"One day in early June, Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, tapped the glass of the bakery case at a Blue Bottle coffee shop on a non-iconic block in Beverly Hills."

"No one seemed to know who she was—another polished professional woman, grabbing an afternoon coffee—which was fine by her. She had chosen the spot, presumably for the anonymity. A few minutes later, her body woman delivered her a cookie: caramel chocolate chip, covered in a light snowfall of flaky salt. As Harris broke off small pieces and popped them in her mouth, we talked about her early life, rummaging through the layers for identifying details. The child of immigrant academics who divorced when she was young—her mother, a cancer researcher, came from India, and her father, an economist, from Jamaica—Harris grew up between Oakland and the Berkeley flats, but also spent time in college towns in the Midwest and a few years in Montreal, where her mother was teaching. 'A very vivid memory of my childhood was the Mayflower truck,' she told me. 'We moved a lot.' She speaks some French. She loves to cook and enjoys dancing, puns. She tells her own story uneasily. 'It’s like extracting stuff from me,' she apologized. 'I’m not good at talking about myself.'"

The inauspicious beginning of "Kamala Harris Makes Her Case/The Presidential candidate has been criticized as a defender of the status quo/Can she prove that she’s a force for change?" by Dana Goodyear (The New Yorker).

Here's my screen shot of one of the 2 Blue Bottle coffee shops in Beverly Hills (from Google Maps):



Where do you go when you want to look like just another polished professional and you want to pop a light snowfall of flaky salt and talk about yourself without talking about yourself?

Did I read the rest of the article? Okay, I'll force myself to skim, but I take that opening to mean that Goodyear got nothing out of her. Let's see...

Harris, who is fifty-four, has a billboard smile, and brown eyes that soften easily but just as readily turn skeptical.

My eyes turned skeptical right there. I mean, my brain, basically. My eyes pretty much stayed the same. Both my billboard brain and my blue eyes are sixty-eight. Isn't that interesting?

I asked Harris whether she thought Americans had different criteria for Presidential candidates depending on gender. ... “I’m not carefully enough watching—and I probably should—how men are being treated compared to me. I’ve had this experience so many times that I don’t let it distract me,” Harris said. “Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.” (Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois, was the first black woman elected to the Senate, in 1992; Harris is the second....)

Well, she said she's "not carefully enough watching." Carol Moseley Braun ran for President too. That was back in '04. The nomination went to John Kerry. (He speaks some French, you know.)(By the way, the name Carol Moseley Braun appears in the last paragraph of this article. There we learn that Mosely Braun is a Biden supporter, and after the recent debate, in which Harris lit into Biden, Mosely Braun "attributed the attack to misplaced 'ambition.'")

Harris has shown that she can rivet a crowd....

The evidence for this statement (which turned my eyes brain skeptical) is that she drew 20,000 people to her first rally. They came, but were they riveted?

But, in a Presidential primary, the audience demands an electrifying vocal. Five months into the campaign, Harris knew that she hadn’t yet found it.

But you just said she can rivet. She can rivet but she can't electrify? The feminist in me is triggered! The female New Yorker reporter is unwittingly characterizing running for President in terms of traditionally male occupations — electrician and riveter. But riveter is, famously, an occupation that women stepped up to when duty called in WWII. Maybe that's why it seemed to make sense to say she can rivet but she can't electrify. It's terrible how metaphor affects reason, is it not?!

“The challenge is, I think, people rightly want to have a sense of who somebody is,” she told me. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently, ’cause I know I need to frame it.”...

And here you are talking to the New Yorker reporter. You know what you need to do. Why not just do it (instead of talk about how you know you need to do it)? It creates the impression that you don't know how to do it.

At an intimate fund-raiser in West Los Angeles, I listened to her ramble on when asked a straightforward question about immigration reform, causing consternation in an otherwise friendly room. But she applied herself to the task of candidacy with A-student intensity. After our coffee in Beverly Hills, she was scheduled for back-to-back events and then a red-eye to D.C. “In high school, when I was getting distracted by other things, my mother would say, ‘Don’t do anything half-assed,’ ” Harris told me.

The reporter is being oh-so-gentle here, but — maybe because I'm reading with skeptical eyes — this is — in so many words — an accusation that Harris is running for President in a half-assed manner. And "A-student intensity" is not a compliment.

During her Senate campaign, Harris’s penchant for high-end travel made her staff cringe. These days, she carries a small Goyard tote and sits in coach....

I looked it up for you. A Goyard tote costs $1200. You may think — in  your skeptical eyes — who gives a good goddamn about the brand of "tote" Harris carries (and since when is a tote bag just called at "tote"?), but The New Yorker has a long history of doing very well with advertising for luxury goods and boosting the readers' simmering desire for such merchandise.

The next morning, Harris was scheduled to appear at a houseparty in Des Moines. En route, she stopped at a coffee shop near Drake University, an “impromptu” visit to a place pre-stocked with law students. “Oh! Hi!” she said, walking through the front door. “Surprise—or not,” she added, seeming embarrassed by the contrivance. She approached a group of students. “Contract law!” she said, glancing at the thick book on the table in front of them. “I had this awful professor, just awful—made you feel small. But so much about contract law is just human behavior.”

I google "who taught contracts at UC Hastings School of Law in 1986." She trashes a specific person for no good reason, then retreats to an intellectual observation without making it come alive. Why not connect that to Trump? He's all about the art of the deal, and isn't he a stable genius of human behavior?

A woman presented a piebald English bulldog, the Drake mascot, and Harris gamely crouched on the floor, scratching his belly, till the handler excused him, saying, “He smells food.”...

Probably, not a good idea to get down low next to a dog that doesn't know you, especially an English bulldog — "They were bred to fight bulls."

Growing up, Harris was surrounded by African-American intellectuals and activists. One of her mother’s closest friends was Mary Lewis, who helped found the field of black studies, at San Francisco State. When [her mother Shyamala] Gopalan worked late at the lab, Kamala spent time with her “second mother”—Regina Shelton, who ran a day care in the apartment below theirs, decorated with posters of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Harris writes that Gopalan “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.”

The sisters spent summers with their father, in Palo Alto, and occasionally travelled with him to Jamaica, but he barely registers in Harris’s account. Meena says, “He was not around after the divorce. Their experience and relationship with blackness is through being raised in these communities in Berkeley and Oakland, and not through the lens of being Caribbean.”...

Kamala went to Howard and returned to San Francisco for law school. By then, [her sister] Maya, who had given birth to Meena at seventeen, was in college, so Kamala and her mother often took Meena for overnights and weekends. The matriarchy was intact....

Harris’s father does not participate in her public life (and didn’t answer a request for an interview). The exception to the rule is telling. In February, on “The Breakfast Club,” an urban-market radio show, Harris admitted to smoking a joint in college, and one of the hosts asked if she supported legalizing marijuana. “Half my family’s from Jamaica—are you kidding me?” she replied, laughing.... After Harris’s radio appearance, her father gave a statement to the Jamaican-diaspora Web site, reprimanding his daughter. “My deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” When I asked Harris how she felt about this belated, public parenting, she said, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” I asked if she found talking about Donald [Harris] unpleasant. “I’m happy to talk about my father,” she said, glumly. “But, ya know.” She raised her eyebrows, and said nothing....

The eyebrows readily turn... shut up.

[Kamala Harris] got her political education in the drawing rooms of Pacific Heights. San Francisco is an incubator of Democratic talent and the stronghold of California’s best-known political families: the Feinsteins, Pelosis, Newsoms, Browns. Politicians are pillars of high society. “People like Kamala, past mayors, the Pelosis, Feinstein, they are as much part of the socialite scene as the barons of industry and tech moguls,” a local observer told me....

During Harris’s short-lived romance with [Willie] Brown, he ran for mayor; they broke up sometime between his victory party and his swearing-in.... Stories that mention Brown have always infuriated Harris; when I asked her campaign about him, a spokesperson testily referred me to statements that she made sixteen years ago.

The reporter didn't even get the eyebrows for that one. If the Willie Brown stories infuriate Harris continually, why can't the New Yorker reporter give us a scene in which she confronted Harris? What were the ground rules of this interview that a spokesperson was able to give the final answer? My eyeballs are so skeptical here. Was she promised a puff piece? This isn't a puff piece, but there seem to be efforts at fulfilling a promise of puffery. I'm slogging through a long article here, and I find this really annoying.

Among political hopefuls, Brown is known as a mentor and a Pygmalion. Always nattily turned out—he favors Brioni suits and Borsalino hats...

More luxury goods.

... he believes that people in public life should present themselves well. “Women in politics need five or six well-fitted sets of pants,” he writes in his memoir. “They also need a complement of blouses or shirts that can be interchanged. And they need a whole series of blazers.”

Please refer to our advertisers.

Pelosi is always on point, he writes; Feinstein can look as if she’s caught between seasons. Tactfully, he doesn’t mention Harris, but he may as well have been cataloguing her wardrobe.

There's more about Brown helping Harris with her clothes and finally some substance:

Brown also arranged appointments for Harris on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the state’s Medical Assistance Commission, which together reportedly paid her about four hundred thousand dollars over five years. He gave her a car.

[Brown's] advice to black women seeking political office: get involved at a high level with cultural and charitable organizations, “like symphonies, museums, and hospitals.” In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she designed a mentorship program for public-school teens....

Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, is another Brown protégé... When Newsom was twenty-eight, Brown appointed him to chair the Parking and Traffic Commission of San Francisco. Not long after, when a seat opened on the city’s powerful Board of Supervisors, Brown chose Newsom to fill it. “I can candidly tell you with conviction I would not be governor of California—I would not have been mayor of San Francisco—without his support and his mentorship,” Newsom told me. “Kamala was not directly appointed D.A. of San Francisco. I think it’s patently unfair to judge that harshly and not judge my relationship.”...

Nice job of extracting the sex from the Harris-and-Brown story.

I asked Nathan Click, who once served as a spokesperson for Harris and now does the same for Newsom, who the elder was. “I don’t know—twins?” he said. A civic leader in San Francisco told me, “Kamala and Gavin are like two puppies rolling around having fun together, seeing who pops out first.”

There's an interesting quote!

As Governor Jerry Brown was entering his final term, Newsom was the lieutenant governor and Harris was attorney general. Governor was clearly the next job for each of them. “It divided the social world,” Mimi Silbert, who co-founded the Delancey Street Foundation, a residency program for ex-convicts, and who is an old friend of both Harris and Newsom, says. “It was, ‘I’m more for Gavin,’ ‘Well, I’m more for Kamala.’ ” As the tension was becoming excruciating, Barbara Boxer unexpectedly announced that she was giving up her seat in the U.S. Senate. Within days, Harris had declared that she would run for the Senate, clearing the way for Newsom eventually to become governor....

So... Newsom popped out first.

This spring, I met Harris for coffee near her Senate office, on Capitol Hill. She was in uniform: slim-cut dark pantsuit, silk blouse, black pearls. I asked her what would have happened if she had faced Newsom—a symbol of electability, the heir with the hair—in a race for governor. “I would have won,” she said—wasn’t it obvious?—and broke out laughing....

So... laughing = lying?

For much of Harris’s life, she has been single, with no children, focussed on her work. She married [Doug] Emhoff, a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, at a tiny ceremony in 2014, where Maya officiated and guests were sworn to secrecy. When Harris is not on Capitol Hill, or on the campaign trail, she and Emhoff live together in Brentwood, with a freezer full of two-cup containers of Bolognese she makes ahead so that he can always have home-cooked food.

The feminist in me is triggered! Emhoff is always capable of having home-cooked food if he makes it his own damned self.

(Emhoff enrolled in cooking classes before the wedding, to make himself a worthy sous-chef.)...

Sous-chef = he can assist her when she cooks. But he'd have to go out to eat or have uncooked food if she didn't fill the freezer with Bolognese sauce whenever she ventured forth from Brentwood. (By the way, 1/2 cup is the portion size for pasta sauce in the U.S. (and that's twice what is it in Italy).)

One longtime donor, noting the country’s expectations around the First Family, told me, “When she married Doug, I knew she was running for President.”

Why else would she marry?!

After Harris finished signing books, she walked over to Emhoff. “How did you not die from maximum cuteness?” he asked her. Harris ignored the cloying remark...

Oh, the dismissiveness! Not even an eyebrow response!

... and, noting the presence of reporters, turned sober: a policy point was coming. “Kids pay attention to everything,” she said. “They remember it. That was an element in my school truancy initiative.”...

Do they remember when a wife refuses to acknowledge an effusive compliment from her husband?

I'm skipping over a lot of material on that school truancy initiative. It's good, but it's background that was available aside from the New Yorker's access to Harris. After that, we get a direct quote:

“I know that when I make decisions it will impact a lot of people,” she told me. “That’s where I’m not going to be modest. I also know that when I say something there will be a lot of people that will trust that I will have thought through what I’ve said. Mrs. Shelton, my second mother, and so many people in my life, they would often say, ‘Well, what does Kamala say about it?’ I know that there are people who count on me, and for that reason it is really important to me that I have and take into account all information, and if I was wrong about something, I don’t let pride associate. Because the consequence of what I do and what I say can be profound.” Her voice was quavering, and her eyes were filling. She swatted my arm. “You got me!” she chided....

So that's what made her start to cry. Remember when Hillary cried:



That helped Hillary a lot (back in '08) even though it was phony-baloney. I mean something was making her cry but the emotion doesn't fit with the words. We don't have video of Harris crying over "the consequence of what I do and what I say can be profound" (or was it "I don’t let pride associate"), but something got to her. "You got me!" But I don't get her.

And she wants to present herself as hard to know: "I’m not good at talking about myself."

Is it as simple as modesty? "I don’t let pride associate." No one at her level could possibly be simple. Modesty must be a minor trait. Carol Mosely Braun said the word: "ambition."

ON REREADING THIS POST: Suddenly I see what the glass ceiling is made of. It's all right there. Now, let me slip away and go tap on the glass of the bakery case at a non-descript coffee shop.