The Opinions - Kamala Harris Wrote Two Books. They Paint Different Pictures.

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

Kamala Harris has made her time as a prosecutor central to her presidential pitch. In this audio essay, Carlos Lozada, a Times Opinion columnist and host of “Matter of Opinion,” examines Harris’s two memoirs, reflects on how her criminal justice message has changed and explores what that may reveal about her candidacy. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. Last week, the Democratic Convention reminded us, as if we could forget, that Kamala Harris used to be a prosecutor. As a prosecutor, Kamala stood up for children who had been victims of sexual abuse. She went on to work for the people fighting to hold lawbreakers accountable. And it's a standard part of her stump speech, going over her. prosecutorial past and using that to attack Donald Trump. I took on perpetrators of all kinds.

Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type. Kamala Harris may know Donald Trump's type, But when it comes to her career as a prosecutor, she seems less certain of her own type. I'm Carlos Lozada, a columnist for New York Times Opinion, and co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. I'm also a recovering book critic.

Before I joined the Times, I spent eight years reviewing books on politics, policy, history, and biography at the Washington Post. So when I'm trying to understand something or someone, I instinctively turn to their own words. Harris has written two memoirs. The first is called Smart on Crime, a career prosecutor's plan to make us safer. It came out in 2009, and you can see how Harris positions herself, not tough on crime or soft on crime,

but smart on crime. The second book came a decade later in 2019. It's called The Truths We Hold, an American Journey. She published it just before launching her first presidential campaign. It's a more conventional memoir. Its policy ideas and political ambitions are woven together with Harris' life story and with generic political inspiration speak. In that first book, she has a fairly positive vision of law enforcement in American life, thinking that it needs reforms, but is basically well-intentioned. The future vice president highlights the noble origins of the prosecutor's role and purpose.

Prosecutors act on the idea that, quote, a crime against any one of us is a crime against all of us. And Harris emphasizes the need for greater police presence in America's streets. Harris writes, quote, if we take a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the streets, mine would shoot up. In Harris's second book, she's a lot more critical of policing. We must speak truth about our mass incarceration crisis that we put more people in prison than any country on earth for no good reason. We must speak truth about police brutality, about racial bias, about the killing of unarmed black men. Now, those views are not necessarily opposed.

Communities can demand greater police presence, even as they decry police brutality. And Harris would hardly be the first politician whose messages shift according to new political circumstances. But Harris' evolution from one book to the next mirrors the evolving politics of the intervening decade. In fact, just the year after her book was published, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow was published,

about the rise of the world. of mass incarceration in American society, there was a whole reawakening, not just on race, but on gender, with Black Lives Matter, with Me Too. So you can see what Kamala Harris looks like before this period of reckoning, and then what she looks like at the tail end of it.

Now, the Venn diagram of 2009 Harris in 2019 Harris definitely contains some healthy overlap. But when Harris revisits some specific details of her work, the differences from one book to the next can be striking. like when she describes her prosecution of two adult men for raping a 14-year-old girl who had fled from a foster home. In 2009, Harris recalls how the girl entered the courtroom, dressed, quote, inappropriately and chewing gum.

Harris writes that the girl was, quote, projecting the attitude that she had contempt for the whole experience. Harris worried that the jurors would be put off, disinclined to trust the girl's story. So Harris writes that she spoke with the girl before she testified, telling her that her attitude made it harder to help her and might make her life worse. Harris tells the story of this case in both books,

except she skips that conversation in the 2019 book. Now, in political memoirs, what authors omit is often as revealing as what they include. That was struck by how remarkably consistent the two accounts were, save for that one moment. By 2019, Harris' conversation with that girl might have been criticized as shaming or blaming the victim. But I wish she had talked about it. In hindsight, does Harris still believe it was a productive exchange?

Maybe a bit of tough advice a young person needed to hear? Or did she come to regret it, as its absence from the second book might imply? Was Harris portraying the prosecutor she wished she'd been? Unburdened by the one she truly was? Harris might dismiss any distinctions between her two books as, quote, false choices, a concept she frequently mentioned. in her writings. Tough on crime or soft on crime? Supporting cops or holding them accountable? These are false choices, she writes. Harris may well be right to resist these dichotomies, but there are limits to denying trade-offs. Politics like prosecution is the art of making hard choices among competing priorities, not just of winning convictions, but of holding them. I feel like the version of Kamala Harris' prosecutor's story that we saw, in the words of her supporters,

the convention tried to maybe create a happy medium between 2009 Kamala Harris and 2019 Kamala Harris. Certainly some of the toughness is back, but leavened with that focus always on safety, dignity, justice. And of course, what she's able to do more effectively now is just draw the contrast with Donald Trump. My career is Kamala Harris for the people, his career, Donald Trump, for himself. And so it was much more of a tool this time around. than it was a mere exposition of her career and proposals for reform. And it seems that prosecutors' past is no longer automatically anathema on the left. Crowds of the DNC were even chanting, lock him up in response to Donald Trump's name.

Has Harris finally found the match between her record and the demands of the moment? Or do her reinventions reflect the chameleon her critics accuser of being? These kinds of judgments can only be made in hindsight, especially if she wins the presidency and must turn campaign positions into real action. So when governance forces false choices into real ones, which Kamala Harris will make them? I got an email this morning from an irate reader that I'll read to you, and I can just tell you what I said to him in response. So here's what a reader said to me. I've seen nitpickery before, but yours reaches a truly different Trumpian low.

It's called hackery. So do you live your? life by the very immutable, pristine principles you require of others, where no one can evolve over time and everything once written must be rewritten precisely the same. But I'm sure you don't live yourself. You are such a fraud and buffoon. So, you know, I can imagine someone reading this and saying, oh, you're just being nitpicky, you know, like obviously people change. And maybe I'm being nitpicky and obviously people do change. But I think when those evolutions and those changes happen in our presidential candidates,

they merit significant scrutiny. And that's what I've tried to do with Kamala Harris' books. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaka, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin,

Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The executive producer of Times Opinion

Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.