What Motivates Kamala Harris?
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Did you see Obama last night? He was amazing. Yes, absolutely.

Where's that dude been? Really? He's still got it, though. When he gets up and he wants to talk, he can do it. I thought for me anyway, it was like this great reality check. It was like, you know, Rip Van Winkle came back and woke up and said, my God, what is going on with you people? And it was like he was saying, you know, my fellow lobsters, you're being boiled alive and you're about to expire. When did it become OK to do that?

to just lie like this and to sell junk from the White House. We know exactly the cohort that he's talking to. You know, all three of us have encountered folks like this. These are typically, in my experience, centrist, sort of lightly Republican, lightly Democrat. They probably voted for Obama.

And the truth is right now in private, a lot of them are sort of saying in the coded ways that people do that they basically are

worried about their pocketbooks. Exactly. Their grocery prices. I mean, I think he's trying to make them say, what kind of person are you if you vote for a person like that? I do agree, Jane, that, you know, if we're the lobsters being boiled, Barack Obama is saying, I'm not getting in that pot. Right. No way, please. He has the outrage about Donald Trump.

I was there at that White House Correspondents' Dinner where he was mocking Donald Trump. And remember his convention speech and the small hands moment? I think that Barack Obama is more personally offended by Donald Trump and also seems to want to personally offend Donald Trump, I think, more than any other public figure we have.

Welcome to the political scene, our weekly discussion about the big question in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos. Hi, Jane. Hi, Susan. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys. All right. Well...

It seems to be the week that everybody's panicking, but don't panic. We're here to talk about it. This week, in fact, is the week of Vice President Kamala Harris's long-awaited media blitz. Please welcome back the next president of the United States.

Joining everyone from the ladies of The View to veteran radio host Howard Stern to 60 Minutes. The vice president told us she has lost track of how many states she's visited. Harris's mission, get the one in four voters who say they still don't know enough about her to find out more. So.

As the fastest presidential campaign in modern history prepares for its final stretch, we'll talk about what else we've learned about Kamala Harris. Evan has just written an outstanding profile of Harris for the magazine, and we'll share what he's learned in the months that he's covered her campaign. We'll also talk about Donald Trump, whose longstanding admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin once again made headlines this week.

Okay, Evan, I want to start with you. You just published a definitive piece about Kamala Harris after following her campaign for these extraordinary last couple of months. So let's talk. What did we learn that we didn't know before?

Yeah. No, I mean, I was thinking as I was listening to how you were describing the last week, which is exactly right. In some ways, there is very little that a person can get as a voter, as a reader from listening to, you know, one of these sort of entertainment themed interviews. That's, you know, she's doing a media blitz. You understand why she's doing it.

What people actually need is something else, which is to go deep into a life, into their originating influences. What has actually shaped a person's choices, their self-narrative, their motives, what really underlies their thinking? And it's, you know, very often the pyrotechnics of the campaign are distracting. And I think too much of our business is about that. And luckily, it's possible now.

by talking to people who've known her for a very long time, by people who have been involved in her life, either as opponents or as advisors or as allies.

who can begin to help you answer the big question, which is fundamentally, politically, is she more like Berkeley or more like Biden? Let's be honest. That's the core that people want to know. That's a good framing. And by the way, she would tell you that that is a one of her favorite slogans, a false choice. She says the slogan no false choice is so often that her staff once got that printed up on blue stress balls that they distributed around the office.

Gives you a little window into the workplace culture, too. But the answer is really interesting, which is that to understand her politics, you have to understand something that is missed in the usual cliche about San Francisco politics, which is that it is not all hippies and crystals. It is actually a place of.

Right.

And the reason is to succeed in that city, you have these centrist real estate fortunes that go all the way back to the gold rush. You've got these new money libertarians from Silicon Valley. And then, of course, you've got the movement politics around the environment, around gay rights. And all of these are contending. So if you actually look at who succeeds, who rises up out of that world, they tend to be quite practical in their politics. And that's interesting.

Kamala Harris. I mean, I just think that's such a compelling sketch of who the person is because of what she comes out of and where she comes from. The other thing that I don't think gets talked about nearly enough, and I know you've looked at this as well, Evan, is, you know, you've got her political biography, but also her biography.

biography, I find the issue of Harris and her parents to be absolutely fascinating because I have a theory of the case about American presidents. If you look back, many of them have what might be charitably described as daddy issues. And clearly there's a lot going on there with Harris's father is still alive, still around, but not a big part of her life. Her mother was this incredibly dominant presence. I wonder what you learned from looking at her biography.

There's this incredibly important theme here that runs through her life, which is about where does she get this sense of self-worth, which is an essential piece of defending her identity.

against what has been, let's face it, a sort of onslaught of negativity, of what can be pretty demoralizing inputs from the world. Going back to being the daughter of a single mom living in the Bay Area as a kid. And it starts actually even before they get to the United States. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was one of the people who would tell you, I am a Brahmin, as she said. My name goes back a thousand years.

Her heritage in India was coming from a priestly caste, meaning she was raised, as her mother described, to see herself as worthy and capable of leadership.

Mina Ahmed, who's writing a book about Indian Americans, helped me understand. She said that sense of her heritage and being a Brahmin insulated her from, inoculated her really, from the kinds of moments that would knock somebody off course. She says it's very common that if their kids would encounter discrimination, the answer to that would be

Just get ahead. Just keep moving. Just go. And when you listen to how Kamala Harris received messages from her mother, one of the things her mother would say if she would come home from school and had had a bad day and somebody had been nasty to her, her mother's answer was to say, well, what did you do about it?

What did you do about it? Now, you hear that sometimes as a political line, but actually embedded in there is a pretty powerful sense of this locomotive of motivation, of energy that goes all the way back to how her mother saw them as part of this much larger arc of history. We don't hear as much about her father, but my sense is that he, too, had a complex and accomplished background of some sort. I mean, he's a fascinating story. You know, he was this brilliant,

brilliant young economic student who comes out of Jamaica at that point also somebody had grown up under British colonial rule most of the students who got the scholarship that he got they went to the UK but he went to Berkeley and only

almost immediately distinguished himself as this very charismatic figure in what was emerging as a new locus of the black freedom struggle. There was an organization in Berkeley called the Afro-American Association. Don Harris was one of the people who helped create it. So was

Kamala's mother. That's where they met. And it had this very distinct sense of not just reading writers who were typically ignored by the establishment, but it was also forming this much stronger sense of what it meant to be African-American. Some of the members of the study group went on to create Kwanzaa. There were other people in the group who went on to form the Black Panthers. So there was a way in which it had a very strong sense of self-worth.

By the time she was five, her parents had really their marriage was falling apart. But even after they divorced, her mother stayed very close to the black community in the Bay Area. And that became the core of their social life. It became the core of her intellectual development was this very strong sense of closeness to.

This sounds a little in your framing of your initial question, Berkeley versus Biden, as if Berkeley really wins and tips the balance. I don't think so, actually, though, Jane, because I think remember what we talked about at the beginning, too, was this sense of.

that she is ultimately a very pragmatic politician. I remember somebody saying to me about Joe Biden once, really astute observation from somebody who'd worked with him in the White House, who said, look, he is an almost perfect weather vane for where the center of the left is, meaning it moves around. And at times it's in one place. Joe Biden, after all, you remember, got ahead of Barack Obama when it came to same-sex marriage because he saw that's where the politics were heading.

In Kamala Harris's case, that kind of – call it mobility or pragmatism can be a detriment at times. That's what got her into trouble in 2019 when people said, I'm not sure I know what she believes in. But it also means that she's been able to find where the party is at any moment. And I think if you looked at her policy prescriptions today –

They are more or less fairly centrist for where Democrats are. And the hard part for her is making that case, breaking through, getting people to actually see her for the politics she describes today. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

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Evan, you've done a lot of reporting over the last few years, obviously, about President Biden. And I have to admit, I still don't really get the relationship between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. I mean, Biden, after eight years as Barack Obama's vice president...

That's a really tough role. My guess is that he didn't love that role and he was eager to step into the big chair himself. And yet you could argue that she was as marginalized as any vice president has been in that Biden administration. You know, one of the reasons people are asking this question about who is she is because they don't know what she's been doing the last four years. And I'm just curious, like what insights you can give us into why that is. And including, by the way, we all heard it in Washington, right?

The Biden team essentially contributing to the idea that Harris wasn't up to stepping into the role as the candidate. And that was one of the arguments that they advanced inside the beltway for why it is that Joe Biden needed to run for reelection even well into his 80s.

So I think part of, and you hit something important there at the end, which is a part of the reason why the White House was so dismissive for a long time of questions about what is her role in this organization, is because they were, in a sense, bound by the requirement to say, no, no, no, Joe Biden's the candidate and he's going to be the winner. So that was a kind of dominant priority. And so it reinforced this

feeling that people couldn't get a whole lot of clear answers about what role she was playing internally. One thing I would reframe from how you were describing it a moment ago, Joe Biden actually has a very high regard for the office of the vice presidency. You know, even though he had his frustrations and we can all recite the stories going back to John Adams about their frustrations with the vice presidency, Biden actually thought

Even though it is, as he says, entirely derivative of power. Vice presidents have no independent agency of their own. They are all shadows of and reflections of the president. So it's limiting by its very nature. But he thinks it's important that being both an advisor, being both a person in waiting, that those are meaningful things. And so from the beginning, he actually let it be known inside the building that.

Whether this was manufactured or not, he wanted people to see her as an equal partner because he felt frustrated by that. He felt when he was in Obama's White House that he had been sidelined, particularly by some of Obama's political aides who thought that his judgment was kind of antique. You know, as one of Biden's aides said to me, look, even at times when he was frustrated by her

by her sense of where things should go. He was always making the case to people around him that she was his partner in this. And you never saw him publicly distancing himself from her.

And that's partly because she never did that to him. She could have very easily. This is the ancient Washington dynamic of a vice president who wants to be president, who begins to dump on their president when they when they get the chance at private dinner parties and stuff.

She did not get that reputation and that he knew about when his polls were as bad as they were. She was not out there angling. As he once said to me, Biden said, look, Al Gore was going to everybody's birthday party in Iowa, meaning he was making it clear when Clinton was on the ropes that he was going to try to go and outmaneuver him. And he didn't want to do that. And then also he didn't want a vice president who was going to do that.

But he didn't exactly set up a situation where she could shine in his administration. And we all heard for a long time this rationale that Biden had to run again because only he could beat Donald Trump and that Kamala Harris couldn't do it. Well, part of this was a little bit of her own doing.

Because when she came into the job, and this has been reported in various places, that she did not want to be pigeonholed. She didn't want to be stuck doing, as she would put it at the time, I don't want to end up doing women's issues or issues related to race.

So, you know, there was this effort to try to figure out, well, what is her portfolio going to be? And part of her struggle in those first couple of years was figuring out where do I make a difference? How can I do things here? And one of the things she pressed for, asked for was voting rights. And that in the end turned out to be a real political labyrinth. And it was obviously impossible. They never got the kind of voting rights legislation they wanted.

But it's so ironic, isn't it, if that was how she entered into it, because it seems that she didn't really come into her own and have her own voice in a way that grabbed the headlines until she took on the abortion issue after Dobbs. It just seemed she connected. The ball hit the bat.

And it was a home run. Yeah, well said. When the draft of this opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade first came out, it was a crystallizing moment, really, for her, because all of a sudden this issue that Joe Biden had always been

Right.

The effect was that she was also in that process building out a network. And that network of people who believed in her became essential on July 21st, the day that

that Joe Biden dropped out. One of the things that I've spent a lot of time doing recently is reporting what happened in that 24 hours, because that is an amazing period in political history. You've got a president dropping out with 100 days to the election. And the question of where are we going to have an open convention? Where are we going to have town halls, all this stuff? What's amazing is it turned out she had a network of allies that she had been building, and they essentially activated that.

And by the next morning, she'd cleared the field. As you described, Susan, a moment ago, nobody expected that of Kamala Harris a few months ago. Yeah, the methodical having harvested all those contacts from all of those events, many of them, you know, the drudgery of the vice presidency and turned that into this network that was able to be activated in such a short period of time. I think you're so right to focus on that. Evan, and also on the abortion thing, it's made her...

so much more of a compelling, successful speaker. Look at her at these rallies. Her confidence, I think, would never be at the levels that it's at right now if she hadn't had basically been constantly on the campaign trail over the last couple of years because of the Dobbs decision. She's gotten so much better. We can all see it in these rallies. What about the media interviews, though? It's really interesting that, you know, that still remains

Yeah, it's really interesting because there's always been this weird dichotomy because you see her in when she was in the Senate, especially, and she'd be, you know, filleting somebody like Bill Barr or Jeff Sessions, who, you know, finally actually just said out loud, you're making me nervous. And she's like, well, I'm not going to do that.

So she was very good at this interrogation. And then she would get into an interview in which you get the kind of questions that most politicians just love, a kind of big, lazy, you know, lazy pitch across the middle of the plate. Like, tell us about your moment. And she doesn't do well in those. She doesn't ruminate and reflect. She's kind of a little bit allergic to that form of introspection in public.

Partly, I think it's some of the self-protection that comes with being aware of there are people who are always going to doubt her capacity to make history. And I think there's an element of her kind of slightly battening down the hatches. And then also, that's just a skill set. She was a prosecutor. She wasn't somebody who really learned how to

And I think she underappreciates the importance of having the kind of philosophical reach, the oratorical power that somebody like Obama has been able – because that really is ultimately something that people want from politicians.

It's more than just having the right statistics and Venn diagrams. They want to be inspired. You know, they want something big. It doesn't always have to be a beautiful sonnet, which is another way that she'd sometimes mocks great speeches. But it has to be a sense that somebody is kind of reaching into you and pulling out a sense of what our country can be. And that's that's something that she's still trying to figure out. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.

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has some kind of rationale behind it. You might not agree with it. You might not agree with the methods. You might not agree with the means, but you have to look at it as like a rational actor and make your analysis that way. And Pod Save America's Jon Favreau and Tommy Vitor. I don't think we're going to fact check our way to victory. Follow Wired Politics Lab for in-depth conversations and analysis to help you navigate the upcoming election.

Susan, I want to turn the tables just for a second, because this week we had a lot of interesting new tidbits, really, about Donald Trump, a figure you've written about as well as anybody on two feet. One of the things in there was this idea of...

Trump staying in touch with Vladimir Putin, having phone calls with him, sending a COVID testing machine. What do you think we've learned or what has this reinforced or brought back to the surface that we should be thinking about when it comes to Trump? Well, look, a Bob Woodward book is always an event in Washington, especially a few weeks before an election. You know, these are a couple of the sort of headline revelations in the new book that I think is coming out actually officially next week. I've had a chance to look through it. And the thing

that's interesting is that Vladimir Putin is this through line, right? Here we are. It's almost exactly, by the way, eight years to the day since October 7th,

2016, I'll never forget it. People remember that as the Access Hollywood Day. But earlier that day, it was the day that Obama administration officials came out and said, boom, period, the Russian government is intervening in our election, put out this really unprecedented, extraordinary statement. And, you know, ever since then, we've been living with this bizarre reality of trying to figure out what is it about

Putin and Donald Trump. I don't think we've come to a definitive answer. And I should say, by the way, on the phone calls, you know, we don't have definitive confirmation. Woodward reported based on a single source that Trump had been in contact with Putin seven different times since the end of his presidency. I should say that

History will tell us one way or the other, but in the meantime, it's pretty damn extraordinary. We don't have former presidents who are talking to our chief adversaries in the world. You know, I remember Donald Trump fulminating and fulminating when he was president and when he was running for the White House at John Kerry, because he alleged that John Kerry was talking to the Iranians with whom he had negotiated the Iran deal in the Obama administration. And

Donald Trump wanted to prosecute John Kerry. He was always demanding, according to our reporters, that John Kerry should be prosecuted for speaking with the Iranians. His advisors had to sort of put that off when Trump was president. And here's this allegation, this extraordinary allegation. What was happening in the period since Trump has left office?

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Donald Trump was basically pushing his Republican members of Congress not to send the billions of dollars in urgently needed military and security assistance to Ukraine that the Biden administration and many members in both parties wanted to send. It's Trump and his

sort of coterie of insiders who have been the leading voices in the United States amplifying Putin's arguments about the war. I think people, I understand they don't have the ability to kind of process how amazing it is and how unusual that we would have a former president of the United States who has this admiration, there's no other word for it, for essentially one of our chief adversaries in the world. Is it admiration? I mean, we've really wondered...

Does Trump envy Putin's power and money or does Putin have something on Trump? I mean, will we ever find out what is at the basis of this weird relationship? Well, I don't.

I don't think we need to get into the realm of psychoanalysis or the deep secrets of the FSB to know that Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin and for strongmen more generally long predates his time in the White House. We reported in our book The Divider when Putin was put

on the cover of Time magazine as its man of the year, years before Trump entered politics. Donald Trump wrote him a mash note, you know, sucking up to him. Trump was fascinated by the culture of, you know, Russian new money and oligarchs. He wanted to open, as we all know, the famous Trump Tower project in Moscow. His son, Don Jr., said publicly that they depended on a lot of Russian oligarch money for their businesses in the United States.

We still don't know the extent of that financing of some of Trump's projects here in the United States. But, you know, his advisors, I've talked about this at great length with many of them. My longtime, you know, friend and

Russia hand, Fiona Hill, who, as you know, was the senior director for Russia during the Trump administration and then testified against him at the first impeachment hearings. You know, she's of the belief that Trump essentially

was jealous of a strong man, that Trump saw Putin as an incarnation of a kind of strength that he is so eager to project. And I think it's very notable to me that even though it's an obvious political liability, right? You know, there are many Republicans who kind of groan and put their heads in their hands when Donald Trump starts talking about Vladimir Putin, and yet he can't shut up about him. If you look at his rallies here in 2024, in this campaign,

He doesn't talk very much about foreign policy. What does he do? He says again and again and again, I was very good friends with...

Kim Jong-un, I was very good friends with Xi Jinping and I was very good friends and I had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin. This is basically his foreign policy platform in 2024. And I would say to all of those people who are thinking about Trump, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. He's telling you

his vision of power in the world. He's telling you that he likes America's adversaries more than its allies, and that he sees himself as one of these strongmen. So forget about all the things we don't know. What we do know is pretty mind-blowing. I would throw it back to you guys, though, because, of course, we do know an awful lot about Donald Trump right now. And yet what blows me away just a few weeks before the election, guys, is that

For many Republicans, they seem information resistant. You know, somebody compared it to me the other day. It's like drug resistant tuberculosis. There's no information about Donald Trump. You know, he could be secretly meeting with Vladimir Putin. And I don't think it would make a difference even to many of these self-professed Republican hawks. Do you think?

Evan, that any of this information about Trump makes a difference? You know, I will tell you, I've been on the ground in places like Michigan recently and having these really interesting conversations with, to give you an example, a guy who works in a diesel plant in Michigan. And he says, look, I am he's upfront about it. He's a he's a Harris supporter.

But he sees a lot of these younger workers who come into the factory and he says, a lot of these guys come in and I can see it right away. Even if they don't tell me that they're Trump supporters, I can just already begin to figure it out. I hear the little echoes of the sound bites, the talking points. And what's amazing and slightly harrowing for our country is a lot of the decisions that people are going to make on not just Trump.

election day, but in the weeks around it, are these little tiny gradations, these little decisions, those little nudges. And that's why every tiny piece of this matters. I think sometimes if you're not a political obsessive or professional, you wonder, why does it really matter how many doors they knock on? Why does it really matter if voters are actually going out and asking their neighbors if they voted? Are they registered? All of that kind of stuff in the final days is

in some ways, can swamp a lot of what's been happening for months and months. So it matters tremendously how these candidates, both Harris and Trump, are talking and who they're talking to in these final days. So as tired as people might be, this is actually the period that counts. And this is the period when it's worth paying attention. All right, Jane, what's your vibe check as we head into the last couple of weeks?

Well, I really don't think anyone knows, not the polls, not anyone else. It's so close that it's almost as if the polls and these predictions have become a Rorschach test of the person talking. You know, it's either you're an optimist or you're a pessimist, and it comes through in what you say. What I worry about is if you place this election in a larger context of elections around the world, there is obviously a playbook that involves demonizing immigrants and

that is working and fueling the rise of the right in many places around the world. And Trump is playing the same playbook.

sort of fear of others and of sort of a takeover of your culture and fear of crime, even though the crime statistics are good. I worry about the potency of this message that he is pushing. It's a hard thing to come up against to try to get people to follow their better angels. And let's face it, the events that are happening in the world, whether it's a hurricane, things that make people feel

jittery, unfortunately, redound to the strongman's benefit. People look for refuge and safety in those moments. Well, here's to better angels, Jane. And to your point, we could have been having that conversation in 2016 about Donald Trump's playbook. The national polling average this week showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 2.5 points on September 10th, exactly a month earlier than

the day of the debate that she won, all the things that happened since then, the national polling average had her up by the exact same amount, 2.5%. So forget the vibes, go to sleep, do whatever you need to do. Live your life. You know, we're not going to know until we know because it's that close. Folks, this was an amazing conversation. Evan, thank you so much in particular for your deep reporting. And we'll look forward to more about Kamala Harris.

Jane, Evan, so great to be with you guys. And listeners, be sure to check out our feed next week when you'll find Evan's full interview with David Remnick as well on the New Yorker Radio Hour. That's going to be out on Monday, October 14th.

This has been the political scene from The New Yorker. I'm Susan Glasser. We had research assistants today from Alex D'Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter and our editor is Gianna Palm. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks for listening. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I love

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