How Kamala Harris Became a Contender

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, ‘We’re going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country.’ ”

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the political scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:16.0	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:19.0	Since July 21st, when Joe Biden stepped aside from the presidential race, all I Since
0:25.0	since july, when Joe Biden stepped aside from the presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice President
0:26.4	Kamala Harris, and no one, I think, has been watching more keenly than the New Yorkers
0:31.4	Evan Osnose.
0:33.0	Evan is a longtime staff writer in Washington,
0:35.7	and over the past months,
0:37.4	he's been speaking with dozens of people close to Harris
0:40.5	from her childhood, her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning round
0:45.8	campaign for the presidency.
0:47.2	Evan, I think we have to kind of get this out of the way the last time you were on the show we talked about the Democratic candidate for president Joe Biden.
0:59.6	Yeah that was back in March and you said he didn't do anything that made me think that his mind is any different than it
1:05.7	wasn't 20-20, but there's this contrast, this juxtaposition between how he looks and
1:12.2	the things that he says that I think is in some ways what every voter is trying
1:16.4	to navigate through and make sense of.
1:19.0	So how did you make sense of it and at what point did you change your assessment of him? I think like a lot of people I was
1:28.1	pretty shocked by what I saw in the debate. It was not the case that in the interview he was trailing off or staring into space
1:37.4	the way he was when he got on TV in June. I remember his aides who had pushed to have him do this debate because they thought
1:48.6	oh well if if the world sees this guy answering questions beside Donald Trump. This will put to rest this
1:55.2	feeling that he is unfit. And of course that's not what happened. What happened was he got on that
2:00.3	stage and looked utterly unable to do the job.
	...

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