There is a video clip of Vice President Kamala Harris talking to a young girl about leadership. Her advice: “You never have to ask anyone permission to lead. When you want to lead, just lead,” she says.
Clearly Harris took that permission for herself in her overnight rise from Joe Biden’s loyal running mate to his replacement as presidential candidate.
Even Oprah Winfrey, in a town hall with the candidate on Sept. 19, commented on how Harris transformed from serviceable Joe Biden stand-in one week to fiery, swaggery speechmaker the next. I saw it too. Gone was the vice president from early 2021 stuck with the gargantuan no-win task of figuring out why people illegally cross the border.
She was the commanding candidate accepting her party’s nomination. She was master debater, putting Donald Trump on his heels during their Sept. 10 debate, verbally smacking him for boasting about his supposed friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”
This was a Kamala Harris I didn’t know existed. Years ago, probably when she was California attorney general, I’d seen her leave an L.A. Times editorial board meeting, looking exasperated after being pummeled with questions from my colleagues and me. We could be a tough room, and how the attorney general dealt with criminal justice issues was often a topic of controversy.
Kamala Harris, the 2.0 version, is self-assured, unflappable and funny. (To the hecklers at one of her recent rallies in Wisconsin: “Oh — you guys are at the wrong rally. No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.”)
But being smart and compelling may not be enough in the scary closing days of this race. She can’t win against Trump just by having a successful record as a prosecutor and lawmaker and creative ideas about how to increase housing supply, support entrepreneurs starting businesses and help people buy their first home. And that’s maddening. That should be enough.
Of course, she knows all this, but even reminding her audiences that Trump is “unhinged, ” as she has done, has so far not moved the needle on polls that show Harris and Trump in a dead heat.
When she first got in the race, Republicans were obsessed with her and treated her like some exotic animal whose name they pretended they couldn’t pronounce. The way she talks, her ethnicity — is she Black or South Asian or, shockingly, both? — her lack of biological children. Though Harris has two stepchildren whom she treats as her own, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a smarmy speech that her children keep her humble but Harris “doesn’t have anything” to keep her humble. Trump called her low-IQ and, according to published reports, “retarded.”
Never has Harris taken the bait. Never has she been drawn into a trash-talk brawl. But as a childless (though cat-less) Black woman, I’ll throw a punch on Harris’ behalf: If children keep you humble, how have Trump’s five children failed to keep him from becoming a megalomaniac?
She took the high road, but her poll numbers didn’t. Alarmingly, she seems to be losing some support among Black men — even though the overwhelming majority of Black people polled say they support her. In an effort to win as many Black voters as possible, she dashed to Detroit on Tuesday for an hour long chat with the enormously popular Black radio show host Charlamagne Tha God. Then, to woo any remaining fence-sitters, she went to Pennsylvania on Wednesday where she sparred with Fox News political anchor Bret Baier.
She skipped the fusty white-tie Al Smith dinner fundraiser in New York for Catholic charities — generally a must-show event for presidential candidates — to campaign in Wisconsin on Thursday night. She’s right to focus on campaigning in key states. But here is what she should never skip in what time remains: Harris, who has long fought for a federal right to abortion, needs to remind voters that Trump is a threat to reproductive rights, not (as he called himself) a protector of women — or white men, or Black men or any person of color. He is a protector only of himself.
Two and a half weeks from now, I don’t want to write that Harris lost but ran a glorious campaign. I want to write that she had a spectacular victory. And then on Inauguration Day, I want to watch Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to become a Supreme Court justice, swear in the first Black and South Asian woman to become president of the United States. I want to imagine what it would be like if my parents had lived to see that. My father would be sobbing as he watched, and my mother would be smiling as if she trusted all along this would happen.
