The April 2018 issue of Vogue magazine carried the article “Kamala Harris Is Dreaming Big,” by Abby Aguirre. The fashion magazine’s newest political feminist heroine is California’s ambitious new liberal Democratic senator, and Vogue made the most of their access to push her as the next president (and first female president, as it wouldn’t stop harping on).
Aguirre opens by trying really hard to convince us of Harris’s commanding (yet also stylish) presence, in classic Vogue style.
It’s a cold January night in D.C., and I’m at the Hart Senate Office Building, trailing U.S. Senator Kamala Harris into a conference room. Inside, a group of young Latino congressional staffers has gathered to meet the Democratic star from California. When she enters, flanked by aides, and dressed in a navy suit, matching ruffled blouse, black pearls, and stilettos that give her petite five-feet-four frame a few extra inches of height, the staffers immediately rise from their chairs.
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Harriss's poltical career -- seven years as district attorney in San Francisco and then another six as attorney general of California -- amounts to an extraordinary run of firsts. She was the first woman and the first person of color to be elected to both positions, and she is now America’s first Indian-American senator and California’s first black senator....
And yet in the seventeen months since Donald Trump was elected president, Harris has been propelled into an altogether different stratum of political celebrity -- one that raises certain questions about her future....Harris has become a force due to her authority on the very issues Trump warps for his own gain: crime and immigration. A robust body of research has established that immigrants are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes, including violent ones. As the state’s former top cop, Harris knows this better than anyone. From the moment President Trump delivered his inaugural address, linking immigration to crime in a macabre vision of “American carnage,” Harris was -- to put it bluntly -- uniquely poised to call bullshit....
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Plenty of national politicians wax poetic about Dreamers. Few can defend them with Harris’s command....
Aguirre dipped into the phony “Senate sexism” controversy:
Without question, it has been her role in the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that has brought Harris the most attention. In June, Harris pummeled Attorney General Jeff Sessions with questions about his contacts with Russians during the Trump campaign.
(Sessions' "contacts with Russians" were another phony story, by the way.)
Republican Senators John McCain and Richard Burr were (falsely) accused of sexism in speaking over Harris.
....The exchange also resonated with Gillibrand. “They were trying to silence her the way that President Trump tried to silence me in his nasty tweets,” Gillibrand says. “That was an effort by the committee chairman to keep her quiet because her questioning was so good and so effective.”
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I am beginning to appreciate what Henry R. Muñoz III, the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, describes as the “aura of respect” that Harris commands. “Let’s call it the phenomenon of Kamala Harris,” Muñoz says, recalling the first time he met her, at a fund-raising event in San Francisco: “She walks into a room with gravitas.”....
But her value extends beyond fund-raising....
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Which again raises the question: Might this new symbol be preparing for a presidential run in 2020?
