Kamala Harris has spent much more of her life as a prosecutor than as a senator or vice president, and that is how she is going to run against Donald Trump.
In sessions that were underway at the Naval Observatory before President Biden’s disastrous debate, Harris and her inner circle had landed on the plan to look past whoever Trump picked as his running mate and focus almost exclusively on the former president.
The vice president had expected that to be part of her role making the case for Biden. It became clearer and clearer over the last month that she was likely going to be making the case for herself.
Now that Biden has stepped aside, and with even more of her potential opponents planning to endorse her on Monday, over a dozen advisers and close allies think her candidacy will lean heavily on her background as a district attorney, attorney general and cross examiner in Senate hearings.
It is simple, they say: prosecutor versus felon, reports CNN.
The strategy will be a return to the “prosecutor for president” framework of her 2020 presidential campaign, which included her slogan taken from her days standing up in court as a young assistant district attorney: “Kamala Harris, for the people.”
Advisers believe that this is a way not just to raise up her own life story, but to make her come across as fighting for Americans while Trump is trying to serve himself. It’s a strategy to play up attributes like strength, intelligence and toughness that are part of being a prosecutor but can also be of a commander in chief.
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“As a former prosecutor, Vice President Harris has a lot of experience holding convicted felons accountable,” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a former primary opponent in the 2020 Democratic race who quickly endorsed Harris after the news of Biden’s decision broke. “She was fighting on behalf of abused women. She was in the trenches against giant banks. She was out in the middle of multiple fights every day as a prosecutor and then attorney general in California.”
Warren noted that she first met Harris before either got to the Senate, when she was then setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the then-California attorney general was taking on big banks over the mortgage crisis.
Harris, 59, left the U.S. Senate seat she had held since 2017 to join the White House. Prior to that, Harris served as California’s attorney general, and San Francisco District Attorney. Republicans not only see an opportunity to attack Harris’ record as vice president, but also dating as far back to her time in San Francisco, reports McClatchy DC.
Biden tapped Harris in March 2021 to lead an effort to ease the “root causes” of migration from Central America — a national strategy that would improve economic and safety conditions and encourage potential migrants to remain in three Central American countries: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
That effort has been mocked by Republicans who dubbed her the “border czar,” even though immigration analysts contend her work is not really about the southern border. “Immigration was not her issue” before becoming vice president, said Dan Morain, a California journalist and author of the biography “Kamala’s Way.”
“She had been to the border. She had talked about transnational gangs,” Morain said. “This was an issue that she talked about as California attorney general, but it wasn’t one of her go-to issues.”
Before Harris became District Attorney of San Francisco, she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. She continued prosecuting domestic violence perpetrators, child abusers and sex traffickers as chief of the Division on Children and Families at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office.
Throughout her career, Harris promoted herself as a tough-on-crime attorney. At the 2016 Democratic convention, she told a New York delegation she was California’s “top cop,” a moniker that many in the state’s communities of color criticized. When she became a U.S. senator in 2017, Harris became a leading voice in a bid to reform the nation’s criminal justice system, notably after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
The White House said Harris spent her career trying to reduce recidivism, help people rebuild after prison and improve children’s civil rights in the juvenile justice system.
Harris’ 2019 presidential campaign platform included seeking a federal moratorium on the death penalty, which she has long opposed. She was embroiled in controversy as a San Francisco prosecutor when she would not seek the death penalty against a suspect accused of killing a police officer. When she ran for attorney general in 2010, many in the law enforcement area opposed her.
Harris opposed a 2010 California ballot initiative to legalize pot. In . 2019, she had a different view. “It is past time to end the failed war on drugs, and it begins with legalizing marijuana,” she said
The Biden administration started the federal process of rescheduling weed from the most tightly regulated Schedule I to less regulated Schedule III in May. At a White House event in March, Harris reiterated a position she’s held recently: “Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.”