Vice President Kamala Harris is on the precipice of becoming the most powerful woman in the world — yet most people don’t know much about her or what she stands for.
As the only person who can take over the $240m in campaign funds raised by her and Joe Biden – who managed to forget her name Thursday, introducing her as Donald Trump — she may soon find herself leading the Democratic party and in the running to become the first black female President in November.
The 59-year-old was once the tough-talking District Attorney of San Francisco, then went on to become Attorney General and then a US Senator for California, her home state.
However, most Americans now know her best by her pastel pantsuits, notorious cackle, tendency to turn many speeches into head-scratching word salads — and the fact that talk show host Drew Barrymore thinks she should be “Momala” of the country.
And as some say she’s been left to twist in the wind amid the increasingly embarrassing crisis engulfing Biden, they wonder if she can “be unburdened by what has been,” to borrow one of her own phrases.
Harris has used the phrase so often, one video mashup on X shows her apparently intoning the line gravely more than 20 times at different events.
Charlie Spiering, author of the recent book, “Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House,” said he “wasn’t sure” what Harris’ political stances and policies even are at this point.
“She obviously has changed her positions on a number of issues to reflect the Biden agenda,” Spiering told The Post.
“She’s been a spectacular failure as vice president because she doesn’t know how to connect with actual people.”
Spiering said Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — who was 61 when he started a romantic relationship with Harris, then 30, in 1994 – had “opened doors” for her.
However, he added: “She was set up by the Democratic elites but they didn’t factor that in California politics you don’t have to necessarily run to appeal the voters, you have to convince the political machine.”
Trump has frequently targeted Harris, dubbing her “Laffin’ Kamala,” and saying Biden has made “one brilliant decision,” by having her as his running mate, calling it “the greatest insurance policy of all time.”
“If Joe had picked someone even halfway competent, they would have bounced him from his office years ago.”
The irony, according to David Cay Johnston, author of “It’s Even Worse than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America,” and a professor of law and journalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is that former prosecutor Harris could probably eviscerate Trump in debates better than anyone else and has bona fides that more than rival past vice presidents and presidents – and certainly Trump himself.
Indeed, a recent CNN poll indicated that Harris would do better against Trump than Biden.
“Kamala Harris has punched all the tickets to become president,” Johnston told The Post. “She was highly competent both as a DA and AG including administratively and she has far more credentials than George Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
“Her one weakness is in the area of foreign policy but I really can’t tell you why she’s come off so weak as the vice president.”
One Democratic Party operative, who did not want to be identified, also named a few other missteps which didn’t play well with the public.
“What ruined her with voters is how she played the race card when she was running for president and she talked about how ‘that little girl was me’ in the (2020) debate,” he said, referring to Harris’ dramatic sparring with Biden over his past opposition to forced busing to desegregate schools, claiming she was representative of the “little girl” impacted by his stance.
“And then she had to make that stupid T-shirt up with the [‘that little girl was me’] phrase which made her sound like some poor little kid from the ghetto when her parents were more educated than many white people.
“The reality is, she’s a tough cookie who could put Trump in the grave in a debate if they let her.”
Harris, the daughter of Jamaican-born Donald Harris, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford, and the late Shyamala Gopalan, who was born in Chennai, India and became a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, grew up mainly in the Oakland area.
She married corporate attorney Doug Emhoff, 59, who is Jewish, in 2014.
Biden’s own campaign staffers have been quietly polling Harris’ viability for the top spot – but some say the Democrats’ handling of both the Biden crisis and Harris’ future has made them look like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
“Four months before the election, and one week after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Harris’s capacity to lead the Democratic Party and the free world has never been more relevant,” Elaina Plott Calabro wrote in The Atlantic.
“And yet many Americans, after three years of the West Wing’s poor stewardship of Harris, are now looking at their vice president as if for the first time.”
A number of her old friends from California told The Post they don’t understand how the whip-smart, witty, ambitious and articulate Kamala they knew back in the day has been reduced to a punchline on the national stage.
“People say to me, ‘Oh she can’t speak, she can’t even finish a sentence and she has a stupid laugh,'” San Francisco socialite and powerhouse fundraiser Diane “Dede” Wilsey, a longtime Republican who knows Harris, as well as Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rep. Nancy Pelosi well, told The Post.
“I have heard her speak a million times. I know her to be a competent person of great integrity. She’s driven, she’s focused, she’s fun and funny and kind. I am puzzled and worried about Kamala. I feel like if they’re not going to replace her, they need to help her. But still she’d need to pull off a herculean feat to turn this around.
“Does she have the capability? Yes. But if the press is going to take her down, she won’t be able to get up.”
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Shelley Taylor, who grew up in the Bay Area and traveled in some of the same circles as Harris and is also biracial, says it could be partly due to race.
“I feel she represents the best of my generation of mixed race people but she’s also part of the Democratic machine,” Taylor told The Post.
“I think she’s more of a prosecutor than a natural politician and she’s afraid to speak her real feelings because of it. I also feel that as a black woman she always has to have her guard up. So when you feel that shackled, I can see the word salads coming out of that.”
Others say that Harris, no matter what her past experience as California’s top cop and senator, just doesn’t have what it takes to lead the free world.
“Kamala actually has charisma but it’s the charisma of like a fun aunt who takes pills, not a politician, which is unfortunate,” writer River Page posted on X. “She could be THRIVING as the host of some Kathie and Hoda style morning show.”
Political insiders know that abortion and reproductive rights have always been Harris’ number one focus in the Biden Administration, especially since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022. She was the first vice president or president to visit an abortion clinic.
“My entire adult life, Roe had been in place,” Harris told Rolling Stone this month. “We always knew that we needed to fight for it. We always knew that there was, from the day it was decided, an intent to get rid of it. But truth be told, most of us really didn’t think [it would happen]. And then they did it. Oh, it took the wind out of me.”
Gun violence is another key area of concern. In March, she visited the blood-stained classroom building where the 2018 Parkland High School massacre occurred.
“I’ve seen what assault weapons do to the human body,” Harris said. “On so many issues of public policy, including — and especially — this one, we can’t just rest back on an issue without really understanding how it plays out in reality, and then feel some level of empathy and purpose to say, “Hey, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can do something about this.”
Her take on the Israel/Gaza conflict is arguably more nuanced than Biden’s or many on the hard left, telling Rolling Stone that the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack which killed over 1,200 was a horror of “slaughter and rape.”
“I’ve seen this in different places around the world, rape being used as a tool of war,” Harris said. “Let’s understand that Israel, when that happened, has and had a right to defend itself. We would. And let’s understand that how it does so matters.”
In the same article she also called for a cease fire and a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, and for the killing of Palestinian civilians to stop.
However, talking policy is different than action and Harris was widely scorned for her inaction in the one specific role handed to her by Biden, who named her “border czar” back in 2021.
Despite being the admin’s face of the rapidly spiraling crisis, Harris refused to visit the border for months and did little to solve any of the problems millions of migrants illegally crossing the border were causing. Although she never officially gave up her position, it was quietly abandoned.
A San Francisco political insider who has known Harris for more than two decades and likes her personally told The Post that “she’s wasted the Vice Presidency.”
“She was given a portfolio,” the source said. “She was given immigration, she was given projects from Biden that she hasn’t made a dent with. She hasn’t made anything her own. Kamala was supposed to bring youth and energy to the ticket, which she has, but she hasn’t been heavy on the deliverables. I think that’s the biggest stumbling block to her being president. She just doesn’t have a lot to show for what she’s done.”
Harris’ media team did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
