David Remnick: Since July 21st, when Joe Biden stepped aside from the presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice President Kamala Harris. No one, I think, has been watching more keenly than the New Yorker's Evan Osnos. Evan is a longtime staff writer in Washington and over the past months he's been speaking with dozens of people close to Harris. From her childhood, her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning round campaign for the presidency. Evan, I think we have to get this out of the way. The last time you were on the show, we talked about the democratic candidate for President, Joe Biden.

Evan Osnos: Yes.

David Remnick: That was back in March. You said, "He didn't do anything that made me think that his mind is any different than it was in 2020." There's this contrast, this juxtaposition, between how he looks and the things that he says that is, in some ways, what every voter is trying to navigate through and make sense of. How did you make sense of it and at what point did you change your assessment of him?

Evan Osnos: I think like a lot of people, I was pretty shocked by what I saw in the debate. It was not the case that in the interview he was trailing off or staring into space. The way he was, when he got on TV in June-- I remember his aides who had pushed to have him do this debate because they thought, "Well, if, if the world sees this guy answering questions beside Donald Trump, this will put to rest this feeling that he is unfit." Of course, that's not what happened. What happened was he got on that stage and looked utterly unable to do the job.

Joe Biden: Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with COVID, excuse me, dealing with everything we have to do with-- Look, if we finally beat Medicare--

Evan Osnos: In a way, there was a rebound effect where people said, "We've suspected all along that he wasn't up for it, and now we know."

David Remnick: Where are you on the question of whether Biden's staff covered that up? Is Kamala Harris in any way responsible for that? It's in part.

Evan Osnos: I think it's a much more human process. Meaning, these were people who worked with this guy every day. They'd see him at times when he was good and they'd see him at times when he was bad. They lost the ability to separate out good faith from bad faith questions about Biden’s health and about his ability to do the job.

David Remnick: Let’s get to Kamala Harris. Right after that debate, the storm of columns and the commentary had checked in, press and company included. There was a very rapid debate over whether it would just be Kamala Harris coasting to the nomination or there would be "A process". Town halls, open conventions. Tell me about your reporting on that process. Was there a process at all?

Evan Osnos: Well, there was this expectation that had taken hold, that there might be some blitz primary, was one of the terms people used. That you might have these sessions where people would get up and the leading candidates, like Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan, or Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania, that they might all contend and then there would be this coalescence of some kind. Maybe it would happen at the convention. Kamala Harris got a call from Joe Biden that morning, and she said to her staff--

David Remnick: This is July 21st?

Evan Osnos: July 21st. She calls in her aides and they made a decision, in effect, that they were not going to wait around for a process to take shape. She's calling around. Her job is to call--

David Remnick: I'm guessing this is not the first time they've had this conversation?

Evan Osnos: Here's the thing. They had originally been putting together for years this super spreadsheet of all the names of the influential people they would need. These are not people that you've heard of, David. These are on the ground delegates, the 4000 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, who are the actual foot soldiers that you need if you're going to try to get a nomination. They thought they would use this in 2028 or something. Then all of a sudden, it's becoming clear over the course of these few weeks in advance, no, they're going to use this now. They tear open this bag of names and begin to call.

She's calling the Obamas and the Clintons and the Pelosi’s, the people at the top. She's also calling the heads of labor unions and so on. What's interesting is that some of those people, I gather, were asking her, "Do you think there should be a process, some town halls or conventions?" Her answer is revealing. Her answer was, "I'm happy to join a process like that- [crosstalk] but I'm not going to wait around." In fact, she was racing to lock down these delegates. As one of her allies said to me, Bakari Sellers, he said, "Look, frankly, we looked at the process of an open convention and we thought that was just a euphemism for skipping over Kamala Harris and we weren't going to do it."

David Remnick: You describe it as a juggernaut, but just a year ago, an NBC poll gave Kamala Harris the lowest approval rating of any Vice President in the history of that poll. There were all kinds of criticisms about her performance on the immigration issue in various interviews that we've all seen. Lester Holt and so on. What accounts for that unbelievable surge and really quick movement in the polls? What happened?

Evan Osnos: You have to remind yourself, by the way, that this was not rapturously received. There were stories with headlines like, "The Democrats are making a big mistake."0 What they overlooked, there was an entire community of voters, some of whom felt close to her because she's an African American, because she's the children of immigrants, because she's a woman, because she has been involved in abortion rights. There was this entire community of activists and regular voters who felt that they had been essentially overlooked in all of those pessimistic assessments of her support.

They came out in huge force. Over the course of the next couple of days, she was putting up tremendous numbers of volunteers and fundraising. It was, or should have been, a bit of a humbling moment for people who had declared her candidacy to be a bad idea at the outset.

David Remnick: Let's go back a little bit in history to describe what makes Kamala Harris who she is personally and psychologically. She often cites her mother as her greatest inspiration. What did she get from her mother?

Evan Osnos: Grit and complete and total persistence. Let me be specific. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, came to the United States from India in 1958, which you have to remember was much earlier than most of the Indian immigration. It was a quite wild thing to do. She didn't tell her parents she was applying to Berkeley for graduate school. She gets the United States and there were very few Indian students there. She actually finds her home in the black community. It was partly because she'd grown up in independence era India. She felt, in a way that, that these politics were familiar to her. The politics of struggle.

She and her sister Maya were raised by her mother, but her mother very much put in the foreground the idea that she was raising, as she said, "Proud Black women daughters." She wanted these women to feel at home in their community. That was the core of how she went out into the world as a political person.

David Remnick: Evan, at the convention, and in her speeches elsewhere, Kamala Harris squares being a prosecutor and fighting for justice. Now, normally many activists, certainly among progressives in the Democratic Party, who feel that being a prosecutor is a little hard to square with progressive values. She tries to do it. How legitimate is that?

Evan Osnos: It was a genuine tension for her. That when activists come to knock on the door, she wants to be the person inside to open it. Now, it was not abstract. She was quite literally hiring people from the communities that tended to be most affected by crime, both people who were victims of crime and then people who were going off to prison. They associated law enforcement as being the enemy in a lot of cases. She said, "I don't want that to be the case." I'm trying to figure out a way to make people feel as if they have a civil right to security. That they have some agency, some control over this process.

David Remnick: Did she succeed at this?

Evan Osnos: It was a bit excruciating at times, frankly. She tried, for instance, saying, "I'm opposing the death penalty." Then as soon as she got into office, there was a huge case in which a police officer was killed. She's sitting in the front row at the funeral. Dianne Feinstein, who was a Democrat like her, but Feinstein read the political moment and said, "No, I'm going to come out in favor of the death penalty in this case." This entire-- Hundreds of police officers stand up and start applauding. Harris was very isolated at that. What she did over time was that she proved to them, to these law enforcement organizations, that she was going to be tough on violent crime.

She was going to draw this distinction between violent offenses and what she thought of as essentially the unjust world of incarceration when it came to nonviolent offenses or people whose lives had been permanently destroyed because of something they'd done when they were young. It was valid enough that she was able to go on to higher office with it.

David Remnick: It's really interesting when you listen to her speeches and her admittedly infrequent interviews. She doesn't talk all that much about being attorney general. She doesn't talk even that much about being in the US Senate, which is, to be fair, not the longest career. She talks mainly about being DA in San Francisco. Why is that? What does she take from that experience?

Evan Osnos: It established for her the idea that you could have a pragmatic politics and not have it look entirely opportunistic. The irony about San Francisco politics is that the cliché, of course, is that it's all a bunch of far left hippies and that's San Francisco politics. No, the reality is San Francisco is defined, partly, by old money fortunes, that go all the way back to the gold rush. Then you've got these new money libertarians from Silicon Valley. Of course, you've got movement politics around the environment or around LGBT rights. All of this stuff is coming together.

The functional effect tends to be that the people, who survive and thrive in San Francisco politics go on to higher office, are the ones who are not the farthest to the left. They're the ones who are calculatingly pragmatic. Politics, ultimately, is about winning. You have to win or you're not advancing the causes you care about.

David Remnick: What did she prove good at as a senator and what was the downside? How was her performance as a senator?

Evan Osnos: She has always been capable at the theatrics of politics. She's very mindful of how politics is a fact of public culture and it's a visual medium, in a sense. In the Senate, she did what she knows how to do, which is interrogate people pretty well. There are these moments that are quite worth remembering.

Kamala Harris: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Attorney General Barr, has the President or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?

Attorney General Barr: I wouldn't--

Kamala Harris: Yes or no?

Attorney General Barr: Could you repeat that question?

Kamala Harris: I will repeat it. Has the President or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? Yes or no, please, sir.

Attorney General Barr: The president or anybody else.

Kamala Harris: It seems like you would remember something like that and be able to tell us.

Attorney General Barr: Yes, but I'm trying to grapple with the word suggest. I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there that-- They have not asked me to open an investigation.

Kamala Harris: Perhaps they've suggested?

Attorney General Barr: I don't know. I wouldn't say suggest--

Kamala Harris: Hinted?

Attorney General Barr: I don't know.

Kamala Harris: Inferred? You don't know. Okay.

Evan Osnos: His only solution was to quibble with her about the word suggest, which-- Mission accomplished. She'd done what she did. She's very good at asking questions in that format. What she was never particularly inclined towards was figuring out what is going to be her signature issue. What could she make a deep impression on? Then history happened, and she was out of there before she really could make a deep impression.

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David Remnick: Evan Osnos is a staff writer based in Washington and will continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker radio hour.

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David Remnick: This is the New Yorker radio hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking today with Evan Osnos, who's been reporting on Kamala Harris and her accelerated, unprecedented campaign for the presidency. In that critical slice of the electorate that we call undecided voters, people tend to say things like, "I still don't know enough about Kamala Harris." Evan went to find out everything he could. When Joe Biden was Vice President, he did have frequent lunches with the President. He had a portfolio of issues. He was respected for his experience in foreign affairs.

Whether he was right or wrong on certain issues, you can certainly debate. There was a presence there as Vice President. There was never any sense, at least in the public rendering of it, that Kamala Harris, as Vice President, had real visible purchase on that office, except when it came to immigration, which was not a big success.

Evan Osnos: I don't think that that actually captures what she was able to do. Joe Biden, because he had been Vice President, it was pretty obvious that he was trying to make her seen in the building as an equal partner. I think that's because he does believe, it's part of his own self-image, that being a Vice President is a noble act. That you're helping somebody achieve. She began to make an impact on his thinking. There were examples. For instance, she was a big proponent of Ketanji Brown Jackson as a nominee for the Supreme Court.

She prevailed over other influential voices who were talking to him at the time, like James Clyburn, who were favoring other candidates. She also got him to consider the idea of student loan relief beyond what he had imagined. There were ways in which she was doing it, but she was also really vigilant, perhaps overly so, about never looking to the public like she was angling for her own future.

David Remnick: One of the criticisms of Kamala Harris as Vice President, even before, was a history of infighting on her staff. That people made fast exits from her staff. Is that true, or is that a canard?

Evan Osnos: No, it's true. She has had, and this goes back to California, too, a lot of turnover on her staff. She's a tough boss, and there's no way around it. People who have watched her up close say that there are times where she can be quite rough on her staff because maybe she doesn't feel like she is prepared for something, and so she's going to muscle it out. As one person said to me, a lot of men get away with that in Washington, including Joe Biden. The reality is, she is subject to extraordinary scrutiny. That's partly because of racism. That's the reality of sexism.

It is also the fact that people put a great deal of weight on her. Because if she is elected, she will make history in so many ways. I think part of what we saw in this first two years in the vice presidency, that were not successful for her, was that she was self-editing and self-critical. She would give a bad interview and then she would recede from the press. It's clear she has concluded over the years that everything she says can either cause her great trouble or it can advance these things that she cares about.

David Remnick: Isn't that the nature of being a politician at the national level, much less a Black politician or a woman?

Evan Osnos: I think the answer is it is, but it is also freighted with so much more. She knows that there are a huge number of Americans who are inspired by what she represents and the possibility that she could reach the highest rung of American power. I think there is also a feeling, even among her allies and her supporters, that they're braced for the backlash for what we know from when Obama became the first Black president of the United States. There were a lot of Americans who felt that as a threat.

David Remnick: Well, the repercussions the first time around are called Donald and Trump.

Evan Osnos: Exactly.

David Remnick: The biggest foreign policy question out there, at least with, let's set aside Ukraine and Russia for a second, is the Middle east. Do you expect, do you sense, that there will be any difference between the way Joe Biden has handled this issue and the way Kamala Harris would? It was surprising to me, to say the least, that at the democratic convention that she decided not to even spare a five-minute speech to any Palestinian American speakers, even at six o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday. That was so concerning to a lot of delegates and to many people in Michigan and well beyond.

Evan Osnos: The reality is that she is conscious of the risk that there are some voters who describe themselves often as single issue Israel voters. Who don't know enough about her to say that they are confident that she's going to be as supportive of Israel as Biden was. [crosstalk]

David Remnick: Does that have to do with her generation or with her, or being Black? Because inscribed in that is all kinds of explosive material.

Evan Osnos: It’s all of the above on some level. For a lot of people, they don't parse it out in those terms. What they say is, "We know Joe Biden." They say, "We knew that Joe Biden has been vocal on this issue for half a century." The simplest way to put it is, she felt more politically vulnerable on the right, even within the confines of the Democratic Party, than she did on the left. This is my read of a political calculation, but it's not hard to divine that what she was doing here was-- She said, "Look, I run the serious risk of losing centrist voters."

This is not just about Israel. It has to do with how she talks about the economy and how she talks about capitalism and how she talks about a whole range of things that are proxies for, "Is she a radical or is she something more familiar?" She has spent the two months of her time as a candidate trying to make the case that she is, in fact, something closer to a continuation of the Biden-Obama tradition than she is something unfamiliar.

David Remnick: Here we are at a moment when Russia has invaded Ukraine, is still there and occupies Ukrainian territory. In the Middle East, we're at the level now of regional war. We have no idea where this ends. There are 40,000 dead in Gaza. October 7th was a shattering experience for Israel and its sense of security. There are other foreign policy issues that get rarely discussed. This is a crucial time, and yet we know precious little, it seems to me, about Kamala Harris as a foreign policy thinker and actor.

Evan Osnos: People who briefed her when she was in the Senate came away. One person described her to me as a completely blank page back then. The reality is she has spent almost four years in the Situation room, sitting beside Joe Biden, working on hard problems, being involved in these kinds of issues. She's met with tons of foreign leaders and so on. What's distinctive, what we have learned about how she thinks about these issues, is that she is a bit different than how Biden thinks about some of these things. He comes out of the Cold War generation. He was shaped by this conception that there is a democratic world and an authoritarian world.

He talks about it in those ways, autocracy versus democracy, and it links back to what he's facing at home with Donald Trump. She doesn't really see it that way. I've talked to people who are involved with her foreign policy who will say, the honest fact is she doesn't draw those kinds of distinctions. It doesn't look to her as if countries that the United States is allied with are all that democratic in some cases. A place like Turkey or even Israel right now. The fact that the United States does a lot of business with Saudi Arabia, which is by any measure, an authoritarian regime. I would not expect that she's going to deviate dramatically from what the Biden administration and ultimately what the Obama administration did.

David Remnick: How does she process the fact that half the country is still with Donald Trump?

Evan Osnos: During the convention-- You'll remember this famous picture of somebody, a photographer, standing behind her own grandniece, who is a little girl who is looking up at Kamala Harris. It is the moment in which this little girl, like many others, might see something of herself in her. When Kamala Harris was asked about it, the temptation, of course, would be to say, "I am the person who is going to finally deliver us to the Promised Land." This was an example of discipline. She didn't take that bait. She stopped herself. What she said was, "Yes, that photo was moving. I'm here to be a president for all Americans."

David, that is a really revealing thing. It sounds like the Pablum that you hear from every presidential candidate. Except Donald Trump's never said he wants to be the president for all Americans. When she's saying that, what she's trying to do is to say to people, "I don't see myself entirely as the vessel for your specific aspirations. I'm trying to get us through this period."

David Remnick: You've been all around the country watching this campaign unfold. What does your instinct tell you about early November? I couldn't resist.

Evan Osnos: Wait a second. I think that the predictions, as we often say, David, are [crosstalk]

David Remnick: The worst journalism. I know. I've said it a thousand times before, but indulge me.

Evan Osnos: There is a scary scenario for people who want to be rid of Donald Trump. Which is that she is right now running a couple of points ahead of him in the popular vote. If she wins that and loses the Electoral College, that'll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience. You can't underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma, that's not an overstatement, it will be. Particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, "We're going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country." At the same time, as we've hinted at a couple of times today, Donald Trump is unraveling before our eyes.

Anybody who watches him for a few minutes, if they're watching on television, they see it. If they're at a rally, people leave early. She took him apart in the debate. There are a lot of people in this country who feel that in 2016 that they didn't marshal enough support for Hillary Clinton, who say, "We didn't really imagine that Donald Trump could win." Today, I don't think anybody has any illusions that Donald Trump could win and what it would mean for this country. That explains some of this enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.

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David Remnick: Evan Osnos, thank you.

Evan Osnos: My pleasure, David.

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David Remnick: You can read Evan Osnos on Kamala Harris and so much more on newyorker.com.

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