When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris to be his running mate, he mentioned her friendship with his deceased son, Beau. As California’s Attorney General Harris had worked with Beau, who was the Delaware’s Attorney General, to oppose a settlement between the Department of Justice and five big banks which had foreclosed on a lot of mortgages during the Great Recession of 2007-09. Their friendship lasted through his death in 1915.
Photo of Kamala Harris in 2018 is by reviewer Jo Freeman; Harris walking into her Senate office during the Kavanaugh hearings
The author adds little about Harris’ personal life that wasn’t in her 2019 autobiography. Harris has said that the most important force in her life was her mother, Shyamala Goplan, who immigrated to Berkeley from India in 1959 to attend graduate school. Her father, Donald Harris, a black immigrant from Jamaica who was also a Berkeley grad student, played a smaller role. Both parents came from high status families in their countries of origin. Kamala Harris is touted as the first black as well as the first woman to become Vice President, but her origins are more patrician than plebeian. That probably explains why she was able to move easily into the moneyed world of California politics without having much money herself. Culturally, she fit.
Her introduction to that world came from Willie Brown, a black California power broker from humbler origins. She was his girlfriend for roughly three years in the 1990s. They broke up amiably and he continued to open doors. This is typical. No one goes into politics, especially on the upper levels, alone. To succeed, political aspirants need sponsors to make introductions and anoint them as someone to be taken seriously. Those sponsors are male because men have always dominated politics. That may be changing as more women gain power, but it hadn’t changed much in the 1990s and 2000s.
She also developed a relationship with Barack Obama, for whom she co-hosted a fundraiser in 2004 while he was a state senator from Illinois running to be a US Senator. They helped each other many times; his staff helped her and her staff learn the ways of Washington when she became a Senator from California.
The book ends with the 2019 campaign, for the Democratic nomination for President, including Harris’ spectacular rise during the debates and equally swift fall without ever entering a primary. He concludes that Kamala’s way was to be tough, sometimes too tough, when the occasion called for it, but also to be caring and empathetic when the only beneficiary was the recipient.
This book’s biggest flaw is lack of an index. It’s become common for even big publishers to leave out that important section, probably because they are now asking authors to supply one or go without. Authors aren’t indexers and don’t want to pay the extra cost. I sympathize, but a book is more than just a quick read when you can look things up.
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