Kamala Harris and the Ambition Trap

Did a woman's drive get her rejected from the country's #2 job by the most ambitious man in politics?

“Others argue that she’s too ambitious and that she will be solely focused on becoming president herself.”

What I’m Writing

The Trump Administration’s Cruel Purge of International Students

Repulsive Anti-Semitism — From the Right and the Left — Needs to Have Consequences

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The View From Here

Over in Biden-land, the former Vice President’s allies are reportedly trying to stick the knife in Kamala Harris as a VP pick. “Some remain bitter about her attacks on Biden during primary debates last year, saying they bring into question her loyalty to the former vice president,” CNBC’s Brian Schwartz reports. “Others argue that she’s too ambitious and that she will be solely focused on becoming president herself.”

Unlike… Joe Biden himself, who was already plotting his senate run when he spent two short years on a county council, ran for senate with virtually no political experience, fancied himself the second coming of JFK once he got there, “never abandoned his aspirations for the top job” when he was vice president (much to Obama’s annoyance), and is on his third presidential run in three decades, during which he has considered many more?

That Joe Biden?

Men are driven and rewarded for it; women are too ambitious and therefore suspect. Men strategize; women connive. This is a familiar refrain.

The solution, though, isn’t just to say “stop saying that” (although I truly do wish people would stop saying it). It’s to ask: Why do we even engage in this farce of the no-ambition politician? And what makes us so uncomfortable about women who strive for power and seem to want something for themselves?

Presidents, vice presidents, and congresspeople should be public servants; the job, in theory, is to serve. But I would humbly suggest that there is not a single person who has ever been elected to any of these offices who is not an absolutely psychotic ambition-monster, and who wants their seat not because they truly believe that they and they alone are the conduit through which the public may be served (itself a disturbing narcissistic delusion) but because they also crave the affirmation, influence, and power that political office supplies. Mike Sacks pointed this out on Twitter: That the issue isn’t ambitious vs. not ambitious (every person in the Senate and most the House would run for president if they thought they could win), it’s obscuring it well vs. not. I mean, there are still people who will argue that Obama wasn’t ambitious and calculated — that his sense of righteousness called him to the duty of the presidency, and by virtue of his intelligence and charisma he won. Friends, you do not get to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office without being viciously ambitious.

That doesn’t mean that politically ambitious people’s motivations are the same. Donald Trump, who wants power for power’s sake and leverages it to assert his dominance and demonstrate his capacity for cruelty, is not the same as ambitious politicians like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A politician can be ambitious and wildly narcissistic (and most of them are) and also have their heart more or less in the right place; they can want power, and they can want to wield that power for good (and, yes, to serve their own egos). When it comes to men in politics, we understand that these motivations can coexist.

When it comes to women in politics, it’s more complicated.

That’s because we really do expect women to serve. There is almost nothing that unifies the female existence and feminine stereotypes as service and subservience. To whom varies — white women are supposed to be selfless for their children and husbands; African American women have been praised for their work in white homes only to be portrayed as lazy if they focus their energies on their own (in the conservative imagination, a white mother who doesn’t work is a SAHM; a black woman is a welfare queen). But in any case, women are supposed to put other people first.

You’d think this would benefit us in politics, which is, after all, at least by both rhetoric and design about putting other people first. But the only way to actually get anything done in the political arena is to accrue power, which means self-promoting, making deals, and being strategic about how you get shit done. Over and over again, you see women run for office on the “I’m A Mom” platform — a pitch premised on the kind of caring about others that we assume comes standard with (white) maternity. Even many of these women — see, e.g., Kirsten “woman in a hurry” Gillibrand — are quickly deemed too ambitious and dismissed accordingly, especially if they challenge men.

But it’s especially brutal for the women who run as themselves and on their professional accomplishments. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first two who come to mind for me are Kamala Harris and Stacy Abrams: Two young (for politics) black women, neither of whom have biological children, both with dense resumes, both bulldog lawyers, and both met, again and again, with a dismissiveness that I hear as a curdled eew — as if their unfeminine ambition were practically contagious.

We know that politicians are ambitious. The question is how we expect them to hide it. For men, the cloak can be thin — as long as their drive is conveyed in the language of public service and their professional experience, we’re good (and often, as in the case of Trump, they don’t even have to do that much). For women, the rules are more amorphous. Motherhood is a good veil for a while, but then you risk being pushed aside as soft and unserious, someone concerned with “women’s and children’s issues” — fine enough to keep you in a legislature, the kiss of death for any executive office. Wanting to make a difference for your community is a tried-and-true one, and certainly a genuine motivator for a lot of women who run for office; but you can’t look hungry or like you want it too much. You have to make the case that you would be good for this role and that you’re exceptionally qualified, but you can’t do it in a way that might make anyone think you think you’d be great at it, or that you want it for any reason that has to do with any ascent up any ladder; you have to pretend you’re not making any ascent, that you didn’t even notice the ladder was there, that maybe there’s no ladder at all.

It’s not female ambition, exactly, that we object to, even if that’s the word we use. It’s the perception that women who want to be let in the room are not adequately serving the interests of the men we assume are by birthright at the table.

Harris apparently also got on Team Biden’s bad side because she challenged Biden in a debate and had “no remorse.” She allegedly laughed and said “that’s politics” when it was implied she should apologize. Biden needs “a loyal no. 2,” and because Harris criticized him when she was running against him, she’s not it.

Harris’s actions were, literally, politics. And at least Harris criticized Biden’s actual policies. Remember when Biden said Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”? That wasn’t policy, but you bet your ass it was politics.

I will add my usual caveat that Harris wasn’t my candidate (neither was Biden). Her prosecutorial record is a big problem; another tough-on-crime prosecutor is not what America needs. Neither, if you ask me, is another moderate old white man who has been on the forefront of absolutely nothing and has little interest in pushing the kind of progressive change — or really, any forward movement — we need right now. But here we are, and the other option is a racist authoritarian who has meted out damage so extreme I cannot yet wrap my head around it, and who will use another four years to utterly destroy whatever salvageable shreds are left of our tattered nation. You can’t always get what you want, as the Boomers say, so I am at least hoping we can get what we need to walk us back from the precipice of abject disaster. And my point isn’t to say that Harris should be VP. It’s to say that she should be evaluated for the position fairly. And a bunch of guys whispering in Biden’s ear that she’s “too ambitious” — that her behaving exactly like Joe Biden himself is disqualifying — is not fair. It is exactly why Congress remains overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. It is why our country’s laws and policies have not caught up to what our people need.

If ambition were disqualifying for political office, we’d have an empty capitol building, and the White House would be left to rot. If we want the people on Capitol Hill to be better, we need to expect public service, not the performance of female subservience.

xx Jill