[su_carousel source=”media: 39832,39834,39835″ limit=”100″ link=”lightbox” width=”800″ height=”540″ responsive=”no” items=”1″]
Sen. Kamala Harris described an American democracy under attack during her first presidential campaign rally on Sunday, Jan. 27, and portrayed herself as a moral force able to stand against President Donald Trump.
After announcing her intent to run for president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day during ABC’s Good Morning America, the junior senator from California headed to the Bay Area to officially kick off her 2020 presidential campaign.
An estimated 22,000 people crowded Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, in front of a flag-draped City Hall, to welcome the former San Francisco district attorney and Oakland native home.
“I am so proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California,” Harris said at the opening of a 35-minute speech, during which she looked back on her East Bay upbringing and how that environment shaped her political values. Harris’ parents met as graduate students at U.C. Berkeley and raised Harris and her sister in Oakland.
“Like so many others, they came in pursuit of a dream,” Harris said of her parents. Her father immigrated to the Bay Area from Jamaica and her mother from India to pursue their academic careers.
With the campaign slogan “Kamala Harris For the People,” Harris embraced her background as a former prosecutor, referencing her oath to fight against crime such as drugs and human trafficking and her familiarity with stopping transnational gangs.
But it’s her career as a prosecutor, that has led many to question her bonafides as a true progressive. While district attorney of San Francisco, Harris’ office spent its resources targeting sex workers and the parents of truant students (most of whom were poor people of color). She refused to use her authority to investigate serious allegations against police departments, including the the infamous SFPD racist text messaging scandal. Additionally, as DA, Harris presided over the SFPD “crime-lab scandal” of 2010, which ultimately resulted in 600 drug cases being dismissed because of concerns about evidence tampering. And while California Attorney General, Harris prosecuted Kevin Cooper, who was convicted of murdering four people, but to this day maintains his innocence.
“His [Cooper’s] trial was infected by racism and corruption by the police,” Lara Bazelon, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, told Slate Magazine on Jan. 26. “When [Harris] was the AG and Kevin Cooper sought DNA testing—advanced testing to prove his innocence—she opposed it. Then Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist, published an expose of Kevin Cooper’s case, and it went viral.”
While Harris has since said she would support DNA testing for Cooper’s case, Cooper remains on death row.
Even so, Harris spoke of a “deeply flawed” criminal justice system in the United States, citing mass incarceration, cash bail, and the system of policing needing drastic repair. “Too many Black and Brown people are being locked up,” she said. “I’m running to fight for an America where no mother or father has to teach their young son that people may stop him, arrest him, chase him, or kill him because of his race.”
Harris laid out her platform saying we must, “seek truth, speak truth and fight for the truth,” on national issues like the economy, equality and climate change.
On immigration, Harris championed for a pathway to citizenship and scorned the current administration’s rhetoric immigrants as the “source of all of our problems.”
She stated her support of DREAMERs and an America that welcomes refugees and brings undocumented people out of the shadows.
Harris declared healthcare as a fundamental right, pledging to deliver Medicare for all citizens. She promised a tax cut for the middle class and a reversal of Trump’s tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.
Harris concluded her speech with a call for unity.
“We have more in common than what separates us,” she said. “We need to recognize we are already standing on common ground.”
Harris will continue her campaign in Iowa to taking questions at a CNN town hall on Monday, putting herself ahead of her democratic opponents in the state that will vote first in the 2020 presidential election.