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Kamala Harris will face barriers as a woman running for the Presidency. “Women constantly have to credential themselves,” Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran of Democratic politics who served in the Clinton Administration, says. She was also the director of communications for the Obama White House, and then for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Harris will “need to remind people of what she has done in her career and what she’s done as Vice-President, because people assume that women haven’t accomplished anything.” But Harris also has notable strengths as a candidate, and—having avoided a bruising primary campaign and having been handed a torch from the incumbent—she has advantages that no other woman running for office has had. For a female candidate, the world has changed since 2016, Palmieri believes. She shares insights into how Joe Biden was finally persuaded to step out of the race, and explains what she meant by advising women to “nod less and cry more.”
Plus, the New Yorker staff writers Vinson Cunningham and Doreen St. Félix discuss Harris’s identity as a biracial politician, and how it will play in the campaign.
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.