Crazy for Kamala

Associated Press

I have to admit it: I'm cuckoo for Kamala. Not just because I think she can help Joe Biden win in November, but because she's a woman with a story, a significant one, that reflects an increasingly diverse culture: biracial, educated, formidable, a proud wife and mother (she's the stepmom of her husband's two children), a person whose refreshing candor reflects an accomplished life.

I'm thrilled. Yet it always pains me that, once again, we are reminded how far women have yet to go on a path to the White House. I thought Hillary Clinton had it nailed, but the baggage she carried -- people either hate the Clintons or love them, there doesn't seem to be an in-between -- and the surprising 41 percent of female votes for her opponent, helped do her in. The country was so sure of a Clinton victory on election night that the New York Times had a front page with the headline "Madam President" ready to go to print. It didn't.

Counting Clinton, Harris is only the fourth woman on a major presidential ticket, one being Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate in 2008. But the first was Geraldine Ferraro, half of the 1984 Democratic party ticket that lost in a landslide to Reagan-Bush. Like Palin, and because she was first, Ferraro took an excruciating lashing in the press. But it wasn't only political bias. The lawyer and three-term congresswoman was criticized for personal feelings on abortion that were deemed incompatible with a Catholic church whose history includes protecting pedophiles. As the daughter of Italian parents, her name and her husband's were associated with the Mafia, one of the oldest racist tropes in our history. She was vilified for being a career woman who kept her maiden name professionally  (Clinton got flak for that, too), which Ferraro meant as a tribute to her mother, who raised her children alone after her husband's early death. In one particularly dumb moment, career woman Barbara Walters asked Ferraro if her working life got in the way of time with her children. It would be laughable if not for the fact that working mothers still face that question today.

I was crazy for Ferraro in the same way I am for Harris. For one thing, I was an impressionable 24-year-old then. And we both wore the same Dorothy Hamill haircut. Like Ferraro's mother, mine insisted I get an education, telling me once when I said I wanted to take a year off from college, "Over my dead body." She didn't push me into my journalism career, but she and my father were ever proud of it. My grandmother, who only made it to the eighth grade, was delighted.  

So my mother's reaction to Harris' ascension this week was not surprising. Soon after mentioning that she felt bad about the death of TV's Regis Fillman, she told me she thinks Harris is terrific. She then had me working my unnimble fingers on Google, which she usually does when she wants to know if a famous person around her age is dead or alive: "Where was her mother from? Does she have children? How old is she? ("Almost the same age as your sister!") What does her husband do? 

These were all valid questions that reflect no bias on my mother's part, although she did remark that Harris is very attractive, which she is. But she didn't equate that with the senator's achievements, though as the joke goes about a mother's chicken soup as a remedy for everything but polio: "It couldn't hurt!"         

It remains to be seen how much Harris' gender -- more so than her biracial identity even - will impact her run. In some quarters, it will, and that's a shame. But Harris benefits from the women who suffered  before her, including Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first black  person to seek the nomination for president from one of the two major parties. Already pummeled by years of racial bias, Chisholm nonetheless believed women could achieve anything they wanted, saying once, "If the men don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair." 

Ferraro also paved the way for Harris, though she was bloodied for it like a boxer in a 15-round fight. She once faced more than 250 members of the media during a press conference to bolster the Mondale-Ferraro ticket and address some of the charges against her. After yet another unfair question, she answered, "You know better than that." 

But do we?  

One thing I can be sure of is that my 85-year-old mother will be happy if Harris becomes only the first woman to ascend to the White House in her lifetime, making it more likely I'll see one in my lifetime,  too.

Bring on the folding chairs.