Kamala Harris and Barack Obama: the parallels and the differences
Commenter “TommyJay” writes:
I must say, Kamala is the emptiest of empty suits. She must be one of the most synthetically, media manufactured politicians ever.
I watched a documentary recently about Lou Pearlman and the rise of the boy bands like NSync and the Back Street Boys. Lots of grist in there, and yes those bands were manufactured after a fashion, but they actually worked pretty hard to bring their musical talents up to some decent level.
Has Kamala ever worked hard at her vocations? I am doubtful.
From the mid-twentieth century on, it’s been unusual for anyone to have arrived at the position of nominee of a major US party for the presidency without having been tested in the crucible of the primaries and had success. But one of Harris’ unique qualities is that the one time she entered the presidential primaries – 2020 – she failed miserably and quit very early. And yet here she is in 2024, the Democrats’ presidential nominee.
That’s one obvious difference between Harris and Obama right there: he won the primary battle in 2008. And although the superdelegates were part of his hard-fought victory over Hillary Clinton, he nevertheless had broad appeal among rank-and-file Democrats. Biden comes closer to having been selected-not-elected as the nominee in 2020, because strong competition from far-left Sanders caused Democrat powers-that-be to convince everyone other than Biden to drop out. But at least there was a contest, however rigged, and Biden won primary votes. Kamala never did, not in 2020 and not in 2024.
However, it struck me quite some time ago that Harris has some remarkable similarities to Obama although there are some strong differences. Here are a few of the similarities:
– Both are of mixed race, although Obama is one-half black and one-half white and Harris is about a quarter black, a quarter white, and half Indian.
– Their black parents are their fathers.
– Their fathers are not African-American, but African (Obama) and Jamaican (Harris).
– Each had two – count em, two – parents with PhDs. [see * below]
– Their mothers were researchers.
– Both mothers died of cancer, although Harris’ mother was 70 and Obama’s mother was 52.
– Their fathers were both professors of economics, described as socialists.
– Both were (and for Harris, are) estranged from their fathers. Obama’s estrangement was more complete, since his father had almost nothing to do with Obama as he was growing up.
– Both lived a large chunk of their formative years in foreign countries – Obama in Indonesia and Harris in Montreal, Canada.
– Both have foreign first names.
– Both had parents who divorced.
– Both had parents who met at a university.
– Both are connected closely to Joe Biden. Biden was Obama’s VP and Harris was Biden’s VP.
– Both were raised in parts of the US that are deep blue.
– Both are lawyers.
As for differences, Obama married at a much younger age – 31 – and had biological children, whereas Harris didn’t marry until she was nearly 50 years old and she has stepchildren. Obama’s political career had been legislative both at the state (Illinois) and federal level up until he became president, whereas Harris worked as a lawyer, DA in San Francisco, and AG in California, before she too became a senator. Obama is tall with a deep sonorous voice whereas Harris is relatively short and her voice is somewhat grating. They project very different personalities: Obama calm and measured and Harris more excited and emotional with a strange laugh.
But one of the most dramatic and least talked-about similarities between the two is the role that mentors played in their political rise. Each got their start in large cities long dominated by Democrat machine politics. And each became (for different reasons) the protege of a powerful black politician at the state level, an experienced older man who promoted them and was responsible for their early prominence at the state level. For Kamala Harris it was Willie Brown, a married man separated from his wife, thirty years her senior, with whom she had an affair in the 1990s that ended in 1995. Brown was speaker of the California State Assembly during that time, a position of power, and later became the mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004. And when I say “position of power,” I mean it:
Brown’s long service in the Assembly and political connections, his strong negotiation skills, and the Assembly’s tenure system for leadership appointments combined to give Brown nearly complete control over the California legislature by the time he became Assembly Speaker. According to The New York Times, Brown became one of the country’s most powerful state legislators. He nicknamed himself the “Ayatollah of the Assembly”.
Brown was also a great fundraiser and had a huge network of deep-pocketed donors on which to draw. More:
Brown had a reputation in the Assembly for his ability to manage people. Republican State Senator Ken Maddy of Fresno noted Brown’s ability to “size up the situation and create, sometimes on the spot, a winning strategy.” According to Hobson, “He was a brilliant daycare operator. … He knew exactly how to hold the hand of his Assembly members. He dominated California politics like no other politician in the history of the state”.
Obviously an extremely talented and savvy politician. Brown was directly responsible for Harris’ ascendance in the political sphere:
Brown’s romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the mid 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris’s 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: “Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work”.
But Brown’s influence
As mayor of San Francisco in 2003, Brown was supportive of her district attorney campaign although they were no longer dating. Critics—including her opponents—were bemoaning cronyism at City Hall. …
At the start of the race [for San Francisco DA], Harris did not appear likely to advance to the runoff. In her own campaign’s initial polls, she stood at about 6 percentage points. “She was unknown by a vast majority of voters,” said Mark Leno, a friend of Harris who was then a state assemblyman organizing her campaign. …
[One of her opponents] had thought being a good prosecutor was enough to win the election, calling himself “totally naive” and adding, “Kamala, she had connections to the mayor, which gave her access to a lot of money people up in Pacific Heights.” …
Harris raised money aggressively. She raked in more than $100,000 before December 2002. By the end of the campaign, she had raised and spent money so prolifically that the city’s ethics commission found Harris violated a pledge not to exceed a voluntary $211,000 spending cap. The Harris campaign apologized and said it was a misunderstanding, according to the Chronicle. She used the money to bombard voters with mail touting her progressive credentials.
Yet by Labor Day of 2003, Harris was still polling between 6 percentage points and 8 points.
Then the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her. I have no idea whether Brown was involved with that, but he was the mayor at the time and I have a strong suspicion he had a large hand in the endorsement. Harris then moved up in the polls but remained behind. Later, that same opponent sent mailers accusing her of only getting where she was because of her affair with Brown, and that apparently backfired and she ended up winning the 3-way election. Her later runs for California AG and then senator were helped along by many endorsements from powerful Democrats in the state, where winning the Democratic primary is generally equal to winning the election.
You know the rest – how poorly she did in 2020 on the national stage. And yet, in the end, powerful Democrats chose her as vice president in 2020 despite her failure in the primaries. I can’t think of another totally failed candidate chosen for the post because of identity politics. And that is part of her problem today – her lack of experience in fielding difficult questions and her lack of appeal to a national audience.
Obama’s Illinois mentor was named Emil Jones, and just like Willie Brown he was black and a long-term politician at the state level. Jones became President of the Illinois Senate from 2003 to 2009. Thirty years separated Harris and Brown’s ages, and Obama and Jones were twenty-five years apart. No, he and Obama were not romantically involved, but early on Jones recognized Obama’s potential and used his influence to help him.
I’ve written at length (2015) about the assistance Jones gave to the ambitious Obama when the latter was in the state senate. Here’s an excerpt [unfortunately, some of the links there are now dead]:
If you want to learn a lot about the sort of operator Obama was back in his early political days in Chicago, you’d do well to read this, which also goes into the way that Emil Jones greased the skids for Obama by handing him legislation on a silver platter, and how angry Obama got when anyone suggested he hadn’t accomplished this on his own. And that article I just linked was written by an Obama admirer; I can only imagine what detractors would have written. This information was in the public domain prior to the 2008 election; wonder why so few people have heard of this stuff?
Or how about this, which was also written before the 2008 election and, although something of a puff piece, still contains some clues to Obama’s rise and how he engineered it with Jones’ help and his own cold-blooded ambition. After the Democrats finally won control of the Illinois state legislature after years in the wilderness of Republican domination, Obama went to the newly-minted Majority Leader Emil Jones (whom he had carefully cultivated even before he was elevated to that position) with a proposition:
“…[Obama] went to see Jones with a big idea. By that point the two men had known each other for the better part of 20 years, but theirs had not always been an easy relationship. They had first met in the mid-1980s, when Obama, as a community organizer on the far South Side, had seen Jones as an ‘old ward heeler’…
“Jones, a chain-smoking, gravelly voiced, unvarnished throwback to the era of the old Daley machine, was wary of Obama, a freshly minted agitator from Columbia University. Obama and other community activists ‘were in-your-face types” [said Jones to the reporter]. “I happened to see them out there one day. And I told them, I said, ‘You don’t gotta be outside. Come on in the office.’
“A friendship was born. A decade later, after returning to Chicago with a law degree and the mantle of first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama won his own state-senate seat, taking the place of an incumbent [Alice Palmer] who had decided to run for Congress, placed a distant third in the Democratic primary, changed her mind, and – with Jones’s help – tried to run for her old seat after all. Obama’s team, in a move as bold as it was adroit, challenged her nominating petitions and managed to keep her name off the ballot.”
Let’s pause for a minute to understand what was happening. Obama had met Jones before he even went to Harvard Law, and at first Jones and Obama were mutually distrustful but then struck up a friendship. But during Obama’s first run for office years later, Obama pulled a really nasty but very effective power move on Jones’ favored candidate, Alice Palmer, and won. This (as I read in more detail in another article that unfortunately I can’t seem to locate right now) really impressed Jones and made him realize that Obama was no soft law school prof but one of the more hardened and ruthless pols around, even though he was just beginning in the trade. The Alice Palmer gambit was what I call Obama’s Godfather move, and Jones understood that he was in the presence of a man with certain gifts: the ability to look like a nice guy and yet who had no reluctance to mow people down, even former friends and mentors, when he needed to do so to get ahead.
To continue:
“Obama arrived in Springfield and told Jones, then the minority leader, that he wanted to ‘work hard.’ He promptly became Jones’s point person on a number of tricky issues, including ethics reform. Now, with Jones elevated to the senate presidency, Obama was approaching him with a cold-eyed proposal.
“‘After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later,’ Jones recalled, relishing the tale. ‘And he said to me, he said, You’re the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er.’ Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: ‘And I told Barack, You think I got a lot of pow-er now?, and he said, Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er. And I said, What kind of pow-er do I have? He said, You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!’ Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. ‘I said to Barack, I said, That sounds good! I said, I haven’t even thought of that. I said, Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?, and he said, Yeah. Me.’
“Jones let the words hang for a moment, and then went on. ‘The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, Let me think about this.’ Obama knew that Jones’s support could single-handedly freeze the discretion of other powerful politicians in the state, and put endorsements of possible rivals on ice. ‘We met a little later that day, and I said, That sounds good. Let’s go for it.'”
Jones gave legislation to Obama that other people had worked on for years, and that (as this article I linked previously made clear) frustrated and angered a lot of legislators who had done the actual work on the bills and had to watch as Obama got the glory instead of them. Obama, the freshman, knew exactly how to work Jones, who’d been doing this for years, and Jones knew a fellow master manipulator of power when he saw one.
Todd Purdum, author of this Vanity Fair piece, is an admirer of Obama. But he noticed something important about how Obama got to the top, and how his ability to hide his ruthless nature (Purdum calls it Obama’s “toughness”) behind a mild facade helped him get there and get there fast:
“The rare talent is to wear ambition lightly, and to allow toughness to be taken for granted. Obama’s life and career suggest he has that talent – or at least that gift. He long ago decided that he had a chance to make something extraordinary of himself. With a calculating consistency that may not always have been apparent to others, or even sometimes to himself, he set out to do just that. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a schoolteacher in Hawaii, says simply, ‘He’s a very cool customer.'”
Obama didn’t appear to the public to be ruthless, but I believe he was and still is. He certainly was part of the coup against Joe Biden. And Kamala? How ruthless is she? She is so fake in her presentation that it’s hard to tell much about the real Kamala Harris, including how much of a role she might have played in Biden’s ouster.
* [NOTE: Commenter “Gringo” points out that according to Wiki, Obama’s father “was forced to leave his PhD program at Harvard University in May 1964 because of administrators’ concerns over his finances and personal life, including uncertainty over the number of wives he had, but he received an M.A. in economics from Harvard in 1965.”]
“,,,she ended up winning the 3-way election.”
Betcha that’s not the only 3-way she’s been involved in.
I like the “similarities” list. Very thorough!
Overall, it’s a fascinating post. When one steps back and thinks about scope and ramifications of this, it’s really quite astonishing and my thought is, “How the hell did we get here?”
Kamala thinks she is a good BS’er and isn’t. (repeating myself) But Obama IS a very good BS’er. His most amazing quality to my eye, is that “cool.” How on earth can a person be on the nation stage in front of millions and be that casual, cool, and cocky? It used to think he was on drugs, maybe mild ones. (I recently had surgery and discovered Valium in the hospital. Is that great stuff or what?!!) But I now suspect that it is his true nature.
With Obama, after having watched several hundred of his appearances, I noticed that his extemporaneous speeches can be subdivided into two categories.
One type is the very good “word salad.” He’s not really saying anything, but it sounds exactly like a real discussion or thought process. Politically, those are best because few people really believe the socialist bullshit that is his true thoughts on these matters.
The second type is generally longer in word count, and I suspect addresses a topic he feels more passionate about. He actually reveals some of his true thoughts, which is politically a mistake for him.
The well known example of that would be (April 2008):
And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
I think other similarities and the core of their success was the lack of political baggage. Neither had long political careers where they solidified their positions by votes in the legislature.
Both fit the Hollywood mold– young, charismatic, able to speak well (aside from Kamala’s laugh, which can be passed off as a charming affectation).
Both are committed leftists– committed to the total transformation of the country to some progressive ideal.
Both rose quickly to national prominence after somewhat short legislative careers.
In other words, both are the ideal Manchurian candidates to represent the Democrat machine.
As much as I dislike Obama I’ll admit he’s quite competent, politically savy, and (for the most part) able respond to questions in a coherent way. He has charm and cunning. He maintains a cool demeanor of confidence and intelligence. He is always trained and prepared for any public speaking he does. In short he’s a very high level, practiced politician.
And those are things I certainly can’t say of Harris. She has none of those qualites. It’s clear to me that she is a person who has been elevated far beyond her abilities purely because she checked certain boxes and had a measure of good fortune. And she may well lose this election for the Democrats because of her lacking these qualities. Perhaps the very ideas that the Left has championed, the concept of elevating a person not due to their merrits, but because they happed to be a certain skin color or gender, may be the thing that undoes them.
Those old Jewish Proverb writers are laughing their asses off!!
Broken families, “Daddy” issues, youths spend marinating in Marxist ideology. What could possibly go wrong??
physicsguy, Ha! So true.
@neo:No, he and Obama were not romantically involved,
Lol, I wonder how you’d know that. I can see there not being publicly available evidence of their romantic involvement, though.
But who knows, perhaps in your long and eventful life you were always present whenever those two met and can say of your own knowledge that they were not romantically involved, and so you can make this categorical statement of something not having happened. 🙂
ok after 16 years I don’t think he was all that, yes they share a heart that blood cold, a calculated indifference, combined with an artificially induced outrage ‘if trayvon were my boy’ one might say they genuinely attempted to run a candidate in so far, that the mug on the other side, had decided to throw the match, Romney pretended a little more, but we have seen how high dudgeon, he can get when he pretends, at Trump, perhaps in order to satisfy the likes of cofer black, the grey eminence of the black ops boys
McCain has become like jacob marley to wax dickensian, the ghost that wouldn’t leave, who enabled obamas ‘dark designs’ even after he had returned to
martha’s vineyard,
did anyone really run the country under obama, there were persons who had their marching orders like holder some others like hillary pursued parallel agendas but their result was terrible to the body politic
TommyJay,
Obama is glib and “cool,” as you write, but there are plenty as talented as he. He also gets a pass due to his skin tone. He himself has written about learning that many whites would go easier on him, have lower expectations; due to their personal issues with race. And he learned to use that to his advantage. If George W. Bush said the exact words Obama says the press would excoriate him for being vacuous because much of what Obama says is vacuous.
None of this is an indictment. A skilled politician will use what is at his or her disposal and Barack Obama is a skilled politician.
No. Barack Sr. had only a Master’s degree. Wiki_Barack Obama, Sr.
Was Barack Sr. capable of getting a Ph.D.? No doubt. He published some papers while working as an economist in Kenya. Those might be counted as Ph.D. equivalents, as the doctorate is or was supposed to the the student’s first professional research.
Barack Sr. was Ph.D. capable or equivalent, but he never got that piece of paper.
As a politician Kamala is a laugh, or better said, a cackle. 🙂 She is not comfortable doing the politician gig. Say what you will about President Obama’s politics or his teleprompter, he is a very astute politician. In fact, you might say that was his calling from an early age. From Dreams from My Father, about Obama’s Occidental College days:
The young Obama was very concerned about how he was perceived, and modified his speech and actions to fit how he wanted to be perceived. You might call him a phony. You might also call him a natural-born politician. A politician has to be concerned about how he presents himself, to appeal to the highest number of people. Like young Obama.
I previously wrote that Kamala is not comfortable doing the politician gig. I am reminded of another politician who was not comfortable doing the politician gig: Richard Nixon. Nixon was an introvert, which is not a good fit for what a politician does. His discomfort came through time and again. I am reminded of Mad Magazine’s take on Nixon: “In my sincerest insincerity.” 🙂
But in Kamala’s case, I don’t think she is an introvert. As I believe Neo once wrote, it is more a discomfort at the hoops that a politician has to jump through.
Income-wise an American child of American professors today would generally be middle-class. Socially they might not be, I suppose it depends on where they are and what they are doing. Nationally, tenured and tenure-track professors’ median salaries are comparable to that of plumbers with 4 – 7 years in.
Gringo:
I fixed it, thanks.
very high level, practiced politician.
Maybe a “very high level Sociopath”?
Niketas:
Yes, it’s also a class thing. But in addition, Kamala’s father was a professor of economics at Stanford, which I’m pretty sure pays way above average for a professor. Her mother wasn’t a professor but was a medical researcher with a PhD in pretty high-up research positions.
This is just the most depressing post I’ve ever encountered on this blog.
IrishOtter:
Why depressing? I find Obama’s administration and its lingering aftermath depressing, and I find Harris’ candidacy depressing. But I don’t find their similarities and differences depressing. I’m curious why you do.
Her beauty lies
Between her thighs,
Willie Brown avers.
Her other places
Have no graces,
The former mayor swears.
Parallels:
Neither Obama nor Harris grew up American black. They were biracial children of privileged births, not from American black parents, and not from a black neighborhood experience.
They were above middle-class. And they sure didn’t work low-class jobs like McDonald’s even as teenagers.
One very important difference: Kamala is obviously lacking in self-confidence; enough so that Ace’s theory, that she gets tight before appearing in public, is at least public. Barack is the opposite; he is obscenely overconfident. I believe he is about as close to being a true solipsist as it is possible to be.
Neither could construct a plausible case for a position they oppose, not if their lives depended on it. They cannot rise above straw men.
Both TommyJay and Rufus are correct in seeing that Obama is just as addicted to vacuous word salad as Harris is. He’s just better at doing it in a way that fools many people. They hear the voice, and look at the poise, and don’t bother with the meanings of the words. Or, really, lack of meaning.
neo on October 22, 2024 at 3:18 pm said:
IrishOtter:
Why depressing? I find Obama’s administration and its lingering aftermath depressing, and I find Harris’ candidacy depressing. But I don’t find their similarities and differences depressing. I’m curious why you do.
_______
Surely the fact that they’ve taken in so many is depressing.
I know IrishOtter wasn’t trying to be funny, but I had to laugh. And neo’s response is very rational, but … what?
I think neo does an excellent job here of helping us see the forest and not just some trees. If one takes politics seriously, and one should, this topic is depressing. However, (this is more of a confession and not a boast) I find it all too ridiculous and mostly choose to turn away and occupy myself otherwise. Or maybe it is my self-preservation impulse. I’m big on that these days.
_______
OK, my slow brain can now hang a word on the aforementioned “forest.” This political disfunction is “systemic.” It took the US almost 250 years for the Machiavellians to figure out how to thoroughly hack our system, and here we are.
neo:
That there should be such people as Obama and Harris and that they should become so consequential in the life of our republic — I find that depressing. Obama’s rise to power and the means and people who facilitated his ascent: also depressing. I am, or was, a Chicago-lander, born and raised, bread and buttered. I used to love the city. Loved it passionately. But Obama and the Democrat machine that propelled his rise to power killed it. I saw Obama’s rise from the beginning and I have to say that I had him pegged from the get-go as a fraud and a bullshitter and a fundamentally awful person. Watching his rise to the pinnacle of political success and not being able to stop him, and watching as the people with the wherewithal to stop him support him instead: that’s depressing.
This post reminded me of all that. Made me feel it in my gut. Made me depressed.
I think of the climactic episode in “The Quiet Man,” the long awaited fight between Will Danaher and Sean Thronton. Taking a break from the fisticuffs, they have a pint together in the nearby pub. They fall to reminiscing about the past. Danaher gloomily observes, “The old days are gone forever.” And sniffs back a tear.
It’s a very funny moment, they was John Ford constructed it. But the sentiment is not funny to me now. The old Chicago is gone forever, and it’s never coming back. Because of people like Obama.
*sniff*
Neither Obama nor Harris grew up American black. They were biracial children of privileged births, not from American black parents, and not from a black neighborhood experience.
==
Obama was not someone of privileged birth. The complex of forces in our political system have elected to allow people to claim American citizenship who should not be permitted that, and that is the closest thing to a privilege the young Harris received. Her parents were here on student visas.
==
were above middle-class.
==
Harris parents were college teachers. Obama’s stepfather was a cartographer for Indonesia’s state oil company. His mother worked for the non-profit blob. His grandfather sold furniture and insurance. His grandmother was the manager of escrow accounts for the Bank of Hawaii. Neither Harris nor Obama were ‘above middle class’.
==
And they sure didn’t work low-class jobs like McDonald’s even as teenagers.
==
In the world I grew up in, probably not Mickey D’s. Grocery store employee and restaurant employee (busboy, waitress, cashier), yes.
IrishOtter:
Thanks for the explanation.
I guess I factored in all that stuff a long time ago, so this post at least didn’t add to it for me.
Obama has been EXTREMELY ruthless from the start of his political career. He stabbed Alice Palmer in the back. (And she had been trying to mentor him.) He somehow managed to get sealed divorce records leaked to push Jack Ryan out of the race. He cheated from the begining of his political career.
neo:
It comes back at me in waves. Not often, but when it does. . . .
Today it was a very big wave.
Someone+Else:
The skids were greased for him from the very start. Even before the start. At the Harvard Law Review he was a do-nothing figurehead. His whole life has been a skate.
It is rather distressing that he climbed up the greasy pole with too much ease it served the interests of many to poison the well of american good will like schwab and soros and jorg gyss and prince talal to cite a few examples on the international front his partnership with malaki lead to the rise of islamic state which he ignored because he was too busy with the victory dance over romney and the tea party at least one skirmish with hamas or hezbollah happened on his watch thanks to al quds brennan
even after he left office he pours copious salt in the wound in the spring of 2020 he fanned the flames when some cities might have been spared