If the Democratic candidate is elected President of the United States on November 5, she would be the first woman of Asian and African descent to accede to the supreme post. A new challenge for this brilliant, combative personality who has already succeeded in breaking the glass ceiling on several occasions, and who is preparing to engage in a heated debate with Donald Trump this Wednesday…
America, Asia, Africa: these three continents have forged the personality of the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.
Kamala Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to two remarkable people, her father from Jamaica and her mother from India. The former, of Jamaican origin, is an economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, while the latter is a biologist and oncologist specializing in breast cancer. Both met in the United States, where they had come to pursue their studies, before setting up home.
But when their parents separated, seven-year-old Kamala and her sister Maya followed their mother to Canada in 1976.
After attending primary school (in a French-speaking school in Montreal) and then secondary school in Westmount (Quebec), Kamala Harris returned to the USA in 1981 to pursue her higher education. She graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and went on to earn a Juris Doctor degree from the Hastings School of Law at the University of California, San Francisco.
A beautiful founding journey
In her early years, Kamala Harris was also strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather. Thanks to her grandfather, an emissary of the Indian government in Zambia, she discovered the African continent. A knowledge enriched by vacations with her Jamaican family. Stays in India with her mother’s relatives completed her cosmopolitan education.
This beautiful founding itinerary enabled Kamala to discover the world through different cultures, as well as the United States, from the East to the West Coast.
What many consider to be an asset, however, was sharply criticized during Donald Trump‘s 2020 presidential campaign . After highlighting her Indian and Jamaican origins, the Republican candidate for re-election declared that “ Kamala Harris could never become the first woman president, it would be an insult to our country”.
But that’s not enough to discourage the woman who intends to become the first second-generation American to reach the White House.
As a reminder, second-generation Americans – children born in the United States to two foreign parents– represent 12% of the country’s population.
Blended family
On the private front, Kamala Harris has not had a smooth, conventional itinerary either.
After a relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s, followed by a brief affair with actor Montel Williams in 2001, she finally found true love with the man who became her husband in 2021, Hollywood lawyer Doug Emhoff. She becomes stepmother to her two children, Cole, born in 1994, and Ella, born in 1999. The children were delighted that Kamala got on so well with their own mother.
A pioneer
If Kamala Harris wins the presidency of the United States on November 5, it wouldn’t be the first time in her career that she has stood out, with her atypical profile, as a pioneer for an exceptional office…
Kamala Harris began her career in a rather conventional way, joining the California Bar in 1990 as an Assistant District Attorney in Alameda County.
In 2003, following various stages in her career in the American justice system, she was elected District Attorney of San Francisco with 56% of the vote.
In so doing, she became both the first district attorney of color in California and the first woman to hold the office in San Francisco.
In 2010, Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General of California and re-elected in 2014 for a second term. Again, she is the first woman to hold this position in U.S. history.
In November 2016, after enjoying the support of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden during her campaign, she was elected Democratic U.S. Senator for the State of California. She is the first U.S. senator of Indo-American origin and the second African-American senator.
In 2020, after attempting to run for the presidency herself as a Democratic candidate, she gave up, owing to a lack of financial resources and an encouraging popularity rating.
Vice-President
But her support for Joe Biden earned her, once he was elected, the distinction of being the first woman, as well as the first African-American and Asian-American , to become Vice-President of the United States.
On November 19, 2021, this responsibility led her to exercise, albeit very briefly (less than an hour and a half!), the prerogatives of the U.S. presidency during a medical examination of Joe Biden, whose state of health was the subject of much discussion. Harris is the first woman to assume such an interim role!
Was this brief episode a prelude to a more permanent role?
On July 21, after long weeks of procrastination and criticism, Joe Biden finally decided to forego a second term and support the candidacy of his vice-president.
If elected, Kamala Harris would be the first woman of such mixed origins to occupy this supreme post.
Not all friends…
All that remains is to convince a majority of Americans that she is the person capable, as she promised in her August 22 Democratic nomination speech, of uniting them all around their “greatest aspirations”.
However, with her progressive but not lax stance, her decisions and positions sometimes disavowed by the left of her party, Kamala Harris does not have only friends.
At the start of her professional career, she suffered her first setback.
In 1994, she was appointed to the Unemployment Insurance Court of Appeals and the Medical Insurance Commission by California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown…with whom she was romantically involved.
He broke it off when he was elected Mayor of San Francisco in 1996, and two years later she was chosen by the San Francisco District Attorney to head the Criminal Investigation Department.
Nevertheless, the 1994-1996 episode was the subject of harsh criticism.
Willie Brown himself admitted, years later, that it “ may have helped the career ” of Kamala Harris. She fiercely denied this, claiming that she “ owed him nothing”.
Subprime crisis
On another front, in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that brought ruin to many Americans, Kamala Harris, as California’s Attorney General, negotiated a settlement for the state with the three largest mortgage providers, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. The result: 12 billion in debt reduction for California homeowners and 18 billion in financial aid.
And yet, it has been criticized on the left for its lack of strictness towards financial players. An example of this “benevolence”: the anti-mortgage fraud team she set up is said to have dealt with just three cases in ten years…
Firmness and a social approach
In the area of justice, when she was California’s Attorney General, she demonstrated a blend of firmness and social approach that may have been disconcerting.
In the fight against drugs, for example, she launched a program to reduce recidivism among first-time offendersconvicted of non-violent offenses. But it has also refused to join states seeking to remove marijuana from the federal list of substances deemed most dangerous.
Kamala Harris has also been criticized for not doing enough to combat discrimination and police violence against people of color.
Yet she set up the first programs in the state of California, encompassing the publicizing of data on deaths during arrests or in prison, investigations into police practices, the use of body cameras for Department of Justice officers and the training of judicial personnel in unconscious bias.
Managing the migration crisis
On the hot-button issue of immigration, however, Kamala Harris, as Vice President, has not been as tough as some Americans, including Democrats, would like.
Certainly, during a visit to Guatemala in June 2021, she warned would-be illegal immigrants not to travel to the United States, as they would be “sent back”.
But two months earlier, her handling of the migration crisis at the Mexican border had been widely criticized. The “more humane policy” she claimed at the time was not up to the task, encouraging migrants to flock to the United States.
Another highly divisive issue is the Middle East conflict. Unlike the left wing of the Democrats, Kamala Harris has repeatedly expressed her support for the State of Israel.
This does not prevent her from defending, in domestic politics, causes considered to be to the left, such as the ban on assault rifles, abortion rights, the fight against climate change, minimum wage increases, criminal justice reform…
Generally speaking, her stance, considered too progressive by some and too conservative by others, does not make her a very consensual person.
A yo-yoing popularity rating
Her popularity rating has suffered in the past.
At the end of 2019, when she was already considering running for President, voting intentions in her favor had dropped to around 3%. A few months earlier, however, she was close in the polls to Jo Biden, the other Democratic candidate.
But for these new presidential elections, the opposite pattern seems to be emerging.
In November 2021, she has just 28% of favorable opinions, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll. That makes her the least popular vice-president in modern U.S. history!
But by last June, her popularity had risen to 42%.
And on September 5, the Swiss daily Le Temps, calculating the averages of national polls across the Atlantic, showed a 3.7-point lead for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.
However, there are still two months to go before the election on November 5. Nothing is set in stone, and Kamala Harris will still have to summon up her fighting spirit to try and win against a Donald Trump renowned for his pugnacity.
Read also > Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia, an enduring relationship
Photo à la Une : © US Ambassy & Consulates in Germany
