Sick Of Covid - Let's Look At Kamala Devi For A Minute...,

alicefromqueens |  Harris opposed legalization as recently as 2014, in her re-election campaign for attorney general of California, even as her Republican opponent supported it. Incidentally, the answer Harris gave a local reporter on the subject that year was the first time her laugh got her in real trouble. Hold onto that for bar trivia-night.

TO BE CLEAR: I HAVE NO PROBLEM with Kamala’s personality type as such. But before she dropped out of the primaries, it amazed me that no one else found her fish-out-of-waterness worth remarking on. Surely it’s not problematic to discuss frankly whether any politician as feminine as Kamala can win a presidential election.

The nearest thing to a high-profile criticism of Harris’s personality was delivered unwittingly in The Washington Post. In an Opinion piece titled, “Vogue got too familiar, too fast,” the paper’s former fashion critic, Robin Givhan, blamed Vogue for making Harris look relatable: “The cover did not give Kamala D. Harris due respect. It was overly familiar. It was a cover image that, in effect, called Harris by her first name without invitation.”

Givhan goes on to suggest that the cover reflected solely the preferences of Vogue’s editor and Hollywood-villain Anna Wintour, and that Wintour’s cluelessness exemplified Vogue’s ongoing problems with race. Astonishingly, this all came after Givhan acknowledged, “Harris styled herself. She chose her ensembles.” 

No one inflicts relatability on Kamala, and no one needs an invite to call her by one name. There’s an invitation in every smile and word from her mouth. Whether Americans want such an invitation from their president is a different question, one we’ll be returning to in this series