Who Is Kamala Harris? Her Context, Ascent, and Economic and Social Commitments

We are weeks away from the seminal U.S. election which will determine if the U.S. opts for a counterrevolutionary white, Christian nationalist, and plutocratic dictatorship or a compromised version of social democracy. After the month-long torment of the nation twisting in the wind as U.S. President Joe Biden resisted pressures to step aside following his disastrous debate performance, the torch of leadership of the Democratic Party has been passed to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Underlining the stakes of the election, more than 200 Republican former staffers for either former President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have endorsed Harris, saying, “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

Between Biden’s withdrawal and election day, there has been little time for either the Democratic Party or former President Donald Trump to define Harris. As The New York Times reported, “Harris does not have a policy page on her campaign website… [she] has been running mainly on Democratic good feelings.” More defining than the vague insistence of “FREEDOM” at the Democratic Party’s convention were the impassioned chants of “Not Going Back!,” or forward, to Trumpian racism, assaults on democracy and climate, or the romances with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jung-Un.

Trump’s promises to punish his political opponents; to deport up to 20 million immigrants, which would require the creation of a police state; and his Project 2025 developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation together provide the road maps to trash constitutional democracy and impose a racist and plutocratic dictatorship.

Despite having served as a senator and vice president, Harris remains a largely unknown quantity. During the Democratic Party’s convention, she was reintroduced as a caring, competent, and tough-minded happy warrior and source of hope. But little is to be learned from what was the Biden-Harris 2024 Democratic Party Platform. Written in anticipation of President Biden’s campaign for reelection, it reads as a defense of Biden’s presidency covering no new ground. Anxious to maintain as much ambiguity and freedom of action as possible, the Harris campaign opted not to make updating the platform a priority. And, although her party’s vacuous platform allocated nearly 20 pages to “Strengthening American Leadership Worldwide,” its fleeting and ritual adoption didn’t disturb the convention’s feel good vibes with any references to competition with China for hegemony, military alliances, or “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems.

During the convention, Cleve Wootson Jr. of The Washington Postwrote an illuminating story about the reinvention of Kamala Harris. He explained in 2020 Harris was uncomfortable campaigning in primaries as the party was moving to the left, and that she endured a “harrowing” first year as vice president when she was poorly supported and isolated by the administration’s senior leadership. That changed when the administration moved to change her image. With support from Biden, she “began focusing less on perilous political tasks like tackling the cause of immigration and seized instead on issues such as abortion and racism, which played to her rhetorical strengths.” And, as we saw in Harris’ acceptance speech and given the framing of the election as being between a prosecutor and a felon, expect Harris to campaign most comfortably on issues of criminal justice.

After blessings from the Obamas, for whom she campaigned during the 2008 primary campaign, she brings the excitement of African American and South Asian accents to her campaigning, signaling support for greater social and economic justice, while committing to history’s most powerful military force, including military alliances, and harping on inflated Russian and Chinese threats.

Worth noting was the scholar Peter Beinart’s observation that there was a false and potentially crippling ring to the convention’s central theme of FREEDOM. Israeli and Jewish pain were legitimately placed on prime time display with the speech by the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American who was wounded and taken hostage in Hamas’ despicable October 7 massacre. But amid protests over the failure of the Biden administration to exercise the leverage it has over Israel to force a cease-fire, the Harris-Walz camp refused to similarly humanize and display Palestinian pain amidst Israel’s genocidal war against Gazans. That. Beinart noted, gave lie to the party’s commitments to equality and could cost it votes in this critically important election.

Not to be forgotten, the shadow of Trump’s January 6, 2021 failed coup and the danger of the Gaza War becoming a region-wide configuration, hang over the election. We cannot assume election fairness. Trump’s election deniers are again in positions to certify false election results. Cadres of attorneys have been lined up to dispute or defend election returns. Should he lose, Trump predicts a “blood bath,” with the possibility of another attempted coup d’état. Meanwhile, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been murderously doing all that he can to entice Iran into triggering a catastrophic regional war with its tectonic impacts on the U.S. election.

The Biden-Trump Context

For the past year it has been apparent that the only way to prevent a Trump dictatorship is to prevent his return to the White House. With the Supreme Court now fully controlled by extreme right wing—racist and fascist operatives who on July 1 granted presidents near-total immunity from prosecution—it has been clear that our constitutional guardrails are insufficient to contain Donald Trump and the counterrevolutionary MAGA movement. Despite his historic legislative successes in rebooting the U.S. economy, the obvious decline of Biden’s physical and intellectual facilities generated severe doubts among many Democrats that President Biden could prevent a Trump-MAGA political tsunami. Only Dean Phillips, a little known Democratic congressman, had the gumption to state that the emperor had no clothes and to, Don Quixote-like, challenge him in primary elections. Many hoped and did what little they could to encourage the Democratic Establishment to intervene and replace him as the party’s candidate while celebrating Biden’s undeniable economic and social policy accomplishments.

That didn’t happen.

Despite our movements’ challenges to Biden’s embrace of Netanyau amid the Gaza genocide, his refusal to force a cease-fire in Ukraine and negotiations with Russia for a neutral and secure Ukraine, and his ratcheting up of the military and economic confrontations with China, a Biden election victory was seen by many as the desperately needed compromise to avoid a Trump dictatorship. In a period reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, Trump’s promises to punish his political opponents; to deport up to 20 million immigrants, which would require the creation of a police state; and his Project 2025 developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation together provide the road maps to trash constitutional democracy and impose a racist and plutocratic dictatorship.

As the political coup progressed, there was talk of an expedited primary election to identify Biden’s successor and to use the primary to build loyalty and excitement for the substitute candidate. That was not to be.

Thus, it was with a mixture of foreboding and a modicum of hope that many tuned into the June 27 televised Biden-Trump debate.

Worst fears were confirmed in the first minutes of the debate. Age had obviously taken its toll. Biden repeatedly lost his train of thought, and his stammering and fading voice generated immediate despair. Trump’s dictatorship, and all that it implies, appeared inevitable.

Fortunately, that despair triggered the revolt within the Democratic Party Establishment, in the liberal press, among major donors, and beyond to those who had been missing during the primary season. The campaign by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the Obamas, and congressional leaders to force Biden to retire was on.

As the political coup progressed, there was talk of an expedited primary election to identify Biden’s successor and to use the primary to build loyalty and excitement for the substitute candidate. That was not to be. Harris, then best known for failing to stem the flow of immigrants from the Global South and for her sputtering 2020 presidential primary campaign, quickly consolidated her hold on the nomination and generated unanticipated excitement and momentum in the Democratic Party’s base.

Harris’ Ascent

On the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention, The New York Timesreported that “the vice president remains largely undefined.” Despite her and the party’s efforts to reintroduce her as forward thinking in comparison to Trump’s obsessions and commitments to a mythic past, with vague tweaks to Biden’s economic policies, as the Times later reported, Harris “is not offering sweeping change in policy. She is at heart an institutionalist… focused on granular impacts over broad society shifts.” She represents continuity of the Biden administration in the tradition of the Clinton-Obama neoliberal trajectory. In terms of foreign and military policies, her refusal to oppose massive new weapons shipments to Israel in the face of the Gaza genocide gives much of the game away. She will do what she can to maintain U.S.-led liberal internationalist hegemony.

Kamala Harris was born in 1964 to Donald J. Harris, an economics doctoral student from Jamaica, and Shyamala Goplan, who at age 19 came to the University of California in Berkeley from India to study nutrition and endocrinology. Contrary to Donald Trump’s calumny that Kamala only recently “turn[ed] Black” for political purposes, she is, like many Americans, multiracial and multicultural. At the University of California, her parents were described as a “power couple” in the school’s civil rights movement, her father being Black and her mother welcomed as a person of color. Donald and Shyamala wed in 1963 and divorced in 1972. Kamala and her younger sister Maya were raised primarily by their single, gritty, and loving mother, who continued her close ties to her family in India. Kamala visited her father on weekends.

She ran unsuccessfully in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, during which her most stunning moment came when she questioned Biden’s associations with segregationists and his early opposition to bussing to desegregate the nation’s schools.

Harris studied political science and economics at Howard, the elite historically Black university in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1986. There she was on the debate team and, signaling her political ambitions, was elected to the student council. From Howard, she returned to California, where she earned her law degree at the University of California’s premier Hastings College of the Law in 1989. The following year, she became deputy district attorney in Oakland, California, near San Francisco, and from 1990 to 1998 developed “a reputation for toughness as she prosecuted cases of gang violence, drug trafficking, and sexual abuse.” She became district attorney in 1998. In 2010 she narrowly won election as the state’s attorney general, becoming the first woman, African American, and South Asian to hold that office. As attorney general, she won a signal court battle with state banks over unfair practices in which she won roughly $20 billion in mortgage relief for homeowners. Her refusal to defend Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage in California, led to that law being overturned.

Harris, who had campaigned for Obama in Iowa during the 2008 presidential primary, became a nationally influential political figure when she was invited to speak in the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Recognized as a “rising star,” she was elected to the Senate in 2016. There she served on the Select Committee on Intelligence, on the Judiciary Committee, and joined the Congressional Black Caucus. She gained national attention for her “prosecutorial” style in questioning witnesses, especially then Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, a close Trump ally, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She ran unsuccessfully in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, during which her most stunning moment came when she questioned Biden’s associations with segregationists and his early opposition to bussing to desegregate the nation’s schools. She said, “That little girl [on the bus] was me.”

Harris failed in 2020 due to uninspired campaigning and criticisms that as California attorney general she failed to investigate police misconduct, including police shootings. Those criticisms fell aside after she became a leading advocate of reform after the brutal police murder of George Floyd that triggered massive and sometimes violent nationwide protests and demands for change.

In the wake of the powerful Black Lives Matter protests, Joe Biden recognized his need to choose a Black woman as his vice presidential running mate if he was to win the critical support of Black women voters. Harris was recruited, and was elected the first woman of color to become vice-president. After the Supreme Court’s antediluvian ruling on abortion, Harris became the administration’s leading advocate of women’s and reproductive rights. She was also tasked with addressing the forces fueling migration from Mexico, protecting voting rights being undermined by racist Republican forces, and, in her role as a serious Washington insider, she set the record for the most tie-breaking votes in the Senate by a vice president.

The Harris-Walz Social and Economic Policy Agenda

Not since the Vietnam War have foreign and military factors been determinative in the outcome of U.S. national elections. True, deep schisms in the Democratic Party over support for Israel’s Gaza genocide threaten to fracture the Democratic coalition, but the most salient issues in the election are domestic: the economy, the struggle for racial justice and against white supremacy, related issues of immigration, constitutional democracy, and reproductive rights.

The U.S. Civil War’s “Lost Cause” of white supremacy ideology remains a driving force in U.S. political culture. We saw this when Donald Trump blessed the “very fine people” in the notorious 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi march and again when Confederate flags led the January 6 failed coup d’etat. From Jim Crow apartheid, the near slavery of Southern sharecropping, and Ku Klux Klan terrorism (Trump’s father was detained at a Klan rally) to systemic racial ballot box obstacles and discriminatory immigration and economic policies, campaigning to entrench white supremacy and the struggle to overturn it have profoundly defined U.S. politics. The modern version didn’t begin with Trump. Recall Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”; Ronald Reagan campaigning on “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of 1960s assassinations of civil rights activists; and George H.W. Bush’s racist Willie Horton television ads.

In an era of economic insecurity, aggravated by the export of U.S. jobs to low-wage platforms from China and Vietnam to Mexico, Donald Trump has generated cult-like white working class support with unvarnished divide and conquer calls and policies promoting white Christian nationalism: “Our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell.” He has charged that Former U.S. President Barack Obama isn’t American. Immigrants, he wailed, are “animals.” Biden would “hurt God” and target Christians, and the list goes on. The most obvious determinant of who supports Trump is whether he or she is racist.

These are the issues on which what may prove to be the nation’s most important election will be fought and won.

It was in these contexts—economic insecurity, racism, misogyny, and increasing authoritarianism—that Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz developed their domestic policy priorities. Still vaguely defined commitments to a “caring” or “opportunity economy” and advocacy of abortion rights are in the fore. In the wake of Biden’s massive post-pandemic restructuring of the U.S. economy, Harris and Walz seek to do little more than fine-tune Bidenomics.

Campaigning with the slogan “She’s for the middle class because she is from the middle class,” Kamala gave her “big” economic policy speech days before the Democratic convention. While Trump responded that Harris and Walz are “communists” and The Washington Posteditorialized that her plan is little more than “populist gimmicks,” the Nobel economic laureate Paul Krugman wrote that they had “staked out a moderately center-left position, not too different from President Biden’s original Build Back Better agenda.” Most important are her calls for restoring the now expired expanded child tax credit, which early in the Biden administration reduced child poverty by nearly half. In the midst of the national housing crisis, the Harris-Walz economic plan calls for tax incentives for home builders and support for first-time home buyers. This may prove to be modestly helpful, but it fails to address the central cause of the housing shortage: zoning laws that block new housing construction. Harris’ call for legislation to ban grocery price gouging—a major driver of inflation—has been misrepresented by Republicans committed to the freedom to exploit and by much of the press as “price controls,” but we still await explanations about how the ban would be implemented.

Harris’ other tax policies include reversing the 2017 Trump trillion dollar a year tax cut for the wealthy, increasing the corporate taxation rate from 21% to 28%, her pledge not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, and joining Trump’s pledge to end federal taxation on tips, a commitment that could contribute to winning Nevada’s electoral votes.

Even as Trump has dominates plutocratic billionaire support, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, of Yale University’s School of Management, argues that there are reasons why “CEOs are excited about Kamala Harris.” For them she represents fidelity to the rule of law and thus would be a bastion against Trump again “inserting himself into private business and regulatory processes to inflict personal vendettas.” Harris is less committed to antitrust court challenges than Biden. Unlike Trump, Harris’ tax policies don’t promise massive increases in the national debt that would generate economic instability. Immigrant reform would provide corporations needed access to skilled immigrant workers, not to mention that currently half of all billion-dollar startups have been initiated by former immigrant students. And, having cut her political teeth in the San Francisco Bay area, including Silicon Valley, Kamala Harris has deep ties to a significant number of the nation’s most influential corporate leaders.

Women’s energy is the driving force of the Harris-Walz campaign. More important than shattering the glass ceiling—the centerpiece of Hillary Clinton’s stem-winding convention speech—has been resistance to the extremist Supreme Court’s overturning of women’s right to abortion in 2022, termed “reproductive freedom” in the Harris campaign. Access to abortion is now dependent on state, not national, legislation, and it has been seriously curtailed or outlawed in 22 states. More restrictions are on the drawing boards. Alabama’s MAGA supreme court is leading the charge with its decision that embryos are “unborn children” and its banning of in vitro fertilization (IVF). U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thomas recently signaled that legal access to contraceptives may be next to be challenged. And both JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, and Trump’s Project 2025 advocate policies akin to relegating women to a 21st century version of being barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

Rallying for the right to choose has been a powerful driver of recent women’s political engagement and a winning formula for Democrats. In every state where referendums to restore the right to abortion have been held, including conservative states like Kansas, pro-choice advocates have prevailed. Kamala Harris has been a leading force within the Biden administration in pressing for the restoration of the Roe vs. Wade right to abortion, saying among other things that “this generation now has fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.” These commitments were on display during the first night of the convention when delegates were brought to tears by Hadley Duvall’s testimony about being denied an abortion as a 12 year old after having been raped by her stepfather, and by Amanda Zurawski and Kaitlyn Joshua who testified about being denied abortions during dangerous failed pregnancies.

Adding to the campaign’s bona fides on reproductive freedom is former football coach Walz. We have been reminded of his history as a strong advocate of abortion rights, including his participation with Vice President Harris in a March 2024 visit to a Planned Parenthood health center that provides abortions.

And then there is race. Since her college days and driven by her experiences as a woman of color, Harris has been a dedicated advocate of civil rights. Like Biden and Obama, Harris correctly warns that freedom in the U.S. is “under profound threat.” In a recent keynote address to the South Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she urged resistance to Republican and Supreme Court assaults on voting and reproductive rights, the denial of Black history, and book bans that have become rampant in Republican-controlled states and communities. And, like Barack Obama, to avoid further aggravating national racial and gender divisions, Kamala Harris underplays her precedent-breaking roles as the first woman and person of color to be vice-president and to lead a major party ticket for the presidency. Others do that for her.

Contrary to Republican charges, Vice President Harris is hardly responsible for the continuing tide of immigration across the U.S. southern border. Not the country’s “immigration czar” as the Republicans charge, in 2021 she was assigned the role of addressing the “root cause” of immigration to the U.S. from Central America and Mexico. In that role she secured $4.2 billion in private funding for job creation in Central America, and controversially in Guatemala she told Central Americans, “Do not come. Do not come… If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

Not an anti-immigrant bigot, Harris supported President Biden’s efforts to negotiate a bipartisan border security and immigration deal with Republicans. That effort was blocked by Donald Trump when he sought political advantage by sowing further chaos. Harris has signaled a somewhat harder line on border control, matched with a still-to-be-defined “path to citizenship” for at least some immigrants who are already in the country. Should Democrats regain control of Congress, we should expect renewed efforts for immigration reform, especially as the U.S. remains in need of skilled and unskilled workers.

When it comes to the existential climate emergency, Reutersreports that “opinion polls show broad support for tackling climate change, especially among younger voters.” But unfortunately, the Harris-Walz campaign seeks to avoid alienating anyone. Several aides describe Harris’ plan on controversial energy issues as one of “strategic ambiguity.” Walz did win meaningful improvements in Minnesota’s pollution standards for automobiles, and as a Senator Harris sought to address deadly and disproportionate levels of pollution in Black and Hispanic communities. But to protect jobs and win votes in Pennsylvania and several Midwestern states, Harris has reversed her earlier support for a ban on fracking to produce more oil. As a member of Congress, Walz voted to complete construction of the deeply controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline and pushed for the lifting of Minnesota’s moratorium on building nuclear plants. Not an encouraging record.

There are just over 10 weeks before now and election day. Developments in the Middle East and Ukraine War or an October surprise could change the equation. But these are the issues on which what may prove to be the nation’s most important election will be fought and won.

Watch tomorrow for Part II: Who Is Kamala Harris? Aggressive Foreign and Military Policies.