Kamala Harris Is (Gasp!) Cosmopolitan

Just don't tell anyone.

Official White House Photo by Polly Irungu

You’re probably familiar with the cliched college essay about the week the applicant spent in Central America on a service trip — “I thought I was helping them, but in the end, they helped me.” High-school students know that the admissions office will look favorably on any way you can show you’re a well-rounded person with a variety of experiences, including those that take you away from familiar surroundings. If you actually lived and studied abroad for a significant length of time — making you demonstrably cosmopolitan at 18 — elite schools will consider you an attractive applicant. 

But if you’re running for president? It might be an exaggeration to say voters like their candidates provincial and narrow-minded, but not much of one. 

How many Americans know that Kamala Harris spent five years, up through the end of high school, living in Montreal? If I had to guess I’d say 3 or 4 percent, at best. Which is too bad, not only because it’s an interesting part of her biography that in a different world she could use to make herself more appealing, but because the fact that she never, ever mentions it is probably the wisest political decision. Harris is indeed cosmopolitan — but if the voters knew that, they might not like it. 

Last weekend, both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal published articles about the time Harris spent in Montreal. Her family moved because her mother got a research job at Jewish General Hospital, and Harris attended Westmount High School, in a wealthy Anglo neighborhood (though that wasn’t where they lived). The Post’s story is more deeply reported and interesting; it describes how Harris was there at a time of intense political conflict between Francophones and Anglophones in Quebec, around the time language laws meant to sustain French and suppress the use of English were passed:

In May 1980, when Harris was in 10th grade, the province prepared to vote on whether Quebec should gain political sovereignty — giving it the right to enact its own laws — while retaining economic ties to Canada. The city was plastered with posters that said “Oui” or “Non,” with the vast majority of those in Westmount opposing the measure.

Derek Leebosh, a Westmount classmate, said the political wars would have played out before Harris.

“All of a sudden she was a minority within a minority within a minority,” Leebosh said. “You’re a Black minority within the English. The English is a minority community within Francophone Quebec, which is a minority in Anglophone North America. And during this period, language laws are being passed. It’s very emotional; there’s lots of demonstrations. That’s all going on in the background.”

I’m particularly interested in this because I was born in Montreal and still have lots of family there (like Ted Cruz, I’m Canadian by birth but I’ve lived in the US since I was a small child). But we all could benefit from hearing what Harris thinks of the time she spent there. What sort of perspective did it give her on social and political conflict, and how we can find connection with people who differ from us? She might turn it into a banal politician’s story (“I realized that deep down we all have the same hopes and dreams…”), but still, I’d like to know what she’d say about it. 

Of course, Harris’s time in another country makes her more appealing to coastal elites like me. But just imagine if the average voter thought it was a good thing that a potential president had lived in a different country (even one that is as culturally close to our own as Canada is) and, among other things, learned how people elsewhere think about America. 

That alone is valuable, since the decisions we make as the closest thing there is to a global hegemon echo across the world, often with profound and even dangerous consequences for us. What does Harris think about how America is viewed in other countries? I can’t say I know.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen again and again that the median voter seems to want their presidents to be as parochial as possible. In 2004, Republicans delighted in saying that John Kerry “looks French,” which was completely meaningless but associated him with a nation they vilified (because France thought invading Iraq was a bad idea; just imagine). Eight years later, Mitt Romney acted embarrassed that like Kerry he too spoke French; Mitt picked up the language on his Mormon mission. 

And of course, there’s Barack Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia after his mother married her second husband, who was Indonesian. Interestingly enough, despite how hard Republicans worked to convince voters that Obama was foreign, in 2008 he never tried to hide the fact that he spent a few childhood years abroad. It may have had to do with the political context at the time, when there was ample discussion of the way George W. Bush had made the United States an international pariah. Obama not only promised to restore our relationships with foreign countries, he even held what was essentially a campaign rally in Berlin in the summer of 2008, speaking to a rapturous crowd of 200,000. 

Kamala Harris will not be holding any rallies in other countries. Not even in Canada.

It’s all, and always, about identity

Some years ago I wrote that what we want in our politicians is for them to be just like us, only better. They should share our experiences and beliefs and biases, but they should also be a little smarter and more accomplished, have more integrity than we do, be more articulate and informed than we are, and just generally be the kind of person we’d like to be. 

Obama was certainly that for liberals, and his cosmopolitan-ness was a key part of it. Donald Trump offered his supporters something different: While they view his lifestyle as aspirational in its vulgar excess (it’s how many people imagine they’d live if they won the lottery, complete with a gold-plated toilet to crap in), he also presents himself as worse than them in important ways. 

He’s more venal, more corrupt, more petty and cruel and narcissistic than they are; if most people acted like he did they’d never stop getting punched in the face. They’d get fired from their jobs, rejected by their families, and probably arrested. People find Trump appealing for the same reason mafia gangsters are appealing: They can watch him transgress in all the ways they secretly (or not so secretly) would love to, and get away with it. For a certain kind of asshole, it’s thrilling.  

How does Harris want the average voter to understand her identity, and connect to it? Whatever you want to put on the list of characteristics and signifiers she has emphasized — middle-class kid, Californian, prosecutor, HBCU grad, fun stepmom — “cosmopolitan” is definitely not on that list. Which says more about the electorate than it does about her.