As a child, Kamala Harris learned to count to ten in seven different languages. Although she identifies with her Jamaican father’s Baptist faith, she also attended Hindu temples with her Indian-born mother. In elementary school, she took the bus out of her black neighborhood to attend a white school, part of a Berkeley program to combat racial segregation.
For Jean-Éric Branaa, author of the book Kamala Harrisboldly subtitled America of the Future, which appears in Édito, Kamala Harris is therefore the incarnation of this mixed, plural America, and of its social diversity.
“She represents the future, by her very person, because she is the daughter of two immigrants of color, and she is the first woman to reach the vice-presidency. She represents the multi-ethnic, the multi-confessional, this aspiration that Americans can have and therefore the America of the future,” says the author, who is a lecturer at Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas and a researcher at the Thucydides Center for Research in International Relations. On the other side, he notes, Donald Trump has with him the evangelicals, the conservatives, the extreme right and the financiers who want to recover their tax money.
But Kamala Harris is “at the center,” he said in an interview. Even though her father, whom she practically “didn’t know,” he said, was a Marxist economist, and her mother, a breast cancer researcher, was very involved in African-American activist circles.
“She is not really left-wing, she is even rather centrist during the first part of her career, that is to say when she is in California,” continues Jean-Éric Branaa. She is centrist and she even goes to the Republican side. They are the ones who got her elected [contre un libéral]. She is elected, so she has a policy that is rather marked on the right, only when she arrives as a senator. But, as you said, she is ambitious and she understands right away that she must become more progressive. ” Her progressivism, he specifies, is one of “common sense”.
A hard line
Determined, therefore, and ambitious, Kamala Harris appears here as having assets to seek support from a fairly broad spectrum of voters. As a prosecutor, she maintained a hard line towards criminals, going so far as to briefly reverse her opposition to the death penalty in the state of California. We also learn that in 2011, as California’s prosecutor, she defended a law that allowed charges to be brought against the parents of children who were absent from school more than 10% of the time. In this sense, she has ammunition against Donald Trump in the field of repression and the fight against crime.
“But today, what she is going after are two electorates,” says Jean-Éric Branaa. “The first, obviously, is the young. She adopts their codes and their singers, the friendship bracelets, that kind of thing. And she shows them that she listens to them. And that is very important. It is also very feminine to know how to listen. And since she is old enough to be their mother, it is going very well,” he continues. Her second target, and this is what we have seen very clearly for the last 15 days, is the rural populations. She is trying to go and find them, to go to Trump’s toes, to go and recover not the unfortunate people who have suffered and who were complaining, but those who have not particularly suffered, and who have conservative identity codes. They are in an America that is withdrawn into itself, rather well-off, and they are afraid of progress. And she is trying to reassure them at the moment.”
Jean-Éric Sanaa admits in an interview that he “likes” Kamala Harris. That being said, he cannot predict her election, even though he wrote a book on Trump before his election in 2016, another on Biden before the 2020 election. Nevertheless, he adds: “If I were asked today to give my opinion on who will win the election, I would put my coin on Kamala Harris because she checks all the right boxes without rejecting anyone, speaking calmly, and that is an extraordinary strength.”
But there is still a long way to go because the Republican and Democratic parties are virtually neck and neck across the country.
Reluctant women
“The majority of Americans support abortion rights,” he said. “Women support abortion rights by 68 to 70 percent in the United States, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, that’s a given. […] Today, Kamala Harris is speaking to these women, and saying: This is why you need to vote.
On the issue of firearms, “the disease of the United States,” says Jean-Éric Branaa, Kamala Harris wants to do like Biden, that is to say, to ban assault weapons, semi-automatics, “because that’s what’s used in all the killings. What she can’t do, however, is attack the carrying of weapons because it is protected by the Second Amendment. So she did that in a very clever way, I think. By taking [Tim] Walz as a running mate, he who has a gun, who likes to hunt, that reassures Americans.” Moreover, Kamala Harris has said publicly that she owns a gun and that she could use it if necessary.
On the issue of immigration, as vice president, rather than going to the US border, she preferred to visit the Latin American states where many illegal immigrants come from to try to improve their lot in their country.
“This work had already been done with Mexico at the time of the maquiladorascontinues Jean-Éric Branaa. It has produced results. Mexico is doing better, there are fewer Mexicans coming to the United States. Today, it comes from a little lower down.”