push of a button, as Prince warned us in 1999. And a lot of times, especially once we got to high school and dating made everything a lot more complicated, we were too Black for the white kids—and way too white for the Black kids.

 

Code-switching became embedded in our DNA. Barack Obama, another integration baby, was mocked for his fluid code-switching. But for us, that’s not performance. It’s just a survival tool.

 

That cultural adeptness makes for a canny politician. It’s an adeptness that has held Harris in good stead on the campaign trail, whether she’s jamming to a drumline, making dosas with Mindy Kaling or dragging Joe Biden for his record on school desegregation. And it’s an adeptness that will be on display as she faces off against Mike Pence in the first and only 2020 vice presidential debate.

 

Compromise and consensus are a key personality trait of Generation Jonesers, particularly among Jonesers of color, said Jonathan Pontell, a social generation expert, who coined the phrase. But that compromising nature, in this era of political extremes, can seem out of step, something for which both Harris and Obama have faced criticism.

 

 

“It’s a great skill to have as a politician, to be able to compromise, bring people together,” said Pontell, who’s working on a book about Generation Jones. “But I don’t know how realistic idealism is right now. We as a country are very tribal — and very angry.”

 

Jonesers, he said, were weaned on idealism as kids in the ’70s, only to be confronted as young adults with the money-hungry cynicism of the ’80s. We were the guinea pigs living through the real changes effected by the turmoil of the ’60s, turmoil we were too young to understand. As integration babies, Black Jonesers were raised with high expectations, expected to excel, to bust ceilings.

 

But racism is real, and often, when we were accepted into Harvard or Yale or Dartmouth or got that plum job, our peers, the kids we hung out with on the playground, accused us of being unworthy beneficiaries of affirmative action. Racism, we learned, has a particular sting when it’s being wielded by the one you thought was your ride or die. It’s why some of us, like Harris, embraced HBCU life, seeking belonging. Acceptance.

 

Straddling the racial divide can be a painful and lonely place. A number of my friends, bougie Black kids who grew up with the best, and with expectations to be the best, didn’t make it out of their 30s alive—felled by drugs, or by suicide, or by sheer bad luck.

 

Prince knew all this, tapping into the angst of a subgeneration. He always looked askance at the poor hand we’d been dealt, but he hid from the world, choosing to shroud himself in mystery.

 

Toward the end of his life, though, he picked out his ’fro and stepped into the light, becoming increasingly vocal about his politics, speaking out for Black Lives Matter. In the wake of the death of Freddie Grey at the hands of Baltimore police, he held a benefit concert he dubbed, “Rally 4 Peace.”

 

When he died, my husband and I held a vigil at our house, playing Prince nonstop, wiping away tears. I’ve read that Kamala and her husband did the same.