Five Reasons to Cheer Kamala Harris

Kamala Devi Harris, named after the Hindu goddess Lakshmi (aka Kamala), was brought up by her Indian mother. Both her parents were immigrants who came here to earn their PhDs at UC Berkeley. Her mother became a cancer researcher and her father, a Jamaican, became an economics professor at Stanford.

But with a career as a prosecutor, first as an assistant DA, then elected as San Francisco’s District Attorney in 2007, and finally becoming California’s Attorney General (“top cop”) in 2010, a lot of progressives get heartburn. That’s why it so important for you to know exactly why she’s a million times better than the GOP ticket. But given that Trump is the devil himself, that’s not saying much. She’s also a genuinely good person. 

Sure, she has personal ambition, can be a bit of a bully, and has her weaknesses. Anyone who thinks they’ve found the perfect leader is in a cult. 

So where did her good side come from?

She grew up in Berkeley, and her parents were radicals, mostly concerned with issues of the Black community that they were part of. Now Berkeley has always had its crazy radicals. (I lived only a few blocks from Kamala at the time she was first bused across town, so I’m speaking first-hand.) And as Harris figured out, quite a few were naive, but there were many good people in that community who really cared about social change. With that said, here are my top five reasons that you should back her enthusiastically. Harris is:

1. Progressive. She really is working for progressive social change.
2. Practical — unlike most progressives — so she will get things done.
3. Inclusive. She will make women and minority communities feel more like they are part of the system, and this will encourage them to become a bigger part of the system and bring more balance to it.
4. Smart. She will figure out and back smart policies that work.
5. A debater. She will defeat Pence when they debate. This matters because people will see both of them as possible presidents.

What puzzles people about Kamala is whether she’s really a centrist claiming to be progressive, or a progressive working inside the system. When she decided to be a prosecutor, her activist mother questioned her hard about this. And this is her explanation.

She had seen enough of protest politics while growing up — fighting for “justice from the outside,” as she called it. And according to her autobiography “When activists came marching and banging on doors,” she “wanted to be on the other side to let them in.”

I think that’s only half right. I think she is more interested in being on the inside so that she can make smart and progressive policy herself. That’s not so bad. Protest movements are needed to provide political pressure for change. But they need smart, sympathetic politicians on the inside, willing to get their hands dirty to get the job done. That’s how it’s always worked. Martin Luther King Jr. needed LBJ inside making deals. And LBJ wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, done it without MLK on the outside changing public opinion.

So if you hear your friends or acquaintances start to whine about her shortcomings, remind them that — right at the moment — the house is on fire. And besides that, their complaints are nothing compared with the faults of our heroes. LBJ, who delivered on civil rights, also gave us the Vietnam war, and FDR put 120,000 innocent Japanese in concentration camps for nearly three years. 

Harris will make a terrific Vice President. And right now, electing Biden and Harris is a matter of saving our Democracy. If they can pull that off, they will long be remembered as 21st-century heroes.