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Kamala: from 'black power' to the White House

2021-01-16T14:40:55.241Z


The daughter of an Indian and a Jamaican, Kamala Harris grew up in San Francisco, in the atmosphere of 'black power'. Soon she felt a political vocation: district attorney, state attorney, senator, presidential candidate… Today she is the first vice president in the history of the United States. Nobody believes that it will stop there


There is a quote from writer James Baldwin that is important to Kamala Harris: “There is no time in the future when we are going to work out our salvation.

The challenge is in the present.

The moment is always now ”.

Translated into politics, she understands that power is there to use.

There is no future in which things will be easier.

In Harris's own words: “Political capital does not pay dividends.

You have to spend it and bear the losses ”.

Kamala Devi Harris will make history next Wednesday in Washington by being the first woman to be sworn in as vice president of the United States after almost two and a half centuries as a republic.

He is also the first black person in that position.

And the first Asian in the White House.

That photo will be, by itself, a before and after in history for all demographic groups removed from power until the 21st century.

But the next day will begin the task of a Cabinet that faces a task of reconstruction not seen since World War II.

It will have to rebuild the economy, the international predicament, the functioning of the institutions - and respect for them so that events such as the unfortunate assault on the Capitol last day 6 are not repeated - and, perhaps most difficult, the civic culture devastated by four years of media and political warfare at the suffocating pace of social networks.

That admired intangible that makes Americans, first, Americans, before putting on any more labels, and recognize each other as such.

It is in this task that the world needs to know who Kamala Harris is.

The first female vice president, yes.

But who is it?

What do you want power for and what do you do when you have it?

The outgoing president, Donald Trump, and the incoming, Joe Biden, were children of the 1950s.

Although in ideological antipodes, both bring with them a particular generational burden.

They grew up in an America where the only public representation of women was as housewives in ads for vacuum cleaners.

The country that raised Trump and Biden was owned exclusively by straight, white parents.

With Harris, born in 1964, the generation of Barack Obama, who is only three years older than her, returns to the White House.

A generation that began to understand the world in the seventies, watching on television a country in upheaval and profound cultural transformation.

Harris is the daughter of an Indian immigrant and a Jamaican immigrant who met as students at the University of Berkeley and always lived in the East Bay area of ​​San Francisco.

They separated when Kamala and her sister, Maya, were girls.

They grew up with their mother, Shyamala Gopalan, in Oakland, then the epicenter of California's African-American movements that spawned the radical Black Panther party.

As an Indian immigrant, Gopalan knew that in America he was colored.

He also came from a home in Delhi with a tradition of political activism.

In her memoirs, Harris explains that their mother raised them to be aware that they were black women in America.

Gopalan was going to make sure his daughters soaked themselves thoroughly in the boiling black culture of the East Bay.

For Kamala Harris, that education took place in a specific space.

The Rainbow Sign was a cultural center that became a meeting place for the most recognized voices of the black culture of the seventies.

There were workshops and events for families with children.

“It was a place designed to disseminate knowledge, awareness and power”: this is how Harris defines it in her memoirs, and she remembers seeing talks there as a child by Shirley Chisholm, America's first black congresswoman, novelist Alice Walker (The Color Purple ) or the poet Maya Angelou.

Other regulars were James Baldwin or Nina Simone.

The now imminent vice president went every Thursday night to that cultural center, as Scott Saul, a professor of literature at Berkeley, who has investigated the legacy of the Rainbow Sign and that time in Harris's life, explains.

"There she learned what it meant to be a black woman in America and what possibilities she had."

The women who ran the Rainbow Sign had broken glass ceilings in their professional fields.

The policy group Harris attended, Saul says, was not idealistic women, but had a very pragmatic view of things.

"One of them writes: 'Politics is not pretty or pleasant, it is not a purist activity, it is a question of who is capable of negotiating from a position of strength."

Saul draws a direct line between those teachings and the way of understanding the power of Harris in his professional stage.

The Rainbow Sign opened in 1971 and closed in 1977, when Harris was 12 years old.

It was just the year she moved to Montreal, where her mother had a job.

I would go back to San Francisco to study law and be a prosecutor.

She assures that she chose that path because she saw it as a way of depending on herself, not on others, to correct injustices.

The chief attorney for a district (county) or state is an elected office in the United States.

It is a semi-political position that runs the public prosecutor's office and, de facto, all the police forces under its jurisdiction.

It is a high-voltage chair with a great impact on the public, since it is held responsible for any issue of citizen security and criminal justice.

Kamala Harris was first seasoned at the Alameda County Attorney's Office, an office with her own legend.

In that office, Earl Warren began his career, the myth of republicanism who later was California's attorney general, state governor and, finally, the president of the Supreme Court that dominated the sixties.

Having made his career as a prosecutor, leading the police forces, has created an image of Harris that clashes with the idealism and combativeness in which he grew up.

It has given her a reputation as a pragmatic woman, who forgets her progressive ideals when they don't suit her.

For Scott Saul, the new vice president continues to represent Oakland's black culture, at least "a layer of Oakland."

“I think the words Kamala heard inspired her.

At the same time, she has chosen her own path, being a district attorney, which has pitted her against people she grew up with.

I think it is very influenced by that environment and the vision of black power.

But it has taken him to a place that no one could imagine.

It has taken him to the White House.

At least one version of it. "

That version of black power in a prosecutor's office began to take shape in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.

Harris spent his late 30s making a name for himself in office and donor circles in the Bay Democratic Party, which is not just any Democratic party.

It is the political home of Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer or Jerry Brown.

In 2003, she won the election to be San Francisco's first black female district attorney after beating the front-runner.

It would be the first of all the first times of his career.

It was a sensation in California.

An in-depth profile from the Los Angeles Times said of her as "a striking 39-year-old woman with a beaming smile, known for her intellect, her discipline at work and, according to one attorney, 'the aura of her personality."

It was already, officially, a rising star.

That profile saw her as the female version of Barack Obama, another young Democratic star who was then running for the Senate from Illinois and had astonished the party with her speech at the convention that year.

When Harris ran for reelection, no one contested him for the job.

The next target was the California Attorney General's Office in 2010. Harris made a name for himself in San Francisco trying to apply the more moderate version of the harsh North American and Californian penal system.

He refused to ask for death sentences and launched a reintegration program.

“For too long we have been told there are only two options: be tough on crime or soft, a simplification that ignores the reality of public safety,” Harris writes.

"You can want the police to stop crime in your neighborhood and also want them not to use excessive force."

He won the seat on the ballot by beating six other Democrats.

Among them was the current Congressman Ted Lieu.

"What I learned from presenting myself against Kamala Harris was that you never appear against Kamala Harris," Lieu confesses by telephone to El País Semanal.

"She's brilliant, she's passionate, and she did an incredible campaign."

For Lieu, she has "the ability to connect with people, but also to fight for issues that matter and get things done."

And he concludes: "She is going to be a phenomenal vice president."

Today, Lieu is a congressman for California's 33rd district.

Her constituency includes, precisely, the exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood, in the hills of Beverly Hills, where Harris lives with her husband, lawyer Doug Emhoff, and their two stepchildren.

That is to say, he will be the representative in Congress of the vice president's neighborhood, where he rubs shoulders with the Hollywood elite.

"They are good neighbors," he jokes.

That election confirmed that Harris was more than just a promising young Democrat.

Political strategist Dan Newman, who is now an advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom, worked on that campaign.

"The election of attorney general was considered practically impossible," recalls Newman by phone.

“It was a position that was assumed to be for a Republican and it had to be a white man.

A woman of color from San Francisco?

Forget this.

But he won, and four years later he appeared almost unopposed. "

Harris won by less than one point against the Republican hopeful.

It was a political earthquake in California.

Harris' label as a candidate, the catchphrase that best sells her as a political figure, Newman believes, is "fearless."

She is someone who is sold politically as "a pioneer used to breaking stereotypes and showing that there is another way of doing things."

The next big scene in this race is a shouting match on the phone.

On one side of the line is Jamie Dimon, chairman of JP Morgan, one of the largest US banks, and on the other, the newly elected attorney general of California.

It's February 2012. “You're trying to rob my shareholders!” Dimon yells.

Harris responds: “Your shareholders?

My shareholders are California homeowners!

Come see them and tell me who has stolen from whom ”.

"It looked like a dog fight," he recalls in his memoirs.

The prosecutor had been chosen just in time to find a year-long agreement between the five largest mortgage banks in the United States (JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, and AllyBank / GMAC) and a coalition of 50 prosecutors. state generals who had denounced the abusive practices with evictions, a consequence of the real estate disaster at the end of the last decade.

The compensation that had been agreed left between 2,000 and 4,000 million dollars to compensate the victims of abusive evictions.

Despite being a newcomer, Harris refused to sign it because it seemed little for the damage caused.

He said they were "crumbs."

He saw the opportunity to use power very clearly and decided to spend his political capital there.

The moment is always now, as James Baldwin said.

Without the signature of California, the state with the most victims, the agreement was a dead letter.

Two weeks after the shouting match with Jamie Dimon, the banks increased their offer to $ 20 billion to close the deal with Harris.

To do so, he even ignored the pressure from the White House of Barack Obama, his ally and friend, who wanted to close an agreement and turn the page as soon as possible.

In addition, it established new rules in the eviction process that made it easier for owners to defend themselves.

There were its chiaroscuro.

The agreement also meant the cessation of investigations into the banks' predatory practices and Harris was criticized for it.

But that was surely the greatest exercise of power of his career.

There were others.

As attorney general, he refused to defend in the Supreme Court an anti-gay marriage law that supposedly tolerant California had passed in a referendum (the infamous Proposition 8).

The gesture contributed to its being declared unconstitutional.

On another occasion, he refused to process a popular legislative proposal, which is his obligation, because he was insultingly homophobic.

Years later, in the Senate, he would not find a way to exercise legislative power because of the Cainite division in Washington, but when he had an opportunity to show the public all the power of a senator, he took it, again, to the fullest.

During Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation appearances for the Supreme Court, Harris gave a lesson in hard-line questioning in 1,000 courthouses.

He did not even accuse him of anything specific: "You know very well what you have done and we are waiting for you to tell us."

We don't know if Kavanaugh actually had something to hide or not, but she managed to make her vague and stammering responses give that feeling to the jury, which was the American people.

Now, in her capacity as vice president and after the Democrats win in Georgia, her vote will be essential to break ties and decide majorities in a Senate divided equally between the two parties.

And that will be an exercise in power.

Like any powerful woman and also with a good personal image, the criticisms of Kamala Harris easily border on sexism.

The best example is not criticism, but praise, and from one of his great political allies.

At a fundraising event in 2013, Barack Obama said: “She is bright, hard-working and tough, she is exactly what is required of a person who enforces the law and makes sure that everyone is treated equally.

And it also turns out that she is the most beautiful attorney general in the country ”.

A few days later, the White House spokesman was publicly apologizing for the comment.

At the time of the banking agreement, there was speculation in California that her ambition was to be governor of the state.

Surely it was.

Everything changed when a legend like Barbara Boxer announced her retirement from the Senate.

California had two female senators since 1992, when Dianne Feinstein and Boxer were elected.

All of California's established political stars had imagined themselves in the Senate.

However, when Harris announced his candidacy there was no discussion.

The entire party stepped aside.

He did, however, meet a primary contender, Congresswoman Loretta Sánchez.

Harris was already a very powerful face in the state, crushing Sánchez by more than 20 points in an election that seemed from the outset designed by the party to win unopposed.

“It is very prudent.

It does not take positions.

It doesn't really say much, ”Loretta Sánchez says of her experience running against Harris.

But it goes further.

“The subjects were not known;

I think that when she ran for president that was one of her problems.

You couldn't tell what it was that mattered to him.

I don't know, it's difficult to define who she is.

Sánchez voted for Biden-Harris and is proud that there is a female vice president.

“I hope that he grows in the position, that he becomes passionate about something, that he finds his themes and finds his voice.

That is what I wish you ”.

This is a review that has accompanied the entire career of Kamala Harris.

When she ran for president in January 2019, she didn't make it until the Iowa caucuses a year later.

She was the most telegenic candidate, the one who generated the most magnetism around her, with a devastating and forceful smile in her speeches, where she played the correct notes.

Everyone, even outside the United States, was able to identify the leading candidates with a strong idea.

Bernie Sanders was the man of universal public health.

Elizabeth Warren wanted to raise taxes on the rich.

Joe Biden proposed moderation, for those convinced that the future is at the center.

Pete Buttigieg was the same, but 40 years younger, capable of speaking to a generation that does not understand that someone could have a problem with a gay candidate.

And Kamala Harris?

What was its theme?

Who was she in that campaign, other than being the best speaker, the best performer on television, and the one with a brilliant career in an executive position very close to people's concerns, such as prosecutor?

On the most important issue of the campaign, health, his position was never clear.

He ended his campaign in December, without getting to be measured at the polls, amid criticism, divisions and leaks to the press from his own cadres.

In the exercise of power it is overwhelming, but it is difficult for him to define up front what he wants that power for.

Dan Newman says Harris's ability to navigate contradictions has been a political strength: “She was always comfortable with the Berkeley activists, but she was also able to connect with San Francisco's old guard, Democratic donors and elected officials;

his career has had the ability to effortlessly connect with the party's various sensibilities to his advantage.

That has also made Republicans not sure how to attack it.

When she entered the candidacy, the Trump campaign said at the same time that she was a radical socialist and a sold out. "

When it came to deciding who was going to be the face to accompany Joe Biden in the White House, his was the most obvious choice.

Today no one doubts that Kamala Harris will be a powerful vice president.

If his career tells us something, it is that he will not miss an opportunity to show Americans, in this case the world, what that power is for.

To use it.

All this political capital "does not generate dividends", as she puts it.

He is going to spend it.

The moment is now.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-01-16

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