Vice President Kamala Harris makes Vogue….

Heck Why NOT?

Nanthan Heller  over at Vogue Does a snapshot piece on the Vice President of the United States ….

She is dressed in an easygoing black suit with a plain white blouse, a few pearls on a double necklace, and black patent leather heels. Since becoming vice president, in 2021, Harris has sought reductions in gun violence, middle-class jobs in clean energy, drinking water for poor communities, and a strategy for Americans’ reproductive freedom. Before our meeting, I talked with more than 20 of her former colleagues and collaborators, who described Harris in these projects as a roll-up-the-sleeves leader. I ask what her first call would be on reaching the Oval Office.

“One of my first calls—outside of family—will be to the team that is working with me on our plan to lower costs for the American people,” she says. “It’s not just about publishing something in a respected journal. It’s not about a speech. It’s literally about, How does this hit the streets? How do people actually feel the work in a way that benefits them?” She says she plans to meet with “those who can help us put back in place the freedoms that have been taken away with the Dobbs decision”—the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade—to get Congress to pass a law. “That’s going to take some work,” she says.

Work, one senses, is a happy word for Harris: What at first seem lucky breaks in her life tend on examination to reveal themselves as outcomes of strategic effort. The hurricanes that barreled into Florida in recent days and brought heavy destruction as far as inland North Carolina have required rescue and recovery from officials and ordinary Americans, and Harris has moved quickly on the ground to show them her support. But work can’t resolve every crisis. In recent weeks, the violence in the Middle East has grown, first with Israeli movement into Lebanon and more recently with a missile attack on Israel by Iran. I ask what “new element” voters can expect from a Harris administration in balancing the United States’ commitments in the region with attempts—so far unsuccessful—to de-escalate the conflict.

“A lot of the work that needs to be done,” Harris says, “is a function of the circumstances at the moment. I can’t anticipate what the circumstances will be four months from now.” She says she sees the role of the United States to create “incentives” for de-escalation and a “pathway” for stability, “including specifically as it relates to what’s happening in Gaza, as opposed to Lebanon.” Throughout her public campaign, Harris has nodded to two hard-to-square points of view on Gaza, affirming “Israel’s right to defend itself” against Hamas and Palestinians’ “right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” “A Harris administration—to speak of myself in the third person, which makes me quite uncomfortable—would be about articulating those points and hopefully bringing some language that is reflective of the complexity and the nuance of what’s happening in the region,” she says. Complexity and nuance, meaning what? I ask. Harris starts a couple of sentences, abandons them, and starts again….

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Chasing the future often casts Americans back on their pasts. In November of 2021, Harris and the second gentleman visited the Institut Pasteur in Paris to get new information about cutting-edge COVID research. “To attack this problem, we have a simple tool: the nasal swab,” James Di Santo, an immunologist, told her. He produced a swab and held it reverently aloft.

“I’m intimately familiar with the nasal swab,” the vice president said.

Her wry conviviality covered other emotions. Privately, Harris described the visit to the Institut as one of the most moving of her time as vice president. Her mother, Shyamala, a cancer researcher who had died 12 years earlier, had worked in those laboratories, doing mRNA research related to the kind that later helped produce a COVID vaccine. Harris met with Étienne-Émile Baulieu, a 90-something endocrinologist with whom her mother had published. “It was an emotionally meaningful meeting for her,” Emhoff remembers. “It was a way to honor her mother in a place where she achieved so much.” Both of Harris’s parents were scholars (her father, Donald, is a retired economist), but it’s her mother, retaining custody of Harris and her younger sister after a divorce, whom friends closely associate with Harris’s personality and laugh.

“Shyamala was an extraordinarily brilliant woman—she had a great sense of humor, cooked, played cards, was well-read, and was fun,” Matthew Rothschild, a friend, former colleague, and longtime LGBTQ advocate who became close to Harris’s mother, says. “What is that characteristic some people have that you’re just proud to be their friend?” In Friends from the Beginning, Stacey Johnson-Batiste’s 2021 memoir of her friendship with Harris, she writes of Shyamala and her own mother ferrying their children around Berkeley. Harris, even at five, fascinated her. “I had never seen anybody else my age wearing such an abundance of beautiful bracelets,” Johnson-Batiste writes. “They were Indian bracelets: fuchsia, yellow, teal, and other vibrant colors, framed by tiny rhinestones that glistened and jangled as we walked.”….

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“In no other country on this earth could her story unfold the way it has,” Oprah is saying. “From a child of immigrants, to big sister, to McDonald’s worker—there is hope for y’all—district attorney, to wife and Mamala, to senator to vice president—please welcome….” The crowd springs to its feet, the stagehand gives a go-sign, and Harris rushes forward, into the light…..

Much More…

Top image….Vogue

image….FACES IN THE CROWD
“You’re never going to have a complete agreement on all the issues. But you can find common ground—and expand that,” says Harris, here seen campaigning in Wisconsin.

bottom image…FIRED UP…Harris at the Redford Fire Department in Michigan, a state that is widely seen as key to an Electoral College victory.