Back on track, the US is not going back

Kamala Harris' nomination is a moment of hope for the planet

Kamala Harris at an anti-apartheid demo when a young student

I am going to interrupt my series of Scottish political history posts aside -  temporarily you will be pleased to hear - to welcome Kamala Harris’ nomination for US President - ‘Laffin’ Kamala”, as Donald Trump calls her. Let’s hope she laughs all the way to the White House. 

A week ago we were staring down the barrel of a second Donald Trump term, which would indubitably be worse for the world than the first. He calls Harris a radical - but who is the real radical?  

Just who is the radical here?

It is said that if the US sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. Trump’s plans carry a serious risk of crashing the US economy. He plans to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants who do important jobs; he wants to slap huge tariffs on goods from China - which include vital parts for US supply chains. And take a look at ‘Project 25’ -  a revolutionary plan to get rid of most government regulation and half the civil service. Think Liz Truss - supersized. 

Trump the sequel would be bad news for the planet. The US under the Biden administration has begun to transition away from fossil fuels to a green future. Obviously, they could be moving faster. But the huge ship is turning. This requires a steady hand at the tiller. But Trump wants to reverse - to “drill, baby drill”, like it was last century. 

For Europeans, there is the added chilling prospect of the US abandoning support for Ukraine and winking at the takeover of that country by the despotic Vladimir Putin. My colleague David Gow wrote in his Substack last week that if Trump wins in November, the UK government will have to ‘blow up’ the transatlantic bridge and refocus on Europe.  

So Harris’ nomination is a moment of hope - the dystopian nightmare may not happen - if she wins.

 “We’re not going back”

At her first stump speech of her Presidential campaign, Harris used this line and the audience roared it right back at her. It serves as a riposte to slogans that hark back to the past such as “Take Back Control” and “Make America Great Once Again”. For many people - women, gay, ethnic minorities - those days were maybe not so great.

Progressives dismiss Harris because of her record as a prosecutor. But Harris has put in a long shift at the frontline of the criminal justice system and has learned from her experience. She writes powerfully in her 2019 political autobiography “These Truths We Hold” (I picked up the last copy from Blackwells earlier this week - reprint in progress no doubt) about its iniquities. One is the unfair cost of bail bonds, which mean poor families have to pawn their possessions and take out usurious loans to free anyone who gets arrested.

“Back on track/ We’re not going back,” comes up in the book. It is the chorus of a song by a group that emerged from an alternative-to-jail programme Harris helped to establish, which ends with a full-on graduation ceremony - for many participants the first opportunity they have ever had to celebrate success. 

A joyful warrior

The Republicans constantly go on about Harris’s laugh - calling it a “cackle” which it is not. I think it is more of a chortle. There is perhaps something a little incongruous about such a big laugh coming from such a petite person. But dancing, singing and laughing are her style - she believes in being a joyful warrior.

Harris was brought up largely by her Indian mother Shyamala Gopalan. (Her grandfather participated in India’s struggle for independence from Britain). But after Shyamala moved to the US to attend Berkeley and married Jamaican Donald Harris, she sought out and was embraced by the black community.

Central to Harris’ childhood was an African-American cultural centre called the Rainbow Sign. The name comes from a Gospel song “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ No more water, the fire next time.” There she met black political leaders, musicians, writers and feminists who influenced the woman she became. (At 12, she moved to Montreal when her mother changed job, but she returned to California each summer).

The subprime mortgage scandal

Harris dates her desire to become a lawyer to the role she saw black lawyers take in dealing with the various crises that afflicted her neighbours growing up. She takes seriously the standard under which US prosecutors work - ‘For the People’. One of the strongest chapters in her book is about the sub-prime mortgage scandal which saw millions of Americans lose their homes because they were mis-sold loans that became unaffordable.

As the newly elected Attorney General of California, Harris attended a meeting of all the AGs of the 50 states, seated alphabetically from Alabama to Wyoming, to discuss a settlement with the banks. That would have given California $2 billion to help underwater mortgage-holders and in return the banks were to get indemnity from future prosecution. The deal was about to be signed but Harris rebelled. 

“I knew that if joined the meeting, the conversation would just pick up where it had left off. They weren’t going to change course because a new AG had expressed concerns. But if they knew I would pull out of the negotiations if I had to, that might move some minds. California had more foreclosures than any other state, making it the biggest exposure of liability for the banks...if I skipped the afternoon session, my empty chair would express that message better than I ever could”.

Eventually, Harris and her team got $18 billion in compensation for Californian homeowners, there were prosecutions, and the state also passed a Homeowners’ Bill of Rights. 

Climate change

As Californian AG, Harris flew above the state’s biggest-ever fire in a helicopter and spoke to families who had lost everything, and to firefighters risking their lives. The daughter of a dedicated scientist, she understands how the incontinent emission of greenhouse gas is impacting the planet and that this needs to change.

In 2017, Harris had a chance to interrogate Mike Pompeo when he came before the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

“When it was finally my turn, I wanted to know how his public position rejecting the science of climate change was going to impact his role at the top of America’s intelligence apparatus. Right-wing pundits from Fox to the Heritage Foundation took great pleasure in calling my questions "dumb," "ridiculous," and “off base." Evidently, they felt my concerns were divorced from issues of national security. But they were wrong.”

Harris enumerates some of the many ways in which climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’ - from damaging food supplies to bringing about the mass movement of people.

An immigrant sympathiser

As VP, Harris was given the border challenge to manage. She didn’t seem to do much to ‘fix’ it. Judging by her book, she is pretty relaxed about immigration into the US and objects to draconian measures to discourage it.

As a child, Harris saw and was angered by the way people made assumptions about her clever mother because of her accent or the colour of her skin. As a Senator she has worked to secure legal status for the ‘Dreamers’ - people who came to the US as children without legal status. Harris’ instinctive sympathies seem to be with immigrants, rather than the people who see them as a threat.

Can she do it?

Immigration is a huge issue in this election. There are many people who regard the influx as a cause for concern. But there will also be many who think they or someone they love might be among the 15 million undocumented immigrants Trump proposes to round up and place in concentration camps. Who can turn out their voters, especially in swing states, will be the key to winning the race.

When the Republican VP JD Vance called Harris a cat lady, I heard ‘Catwoman’ and thought - well who better to take on these two, who seem to have cribbed their policy agenda from an arch-villain in a Marvel comic?

In the book, Harris recounts a conversation she had with her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer just about the time Harris was running for the post of California’s AG.

“She asked me how it was going. I said ‘Mummy, these guys say they are going to kick my ass.’ My mother…looked at me and just unveiled the biggest smile. She knew who she had raised.”

Illustration from ‘These Truths We Hold”