Portrait | From long shot to the woman who can beat Trump

DESPITE nearly four years as vice president and a long career in public life, many people still don't know how to pronounce her first name correctly. Here's how:

Her name means “lotus flower", Harris has pointed out, “which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising to the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom".

Harris has become just as accustomed to people mispronouncing her name as she has to all the predictable gossip that has been rehashed about her since Sunday: she slept her way to the top, she wasn't really born in the US and therefore can't become president, she flip-flops on important issues, she wouldn't have achieved so much if she hadn't been black and female. And, often in the same breath, as someone with Indian parents and a white husband, she isn't a true “black American".

It has even been held against her that she doesn't have children. JD Vance, Donald Trump's running mate in the battle for the White House, said in 2021: “It's just a basic fact: if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children."

Almost none of this should matter at all, but: she was born in the US and is undoubtedly eligible to become president. She doesn't have children of her own but she is the stepmother of Cole and Ella Emhoff, the children of attorney Doug Emhoff, whom she married in 2014. Kerstin Emhoff, Doug's first wife and Cole and Ella's biological mother, told CNN this week about the relationship between the four of them: “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I," and likewise she told The New York Times: “[Kamala] is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it."

Hint to petty Republicans: if a woman speaks like this about the stepmother of her own children, go find another tree to pee against.

About the allegations that Harris dispensed sexual favours in exchange for promotion, the same accusation has been made against almost every successful woman in history. In Harris's case, it usually harks back to her relationship more than three decades ago with Willie Brown, then among other things Democratic mayor of San Francisco. The relationship was no secret even then. Her ability to do the jobs to which he appointed her was also never in doubt. And about the allegations that as district attorney in San Francisco she would be reluctant to prosecute Brown for the corruption he was constantly accused of, Harris said in 2003: “[Brown's] career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing. If there is corruption, it will be prosecuted."

Harris is the 49th vice president of the US. She is the first woman, the first black person and the first of Asian descent to hold this position. Her father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica. He was a brilliant student who emigrated to the US after being admitted to the University of California at Berkeley. Today, he is today an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in the south of India but also emigrated to the US and studied at Berkeley, where they met. She later earned a doctoral degree in endocrinology and was a respected researcher on breast cancer. She passed away in 2009.

Harris received a BA in political science and economics from Howard University in 1986, then her law degree from Hastings College. She was San Francisco's district attorney from 2004 to 2011, then California's attorney general until 2017 and subsequently senator for the state until she became Joe Biden's vice president.

In the Senate, she gained a reputation as a relentless interrogator of Republicans who crossed her path, like this:

And this:

Regarding policy, she is probably slightly left of centre within the Democratic Party. She is known as a champion for stricter gun control, climate issues, affordable medical care, and labour and women's rights.

Abortion, in particular, will be one of the biggest points of debate between Harris and Trump: “If you are a woman, you know we deserve a country with equal pay and access to health care, including a safe and legal abortion, protected as a fundamental and constitutional right," she said at the Women's March in Washington the day after Trump's inauguration in 2017 .

After Trump's presidency, the conservative judges he appointed to the Supreme Court reversed Roe vs. Wade, but this turning point on abortion rights has since cost the Republicans dearly in several elections. It was Trump himself who convinced the Grand Old Party earlier this month to abandon the federal ban on abortion that had been part of its official policy for 40 years: he believes he has more to lose than to gain from the issue.

On the economy and especially the contribution that the super-rich and large corporations should make to state coffers, Harris doesn't differ much from Biden. She criticised Trump this week for his “failed trickle-down policies that gave huge tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and made working families pay the cost".

Trump has said about Harris that she is “more liberal than [senator] Bernie Sanders, can you believe it", but on Wednesday she was notably absent from the group of senior Democrats who boycotted Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before a joint session of Congress in protest against Israel's destruction of Gaza — while she did attend a “prior engagement" in Indianapolis.

Her husband is Jewish, and she enjoys the support of several major Jewish interest groups, including the Democratic Majority for Israel and the Jewish Democratic Council of America. In her opposition to a UN Security Council resolution that would have condemned Israel over Gaza, she said: “I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable." Although she has consistently been careful not to contradict Biden on Israel, she has expressed her concern about the humanitarian catastrophe and suffering in Gaza.

And although she wasn't present when Netanyahu delivered his speech to Congress, she did have a personal meeting with the Israeli prime minister on the same day. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, she supposedly told Netanyahu that it's time for the war to end in a way that would ensure Israel's survival, that all hostages are to be released, that the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza comes to an end, and that the Palestinians can enjoy their right to dignity, freedom and self-determination.

Whether she conveyed such a message to Netanyahu, and whether it means US policy and its approach towards Israel will change, we will only know if Kamala Harris is elected as the 47th president of the United States of America on November 5.

♦ VWB ♦

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