Recasting Kamala Harris gets ugly: ‘Sharp mind’ or ‘dumb as a rock’?

As Kamala Harris swiftly ascended to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket this week, a clear narrative surfaced from her supporters.

“I’ve known Kamala Harris a long time,” wrote Hillary Clinton, the last woman in the role. “This brilliant prosecutor will make the case against convicted felon Donald Trump.”

On the right, Republicans were busy casting Harris in a very different light, with former President Trump — known for giving his rivals crude nicknames — leading the charge.

Trump wrote that Harris is “Dumb as a Rock” and has been an “insignificant” vice president. He also called her “Lyin’ Kamala,” and said she’d shown particular “incompetence” as President Biden’s “appointed ‘Border Czar’” — something she was never actually named.

The dueling narratives in some ways reflect normal American politicking — the tried-and-true tactic of tearing down the opposing candidate. But they also reflect something unique in an unprecedented race between the first woman of color to top a major party ticket, and the first convicted felon to do so.

Harris’ long career as a prosecutor provides Democrats with a perfect contrast to Trump, whose life in recent years has been defined by legal troubles. Harris’ lifetime as a Black and South Asian woman also teed her up for attacks that other American women of color immediately recognized — ones that questioned her basic intelligence and seriousness, despite her rise to the pinnacle of American public life.

“There are going to be some attacks that are going to be blatantly hard for Harris and for the Black women watching her,” said Keneshia Grant, an associate professor of political science at Howard University and author of “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century.”

Grant said we have reached a point in American politics where politicians — and particularly those on the right — are “rewarded for speaking in a manner that is thought to be clear, direct and aggressive to their foes.”

And while some derogatory speech will come out through the coded language of so-called dog whistles — understood by a receptive base but largely missed by others — Trump and other Republicans have already shown their willingness to openly trade on racist and sexist tropes, she said.

“‘Dog whistles’ would suggest that we can’t hear it, but we can hear it very clearly,” Grant said. “We know what’s happening.”

‘A very sharp mind’

People who have worked with Harris and support her candidacy said the Trump-backed idea that she’s “dumb” is absurd — as evidenced by her long career as a prosecutor and successful politician.

“In many ways, she’s the classic lawyer. She’s very methodical and analytical,” said one lawyer and former longtime aide to Harris, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about her.

A aide says Harris thought to ask Brett M. Kavanaugh at his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearing whether any laws let the government make decisions about men’s bodies. He was stumped — which made her point.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

The aide shared an anecdote: In the lead-up to Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, then-Sen. Harris — a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — held a mock hearing with aides to prepare to question the conservative judge.

At one point, the team was “trying to figure out how to best raise the point of how unequal it was — on a woman’s right to choose — to have a law that governed what a woman could do with her body,” the aide said. They bounced around ideas until Harris stopped them with a simple question:

“What law is there that forces a man to do something that he doesn’t want to do with his body?”

“None of us could come up with anything,” the aide said — and neither could Kavanaugh, who would fumble his answer at the hearing.

The aide said the exchange perfectly captured how Harris’ “lawyerly, sharp mind” is also a “politically savvy” one.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a former federal prosecutor who rose to national prominence while leading House efforts to impeach Trump in 2020, said the former president’s attack lines about Harris’ intellect show he is actually worried about how smart she is — as evidenced by his attempts to move the next debate from ABC to a friendlier setting with Fox News.

“I have no doubt that Trump is deeply worried about the next debate, and for good reason,” Schiff said. “He should be worried about it.”

While Biden was criticized over the last debate, in part for not calling out the Republican’s mistruths, Harris can use her “razor-sharp mind to make the case against [Trump] during the debate when he lies about this or lies about that,” Schiff said.

“She is very quick on her feet,” he said, and “conducts a hell of a cross-examination.”

Harris has not always leaned into her past as a prosecutor, in part because it has hampered her ability to win the progressive vote. But she has always understood it as a viable message in a head-to-head race against Trump — as indicated by an ad her presidential campaign ran before the 2020 primaries that cast her as “the anti-Trump.”

“I prosecuted sex predators. Trump is one,” Harris said over a clip from the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which he talked about grabbing unsuspecting women “by the pussy.”

Since then, Trump’s woes have only grown. He was found liable in civil court for having sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, and for having artificially inflated his net worth to secure better business deals. He also was convicted of 34 felonies in a New York criminal case involving hush money he paid to an adult film actor to keep her from sharing her account of a sexual encounter with him; he denies it happened.

As Harris’ nomination grew increasingly inevitable this week, Grant said, a friend shared the old Harris ad. The Howard professor said she was immediately struck by how current it felt. Many others made the same observation online — and Harris and her campaign were obviously also aware its message has held up.

On Tuesday, at her first rally since she secured enough delegates on Monday for the Democratic nomination, Harris framed today’s race in the exact same way.

‘These tropes are embedded’

Trump is not the only person who thinks Harris is unqualified to be president.

Steve Cooley, a Republican who was elected district attorney in liberal Los Angeles County three times, lost to Harris in a bitter race for state attorney general in 2010 — and is still not a fan.

Cooley said Harris was a “generally ineffectual” prosecutor at the start of her career in Alameda County; “one of the weaker” lead prosecutors in the state when she was San Francisco district attorney; and an unprincipled state attorney general who “didn’t follow the law” when it didn’t suit her or her political ambitions.

He specifically criticized Harris’ decision as San Francisco D.A. to not seek the death penalty for the man accused of murdering police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004 — a case Cooley also highlighted while running against her for attorney general.

Cooley insinuated that Harris had ridden the coattails of famed San Francisco politician Willie Brown, whom she’d dated in the 1990s while he was speaker of the California Assembly. He also said that she was so ill-informed about prosecutorial rules when she took over the San Francisco D.A.’s office — including those for disclosing past misconduct by police officers taking the stand in criminal cases — that she simply copied his guidelines from L.A.

“As a politician, I have to give her kudos. She seems to be in the right place at the right time, and she works very hard toward advancing her political career,” Cooley said. But as a prosecutor and a leader, he said, she was “not capable of critical thinking.”

Cooley called Harris a “DEI kind of candidate” — a reference to “diversity, equity and inclusion” — suggesting she’d received special treatment as a woman of color, which enabled her success. He said there were “probably millions and millions of people out there in the United States more qualified to be president.”

With such claims widespread on the right, Republican leaders admonished fellow conservatives, including in Congress, on Tuesday for using such lines of attack on Harris.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican who represented the Bakersfield area, said on “Meet the Press Now” that his former colleagues’ use of the initials “DEI” was “stupid and dumb.”

“I disagree with DEI, but she is the vice president of the United States; she is the former U.S. senator. These congressmen saying it — they are wrong in their own instincts,” McCarthy said.

At a recent campaign rally, Ohio’s Sen. J.D. Vance — Trump’s pick for his vice presidential running mate — clearly struck a chord with the crowd when he suggested Harris had little to show for her time as vice president.

“What the hell have you done,” he said of Harris, “other than collect a check?”

Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, said Vance’s remark was an unmistakable appeal to stereotypes about women and women of color.

“That clearly is invoking a ‘welfare queen’ trope,” Gillespie said, “and it’s ridiculous.”

But Vance’s remark and an array of other right-wing criticisms being aimed at Harris — that she is unserious given the way she laughs or “cackles,” or that she is incompetent despite her many advancements in competitive fields, or that she is somehow taking handouts or coasting on the diversity she represents — are no surprise, Gillespie said.

“These tropes are embedded in American life and culture — we’ve been affected by them; we’ve internalized some of them,” she said. Trump’s repeated use of such criticism has created a “permission structure” for others to do the same, she said.

Gillespie said such claims “are the land mines that Harris is going to have to navigate” if she wants to win. And with the vice president topping the Democratic ticket, she said, it won’t be enough for her to take a first lady route like Michelle Obama, turning the other cheek and saying, “When they go low, we go high.”

Harris and her surrogates will have to find a way to respond “in a constructive manner” that makes it clear such attacks on her are loaded yet groundless, but that also rallies her base to her side.

Howard University‘s Grant said Harris had already benefited from Black women rushing to get behind her, in part to ensure she wouldn’t be sidestepped for the nomination by her own party based on some of the same claims now coming from the right.

“For me, and I suppose for other Black women, it was hard to watch this public conversation about who should be the Democratic nominee and have her be mentioned like third or fourth,” Grant said. “We know firsthand what it means to be in the trenches working hard, doing excellent work, only to be passed over when it comes time to appoint the person who is going to be the public face of the work.”

Now that the Democrats have gotten behind Harris, Grant said, there is a clear path forward. Still, women of color know that Harris will be held to a higher standard than Trump, she said — expected to walk a perfect line between assertive and calm, and respond to virulent attacks with “punchy but light” retorts.

“She has to appear like the Kamala who we saw asking questions of Brett Kavanaugh,” Grant said of Harris’ task ahead. “Thoughtful, smart, thorough, direct — but not too much of any of those things.”

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.