Kamala Harris Makes Her Case

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — It was cloudy and brisk on Sunday morning, but it would have felt like a midsummer’s day to Kamala Harris had she been been walking around 16th and Telegraph Avenue. Beaming with radiant smiles and laughter, the multicolored crowd of thousands stretched around the corner of Telegraph and down around San Pablo Avenue. Some chatted about the possibility of the second black president, the first South Asian president, the first woman in the White House, the first Alpha Kappa Alpha soror (skee-wee!), the first HBCU grad, the first one from their hometown. The bootleggers were out in force, with the perhaps too-easily replicated Harris campaign logo already finding its way onto hats and tote bags. One local couple, there with their two young daughters, had printed up their own Harris gear and spoke of a “new beginning.”

It is tempting to judge such an atmosphere as “Yes We Can”-ish, but that would be reductive. Yes, the Senator from California, 54, was first dubbed the “female Obama” in a Daily Beast profile nearly nine years ago. But to presume that she is now running for president because press and politicos alike pushed her to is not only to deny Harris the agency she has in making such a choice, but also to disregard the obvious differences between herself and our previous president. The Harris phenomenon is its own kind of wonder, where a presidential campaign for a woman born from Jamaican and Tamil Indian parents has become possible not merely because Obama opened the door. It isn’t just because Oakland, Howard University and AKAs all love their homegirl, either. Harris got here while exhibiting the kind of femininity that makes men like Jeff Sessions nervous. Obama often shied away from exhibiting the kind of anger for which black men are so often stigmatized, but Harris has provided yet another example of a woman of color rising in politics because of — not despite — her intensity and intelligence. If anything, Harris stands at the end of a road that was last tread by Michelle, not Barack.

The senator needed to use her debut 2020 event — easily the grandest yet staged by any Democratic candidate who has entered the primary race — to prove her star-making qualities also make her a viable presidential candidate. That was difficult enough for anyone, and by any reasonable measure, she nailed it. Speaking to what the campaign estimated to be more than 20,000 people in front of Oakland City Hall, Harris offered a fascinating and layered rationalization for why she chose to do this.

A lot of candidates would have been content to launch their presidential campaigns with platitudes about the American Dream and moral clarity, but the former prosecutor chose to do something a bit more interesting with her time. She used her opening salvo to make an argument for improving the same flawed system in which she has spent her career.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kamala-harris-2020-president-785410/