The best refutation of the reputation that Kamala Harris acquired for being a poor communicator can be found in a casual 90-second video phone recording from 2019, in which the then-senator offers Thanksgiving turkey recipe tips seconds before going on air for an interview.
This was before Harris’s doomed run in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, a campaign whose abject failure nonetheless prompted Joe Biden to choose her as his running mate, which in turn has led to her stunning elevation this week to become the conduit through which the United States of America will make its next decisive ideological turn.
By November, Kamala Harris will either be America’s first female president or Donald Trump will return to the White House for a second term. It’s a choice as stark as north or south, day or night.
The video was posted at the time, to little notice, by Jonathan Capehart, a Washington Post journalist. Also present – off-screen – was Capehart’s husband, Nick Schmit, who served as assistant chief of protocol at the US state department. And it’s clearly around Thanksgiving because Harris has just been asked about cooking a turkey. Her kitchen prowess is well known – and will doubtlessly feature prominently as the Harris campaign continues to build a more rounded profile of her qualities and personality. In the video she is at once offering a vivid and energetic recipe on the most flavoursome way to cook the bird and talking with the interview editor, who is speaking to her through an earpiece.
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“A little sugar ... a couple of peppercorns, even do a slice of orange, somethin’ like that ... Oh yes, hi ... I’m here. Okay ... I’m gonna talk about a recipe while you are checking, is that okay? ... she’ll tell me if I’m annoying her ... okay ... so Nick ... if you’re ... a dry brine is easier ... 48 hours ... kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, maybe a little thyme ... oh, I have one minute ... do the salt and pepper all over, just lather that baby up ... mix that up with a little rosemary, under the skin with some butter and then get a nice big bottle of cheap white wine to baste the butter and ... Yes, Hi!”
Anyone who happened on that vignette during the years when Harris was routinely upbraided and mocked for the stiffness of her public performances would have wondered why she simply did not allow herself to just be the person in that video. Here was a side of Harris seldom on show to the public: a warm, vivacious and natural communicator, relaxed about the interview she was about to do and ready to snap back into her political persona at a second’s notice.
Significantly, that brighter aspect of Harris materialised again in June, minutes after Joe Biden’s re-election campaign fell apart following his belief-shattering television debate performance against Donald Trump. As a wildfire of panic spread through the Democratic Party, Harris made an appearance on CNN’s post-debate analysis show.
It was an unscheduled interview and close to midnight. She made a decent stab at defending the impossible and remained utterly loyal to the beleaguered Biden – as she would continue to do during those terrible weeks of uncertainty when, it seemed, only the president was unable to see that the entire country believed him too old and too enfeebled to serve for another four years.
But what stood out was not so much what Harris said that evening as the striking contrast she made to what had been a dismayingly incoherent, embittered debate between the two elder figureheads of their respective parties.
On Sunday last, during the hours around Joe Biden’s decision to step down from his nomination, Harris moved with extraordinary efficiency and clarity, making private phone calls numbering in the hundreds to fellow Democrats. By Monday evening, the party had made a sensational shift, from drifting in a sort of apathetic resignation to suddenly energised and excited and solely backing Harris. An unexpected and newfound elation swept through the entire party.
The Irish Americans for Biden group was one of the Democratic support groups to receive a call from the new campaign in recent days; it is now the Irish Americans for Harris.
“I have never seen such a transition of campaign workers all in for one person now campaigning for another person with hardly a glitch,” says Ted Smyth, the former diplomat and current president of the advisory board of NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House.
“It has been phenomenal. Normally the Democratic Party is full of splits, divisions and conflicts. You know the old cliche: Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line. Well, it has been reversed. You have the Democratic Party united in a way it hasn’t been for years. It is so far away from 1968 as to be unimaginable.
“Pretty much united on all the core issues, from AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman who is the left-wing star of the party] right through to the Blue Dogs [A Democrat caucus of moderates]. As Irish Americans ... we are a swing vote. And on the margins, when it is 52-48 as it was for Biden in 2020 and the other way for Trump against Hillary in 2016, it can make a key difference in some of the battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
Smyth is a long-time resident of New York City and a steadfast Democrat. When Bill Clinton was campaigning in a Democratic primary remembered for ferocious debates with Jerry Brown in 1992, Smyth was among a group of Irish Americans, including Stella O’Leary, John Fitzpatrick, Brian O’Dwyer, Phil O’Leary and Niall O’Dowd, who set up a group and campaigned on the future president’s behalf.
It has remained active in all subsequent elections. But this campaign has already been mind-bending in its extreme narrative turns. The smoothness with which Harris has responded to Biden’s bombshell announcement is the latest dramatic turn. That extreme switch in energy, from the ebbing days of the Biden campaign to the sudden surge in optimism this week, has been breathtaking and demanded an instant recalibration by everyone – including the Trump campaign.
“The main attack will be the DEI [Diversity, Equality and Inclusion] thing and that is going to backfire,” predicts Smyth. “We’ve been through the Hillary campaign already, the electing-a-woman thing, but in my view Kamala has a charm and a credibility that is unusual in a political candidate. A sort of infectious energy that was hidden for a while, but is very apparent and natural now.
Even this week in Milwaukee, she did her thing, reading from the teleprompter but with great panache and timing. And then when she was talking about Project 2025, she paused, and she said: ‘I can’t believe they wrote this down.’ It was a great comment. I can’t believe it either – and Trump has started to run away from it. But they wrote down this policy document for screwing the country.”
By Friday there was another fillip for the Harris campaign. Former president Barack Obama endorsed her to be the Democratic presidential nominee. He had been the most prominent Democrat to have held out on endorsing her candidacy. The campaign was further buoyed by more than $100m in donations in less than a week, while a further 100,000 people have signed up to volunteer for her bid.
This radical reinvention of the Democratic campaign gives the republican convention the appearance of a distantly remembered event. All the speeches directed at attacking Biden, often in deeply personal terms, are instantly outdated. Harris’s campaign against Trump will be bruising. But already, in that speech in Milwaukee, she demonstrated a readiness for what lies ahead, taking her audience back to her years before she was vice-president or attorney general to when she worked as a courtroom prosecutor in California.
“And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type. And in this campaign I promise you I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week.
“As an attorney general of California I took on one of country’s largest for-profit colleges that was scamming students. Donald Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students. As a prosecutor, I specialised in cases involving sexual abuse. Well. Trump was found liable for committing sexual abuse. As attorney general of California, I took on the big Wall Street banks and held them accountable for fraud. Donald Trump was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.
“But let’s also make no mistake. This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump. This campaign is about who we fight for.”
It sounded like a message to her immediate opponent as much as to anyone else. Combating Trump’s aggressive, no-holds barred campaigning style will be just one of the challenges facing Harris.
The quick interpretation of her elevation to nominee is that the November election now becomes a national referendum on Donald Trump. That is partly true. But it is also a referendum on America itself. The past decade has heard much discussion about the width and depth of the twin seams of racism and sexism running through American society. The questions presented by Harris’s elevation to presidential candidate are obvious. It is similar to the main question posed by Hillary Clinton in 2016: Is the United States ready to elect a woman as its president? But there is an equally monumental follow up-question: Is the country willing to elect a black south Asian woman?
Harris’s story covers the classic American immigrant story. But she also represents the liberal, Californian collegiate elite and the Washington ruling class that the Trump-Vance agenda promises to eviscerate.
[ Kamala Harris should have been given the chance to prove herselfOpens in new window ]
So, she faces a monumental task. She has less than a month before the Democratic convention in Chicago and will then campaign with her pick as running mate. The likeliest bet is Mark Kelly, the astronaut turned senator from Arizona, a border state politician who can support Harris through what will be a republican tirade against the Biden-Harris record on immigration at the southern border. She has to go through the unique experience of warring against Donald Trump. And then, she has to cope with the prejudices that come with being a woman seeking the highest office in the land.
Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert, led a study four years ago on gender abuse and disinformation against female political candidates. They found some 336,000 pieces of abuse directed at 13 candidates over a two-month period – from both the Republican and Democratic parties. But 78 per cent of that figure was directed at Harris, much of it sexualised, some of it transphobic and the milder iterations attacking her as a DEI candidate. In a piece on MSNBC this week, Jankowicz noted an immediate spike in such abuse after Harris succeeded Biden.
Aside from all that, Harris has to convince the voting public that she has that intangible quality: an appeal to the voting public; that she has the stuff that makes enough people want to believe in her. In the days when Joe Biden wavered between staying and leaving, one of the underlying concerns was whether Harris would have the substance to step into that void.
Was it ever fair? Was she hobbled by the ill-defined and necessarily muted role of vice-president? Certainly, she will need to tone down the occasional lapse into west coast trippy linguistics when her riffs about the future and spirit can sound as though she is reading from the brochure of an over-priced Californian wellness retreat. But the early signs have bowled Democrats over and a fresh gust of elation has swept through the party.
Hillary Clinton wrote in an opinion piece this week that Harris is “chronically underestimated, as are so many women in politics, but she is well prepared for this moment”.
Time will tell. But now the American political class and public alike are beginning to see the small signs – such as that quirky video from six years ago – that Kamala Harris has been hiding in plain sight all along.
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