Kamala Harris: First woman vice president who fails to score a big first in US politics

PTI, Nov 6, 2024, 5:12 PM IST

Kamala Harris (Source: Instagram)

Washington: Kamala Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, failed to notch a big first in American politics when she lost to her Republican rival Donald Trump in the race to the White House.

The Democratic leader’s defeat to Trump in a bitterly contested election shattered her dream to become the first woman President of the United States.

Harris, 60, has known other firsts, though. She has been the district attorney for San Francisco — the first woman, first African-American and first Indian-origin person to be elected to the position.

As vice president, she is the first woman to hold the post. Also, she happens to be the first African-American or Indian-American person to make it there.

In an Op-ed published three days before the November 5 election, Harris recollected her frequent visit to India as a child and remembered her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist.

“Growing up, my mother raised my sister and me to appreciate and honour our heritage. Nearly every other year, we would go to India for Diwali. We would spend time with our grandparents, our uncles, and our ‘chitthis’ (aunts),” Harris said in the article for The Juggernaut, an online South Asian publication.

She said she believes Americans want a president who works for all American people. “And that has been the story of my entire career,” she said.

Harris got her big chance when President Joe Biden abandoned his own bid for reelection in July following his poor performance in a nationally televised debate with Trump. Biden endorsed Harris as the party nominee in the election.

Her nomination fulfilled her presidential dreams, which she abandoned before the primaries in 2019 due to a lack of funds to continue her campaign.

Biden picked her as his running mate in 2016. She was just the third woman to be picked as the vice president nominee on a major party ticket.

And she was one of only three Asian Americans in the Senate and the first Indian-American ever to serve in the chamber.

She has been likened to Barack Obama, the country’s first Black President.

More than a decade ago, journalist Gwen Ifill called Harris “the female Barack Obama” on the “Late Show With David Letterman”. Later, a small businessman from Willoughby, Tony Pinto, called her “a young, female version of the president”.

She is considered close to Obama, who endorsed her in various elections, including that for the US Senate in 2016, Vice President in 2020 and the presidential election in 2024.

Harris was born to two immigrant parents: a Black father and an Indian mother. Her father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica, and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, migrated to the US from Chennai in 1958. She, however, defines herself simply as “American”.

After her parents divorced, Harris was raised primarily by her Hindu mother. She says that her mother adopted Black culture and immersed her two daughters — Kamala and her younger sister Maya — in it. Harris grew up embracing her Indian culture but living a proudly African American life.

“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” she wrote in her autobiography ‘The Truths We Hold’. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” Harris was born in Oakland and grew up in Berkeley. She spent her high school years living in French-speaking Canada — her mother was teaching at McGill University in Montreal.

“Harris was raised in a middle-class family by a working mother who taught her to believe in the promise of America. Her mother also taught her the value of hard work, bringing Kamala to her breast cancer research lab and showing her how to clean test tubes as a child,” according to the Harris campaign website.

She attended college in the US, spending four years at Howard University, which she has described as among the most formative experiences of her life. After Howard, she went on to earn her law degree at the University of California, Hastings and began her career at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.

She became the top prosecutor for San Francisco in 2003 before being elected the first woman and the first Black person to serve as California’s attorney general in 2010, the top lawyer in America’s most populous state.

In her nearly two terms in office as attorney general, Harris gained a reputation as one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party. In 2017, she was sworn into the US Senate, where she championed legislation to fight hunger, provide rent relief, improve maternal health care, expand access to capital for small businesses, revitalise America’s infrastructure, and combat the climate crisis.

Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, for the past 10 years. She is the stepmother of two children, Ella and Cole, who are her “endless source of love and pure joy.” Her role as vice president was more than just symbolic. Unlike her predecessors, she wielded considerable power during Biden’s presidency.

As president of the Senate, she set a new record for the most tie-breaking votes cast by a Vice President in history – surpassing one that had stood for nearly 200 years. And her votes have been consequential.