When initiative bears fruit: Harris’ rapid rise driven by call for action

Hours before Kamala Harris took the stage for the first time as Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, she received a text message from a childhood classmate with photos from their school days. In one of the pictures, a racially diverse group of first-graders are gathered in a classroom. Some had taken the bus from their homes across town to join white students from the affluent hillside neighbourhoods in Berkeley, California. A pensive Harris sits on the floor, dutifully looking ahead, a child in the centre of an experiment in racial integration.

“That’s how it started. There’s no question!” Harris, 55, texted back to Aaron Peskin, the former classmate who is now a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Fifty years after she was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley’s public schools, Harris is now the first Black woman and first Asian American woman named to a major party presidential ticket. From her earliest years, Harris’ path toward the second-highest office in the United States has tracked the nation’s struggle for racial equality. The start-and-stop progress and sometimes messy debate have shaped her life, from an upbringing by immigrant parents, a childhood among civil rights activists, a career at the helm of a flawed criminal justice system and her rapid ascent to the top of Democratic politics.

Those experiences forged a politician who is unafraid to buck the political powers that be, but also charts a cautious course through policy debates. As a senator and candidate, she’s emerged as a leader who knows the power of tough questioning and a viral moment, and also the weight of her role as a voice for women of colour. “She’s the right thing at the right time in this country,” said Peskin. “She understands how complicated life is, and what the promises of America are.” Harris’ political rise, while fast, has not been without criticism and setbacks.

She’s been criticised for shifting policy positions. She faced questions familiar to women in politics, particularly women of colour, about her ambition. Republican President Donald Trump labelled her “nasty” for her piercing interrogation of his nominees, including now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Some progressive Democrats, meanwhile, view her work as a prosecutor sceptically, questioning her use of policies they say are discriminatory. Her own presidential bid, announced before 20,000 people in her hometown of Oakland, California, flamed out before primary season voting began. She struggled to raise money and present a clear vision. Now she’s back in an election she calls the most consequential of her lifetime.

“My mother Shyamala raised my sister Maya and me to believe that it was up to us and every generation of Americans to keep on marching,” Harris said in her first speech after Biden announced his selection. “She’d tell us: Don’t sit around and complain about things. Do something.” Harris seemed bound to rise in politics from the very earliest days of her career. She was a Howard University graduate without family wealth or high-powered ties when she returned to her native Bay Area for law school and took a job at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in 1990. She quickly began making connections in San Francisco’s tight-knit and competitive political circles. She served on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art board, where she reached out to Libby Schaaf, now Oakland’s mayor, who was running a volunteer programme in Oakland’s public schools. They launched a mentoring programme to connect inner-city students interested in fine arts with museum members, giving the kids access to one of the city’s elite institutions.

“I love to say that Kamala has been fighting for the people long before anyone was looking,” Schaaf said. Among Harris’s friends and later political backers were members of the Getty family of oil fortunes and then-California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. In 2001 Harris joined a group of women working to enhance their political representation in the city. Brown, whom Harris briefly dated, appointed her to two state boards in 1994 and 1995. It was her first foray into state politics, and it came with accusations of political favouritism that would surface in 2003, when Harris made her first political run for San Francisco district attorney.

Harris, then working for the city attorney, challenged her former boss, San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan. He backed legalisation of medical marijuana and other progressive issues. But critics questioned his priorities. Harris tacked right on the issues to run against him, pledging to be tough on crime and repair relationships with police. Harris had the backing of monied donors, but the public barely knew her. So she used an ironing board as a pop-up table outside grocery stores to meet voters. She promised to bring more attention to domestic violence cases and to Black mothers who had lost their children to homicide, issues she felt Hallinan was neglecting.

Debbie Mesloh, a long-time friend and adviser, said Harris cut her teeth in that first race, learning lessons that she would carry into national politics. Harris faced both the scrutiny of her personal life and the resistance to her rise as she raced past rivals from more well-connected families. “She had to be strong, she had to be bold, she had to be ambitious,” Mesloh recalled. “There was a big question, too, of ‘Who do you think you are?’” Harris, then 39, won handily. Just months into her tenure, Harris decided not to seek the death penalty against a man charged with killing a police officer. That decision angered law enforcement officers and drew rebuke from Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the city’s former mayor and a force in California politics. But Harris had run as a death penalty opponent and her move made good on a campaign promise.

The issue would later fuel Harris’ reputation as a political shape-shifter. Years later, when she ran for California attorney general and needed support beyond her liberal home base, Harris tempered her stance on capital punishment. She pledged to uphold the death penalty if elected, then stayed silent when ballot measures to repeal it went before voters in 2012 and 2016. She said it would be inappropriate to weigh in because her office was responsible for writing the measures.

In 2014, she had a chance to effectively abolish the death penalty when a federal judge said it was so rarely used that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment for those languishing on death row. Harris appealed the decision and won, keeping capital punishment on the books. She now calls for a federal moratorium. Observers and critics point to these episodes as evidence of Harris’s penchant for staking out cautious positions that uphold the status quo.

“There was nothing about the way she carried herself as a prosecutor, the way she handled cases, that made you say, ‘Oh wow, she’s really shaking things up,’” said John Raphling, a former public defender in California who is now a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch. But, he added, the debate over criminal justice reform was different at the time. “The whole idea of a progressive prosecutor is a pretty recent phenomenon,” he said.

Harris’ allies argue that she worked within the confines of the system and the politics of the time. Harris found ways to make change when possible, they say. As district attorney, she launched a re-entry programme that connected non-violent offenders to jobs and education that became a national model. Harris, mindful of her history-making role, on Friday called Biden bold for choosing a Black woman to join him on the ticket.

“I have not achieved anything that I have without the support of many who believed in the possibility of someone who has never been there before,” she said in an interview.