As a junior senator, Harris believed in California’s liberal leanings. Government transparency website on the 2020 report on the ideological leanings of the Senate GovTrack.us ranking him as the second most liberal senator behind Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.
But legislation is not the arena in which he distinguishes himself.
A lawyer by training, Harris began his career as a prosecutor in the Oakland, Calif., district, and in 2003 won election to become San Francisco’s district attorney.
The skills he learned cross-examining witnesses proved valuable when Trump officials and nominees for top office testified before his committees.
Harris took umbrage when asked by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing if he could think of any legislation in which the government makes decisions about the “male organ.”
The result was clear: Politicians were more inclined to interfere with women’s physical rights than men.
“Um,” Kavanaugh said. “I’m happy to answer a more specific question.”
In a Judiciary Committee hearing the following year, he asked Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, if Trump had ever suggested an investigation into anyone. Yes or no? – he asked.
“I’m trying to fight the word ‘propose,'” Barr said. “There were discussions about issues that … they didn’t ask me to open an investigation.”
When asked about Harris’ methods in the hearing, Barr told NBC News: “During the questioning, he adopted a style that was the caricature of a tough prosecutor, as always – rapid fire and confrontational.”
The Senate served as the springboard for Harris’ next big leap. Using the attention he received in the hearings, he jumped into the 2020 presidential race after only two years in the Senate.
He announced his candidacy to a crowd of 20,000 in Auckland, where he was born to an immigrant Indian mother and a Jamaican father.
“I wasn’t surprised when he ran, but in my dealings with him, he didn’t have the same whiff of ambition from the moment you meet them that some people do,” Sen. Mark Warner, D.-Va., said in an interview. “You haven’t had that creepy, fleeting feeling that I’ve had with some of my colleagues.”
Harris’ campaign quickly flattened out. He struggled to explain health policy and failed to conduct a disciplined operation. In 2019, one of his campaign aides, Kelly Mehlenbacher, wrote a resignation letter “I’ve never seen an organization treat its employees so badly,” he said, obtained by The New York Times.
Harris’ exchanges with Biden during the first Democratic debate at least earned him respect. He questioned his opposition to busing as a means of integrating schools in the 1960s and 70s.
“That little girl was me,” she said, describing how a little girl was bused from one school to another in Berkeley, California, to facilitate desegregation.
At the next debate, Biden greeted her with a warm smile: “Take it easy on me, baby.”
Lacking money, Harris dropped out before the first Iowa contest. Out of the wreckage of the 2020 campaign came an anticipated opportunity. Biden won and made Harris his running mate.
“His 2020 campaign was a disaster and failed, but it managed to carry him to the vice presidency. And that’s what got him to where he is now,” said Gil Duran, Harris’ former assistant at the California Attorney General’s Office. “In a strange way in Kamala’s career, even the setbacks have been stepping stones to where she is now.”
“He cares about his friends”
Harris’ transition to the vice presidency has been rocky. Since being elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2003, he has been his own boss.
Now he was under Biden. His job was to make her look good and push his agenda. He has tasked him with addressing the root causes of illegal immigration, a largely diplomatic task that Trump has hung around his neck, derided as a failed “border czar.”
Biden’s approval ratings plummeted, as did his.
Harris’ top aides came and wentraising concerns about his management style.
Duran, who served as the attorney general’s communications director in 2013, said: “I’m gone after five months, so I’m going to talk about it. The story of staff dysfunction is something he will have to work on.
Some former aides insist she is held to a different standard than male bosses. “I found my three years working for the attorney general to be critical to my development as a lawyer,” Jeffrey Tsai, a former senior official in Harris’s attorney general’s office, said in an interview.
He added that there were “rings of sexist undertones” in touching on his executive character.
Duran disagreed. “Dianne Feinstein,” said the late California senator, “was the best manager I ever worked for, and she’s a woman, so I don’t consider my criticism to be sexist.”
A former White House aide suggested that Harris faced pressures at the time, which required a loose approach as he served in senior positions.
“At each higher level, he’s had less time,” the person said. “I have also worked with men who use their time effectively. I have seen it. When I worked with President Biden, I heard him say during briefings, ‘Don’t jump on me.’
According to Harris loyalists, he had little chance to shine in an office that traditionally demands unwavering respect for the president. Now that he’s standing alone, he’s drawing huge crowds and connecting directly with Americans, something that wasn’t possible when Biden was No. 2.
“I don’t know if that’s true, but it has a ring of truth,” Warner said.
In private, he often exuded the ease and friendliness that Americans see on the campaign trail, supporters say. Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said Harris would invite female senators from both parties to dinner at the vice president’s residence. Harris made cheese puffs for the group once, then shared her recipe.
Hirono recalled another instance in which the vice president appeared in the Senate to break a tie. Harris saw Hirono’s scarf come undone and fixed it himself on the bench.
“How many people preside [over the Senate] would he do that?’ Hirono said. “He cares about his friends.”
“He belongs in the role”
Brian Brokaw, a former Harris campaign aide, visited the White House last year to see his old boss and pass on notes written by his two young children.
In a shot from the meeting, Harris is leaning forward on a couch holding letters. He’s in a West Wing office down the hall from the Oval, nearly 3,000 miles from the school bus where black kids ride in hopes that they’ll have the same opportunities as white kids.
“Can you believe it?” Brokaw told him. “Here you are in your office in the West Wing! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?
Harris looked at her, she remembered, and seemed to say, “Of course I’m here!”
“He 100% believes he belongs in this role,” Brokaw said in an interview.
Harris came to politics with the advantages that most presidents have – family money or political pedigree. His mother Shyamala Gopalan was a cancer researcher and his father Donald Harris was an economist. The couple filed for divorce in 1972.
In the mid-1990s, she met Willie Brown, a powerful former speaker of the California State Assembly and former mayor of San Francisco.
Los Angeles Times article In November 1994, then-Speaker Brown announced that he had appointed him to the California Medical Care Commission, a $72,000-a-year position. At the time, sources described her as Brown’s girlfriend, the article states.
In 2003, when he was running for San Francisco DA, he tried to deny any suggestion that he was affiliated with Brown in interviews with SF Weekly.
“His career is over; I will survive for the next 40 years. I don’t owe him anything,” he told the news agency.
His mother, who passed away in 2009 from the same disease he learned about, stands as a formative influence in his life. He encouraged her as she began her political career.
Mesloh recalls Shyamala showing up at the campaign office every day during the DA’s race, attending strategy meetings and stuffing envelopes.
“He was a worker,” Mesloh said. “Shyamala was always very involved.”
As San Francisco DA and later attorney general, Harris now held many positions that were fodder for both campaigns.
He opposed the death penalty, even when he was shot and killed on his watch as a San Francisco police DA. Harris declined to seek the death penalty for the 21-year-old gang member accused of killing Officer Isaac Espinoza, putting him at odds with then-Sen. Feinstein argued that the crime warranted the death penalty.
Harris’ position makes him vulnerable to the charge that he is soft on crime.
But he later defended the death sentence in court after becoming attorney general. Harris appealed a federal judge’s decision In 2014, California’s death penalty violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. An appeals court overturned the judge’s decision a year later, upholding the death sentence.
His campaign is seizing on other parts of his record as attorney general to show that he is the antithesis of Trump. He filed a lawsuit against for-profit Corinthian Colleges in 2013, alleging the company awarded worthless degrees to unsuspecting students and left them in debt.
The case ended after three years $1.1 billion verdict against the then dissolved Corinthian Colleges. As vice president in 2022, Harris was happy to announce that the Biden administration was canceling the debt of former Corinthian students.
He already refers to the saga of the Corinthian Colleges as proof of his sincerity.
In 2018, a federal court affirmed $25 million settlement With Trump University students who claim they were lured into paying high fees in hopes of learning the “secrets of success” in the real estate industry.
“I know Donald Trump’s type” likes to say.