The best profile of Kamala Harris you will read is by Joan Walsh in the Nation. An excerpt:
I heard the rapid staccato click of high heels. Harris walked in, greeted me warmly, and immediately yanked open the curtains. She was not afraid of the heat. She wanted sunshine in here.
She is about to get much more sunshine—and heat—than she asked for. A few days after our conversation, President Joe Biden had the worst debate performance of his career and sent the Democratic Party into a crisis over his ability to win the 2024 election against Donald Trump. Pundits and more than a few Democratic leaders clamored for Biden to step aside, as polling showed his path to a second term drying up. On July 21, Biden announced that he was suspending his campaign for president and endorsed Harris as nominee soon after. Prominent Democrats quickly lined up behind her as her work wooing Biden’s delegates began.
Harris and I spoke when she was still trying to win a second term for Biden, dispatched to reach voters who were among the most critical to his reelection. In the days before I met with her, I was repeatedly told: Do not suggest that she’s “found her voice” in the two years since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, when the Supreme Court robbed American women of rights we’ve enjoyed for half a century—although she kicked off her Dobbs anniversary tour the day we spoke. Do not say that she’s “having a moment” on the 2024 campaign trail. Or ask if there’s any “daylight” between her and the president over Israel’s brutal retaliation against Hamas in the wake of the October 7 massacre. (On policy, there isn’t, though Harris has been more critical in public about the mercilessness of Israel’s response and the toll on Palestinian civilians than Biden has.) Do not ask whether anything “surprises” her after a long career as a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and now as the nation’s first Black, first Asian, and first woman vice president. This struck me as a defensive tic, a reaction to the feeling that she has repeatedly been underestimated. (That feeling simmers under the surface of our conversation as well.)
I was warned against going down these paths not just by her staff but by some of the friends who’ve known her for decades. They were not protecting her; they were protecting me—from her impatience with what she thinks are stupid questions she’s heard time and again.
So I struggled with how to phrase a question about whether Dobbs has given her a new mission. I think I maybe even used the dreaded word “moment.”
“I appreciate that perhaps for some who weren’t paying attention, this seems like a ‘moment,’” Harris allowed. “But there have been many moments in my career which have been about my commitment to these kinds of fights, whether they’re on the front pages of newspapers or not.”
The problem, though, is that Harris could use this redemption story. Her 2020 presidential primary bid went poorly. (Full disclosure: My daughter, Nora, was her Iowa political director in that race. I also worked with her sister, Maya Harris, at an Oakland nonprofit 25 years ago.) The first year or so of her vice presidency didn’t shine. The past two years have been different: Since Dobbs, she has been Biden’s top ambassador on issues of reproductive justice—yes, unlike Biden, she’ll say “abortion,” but she also frames the issue around broader themes of maternal health and family support. When we met, Harris had just come from a taping at MSNBC where she sat alongside Hadley Duvall, the brave Kentucky woman who spoke about being raped by her stepfather and becoming pregnant at 12 and railed against Republicans who would force girls to have their rapist’s baby.
Duvall had a miscarriage but remembers she took comfort in knowing she had “options”—options she wouldn’t have now in Kentucky or in many other states. “One of the things I’m utterly in awe of is the number of people who have decided, ‘I’m gonna tell my story, because I don’t want other people to go through this,’” Harris told me. “I said to Hadley, ‘I’ve seen, in moments of crisis, the universe has a way of revealing the heroes.’”
After Biden’s catastrophic debate performance and declining poll numbers, the Democratic Party needs a hero. Can Harris pull it off? Senior Democrats as well as some progressives who had been pushing Biden to stay in the race have lined up behind her, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. At press time, former President Barack Obama had not endorsed Harris, yet several of Harris’s strongest presumed rivals for the nomination, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, had. ActBlue reported raising nearly $50 million in small donations in the seven hours after Biden’s announcement. Now the way in which she navigates this unprecedented situation could mean the difference not only between getting herself or Trump into the White House—but between democracy and autocracy.
Back in New York, Harris resisted the idea that her past two years represent any sort of evolution into a stronger leadership role. So I flipped to what her longtime friend, California Senator Laphonza Butler, told me. Butler didn’t see some post-Dobbs awakening in Harris either, but she mentioned one thing she thought might be new, and I shared it with Harris: “I see a Black woman who got sick and tired of trying to please everybody and just said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not gonna make everybody happy. I just have to be me.’”
Harris responded with the trademark laugh that’s launched a thousand hateful Fox News segments and told me: “I love Laphonza Butler.”