Kamala Harris leans on memory of her mother, as she reintroduces herself

Chicago: In 1958, a young graduate student moved to the United States from her native India because she wanted to find a cure for breast cancer. She fell in love, got married and had two daughters. She named her eldest Kamala, a Sanskrit name meaning lotus flower.

Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died of colon cancer in 2009, never got to see that daughter, Kamala Harris, win a close election to become attorney general of California, and go on to become a senator. She did not watch as Harris was chosen to run with Joe Biden, eventually becoming the vice president of the United States. But at the 2024 Democratic convention, Harris will credit the woman who raised her as her life's animating force.

Harris' headlining speech Thursday evening is expected to focus in part on how her mother shaped her values and informed her approach to politics, according to a person who is helping with the speech who was not authorized to speak about the appearance.

"America, the path that led me here in recent weeks was no doubt unexpected. But I'm no stranger to unlikely journeys," Harris will say on Thursday night, according to excerpts of her speech released by her office. "My mother, Shyamala Harris, had one of her own. I miss her every day -- especially now. And I know she's looking down tonight and smiling."

In her address, Harris has to outline her biography and introduce herself to the largest audience she has had yet as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Throughout the week, family members and friends have appeared to tell the convention crowd more about Harris. Shyamala Gopalan Harris has been at the fore of many of those speeches, as Tony West, who is married to Harris' younger sister, Maya, said Wednesday evening.

"Kamala and I each pursued different legal careers, but we were motivated by the same values: a belief in equal opportunity, a yearning for fairness, a passion for justice," he said, "values 'Mother Harris' taught those two little girls, values that powered Kamala's public service from the very beginning."

Other political allies, including Hillary Clinton, have woven Harris' mother into their convention speeches, putting the vice president at the front of a long line of American women who had fought for civil rights, worked to earn public office and campaigned to win the presidency.

"My friends, the future is here," Clinton said. "I wish my mother and Kamala's mother could see us. They would say, 'Keep going.'"

The definitional power of parenthood has been an unofficial theme of the convention this week. In a speech that captivated the United Center crowd on Tuesday, Michelle Obama, the former first lady, told attendees that she was mourning her mother, Marian Robinson, who died in May. She acknowledged that she had not been sure she would be stable enough to deliver her speech.

"The last time I was here in my hometown was to memorialize my mother, the woman who showed me the meaning of hard work and humility and decency, the woman who set my moral compass high and showed me the power of my own voice," Obama said.

In his own speech, her husband, former President Barack Obama, praised Robinson and Madelyn Dunham, his maternal grandmother, who helped raise him: "They both represented an entire generation of working people, who through war and depression, discrimination and limited opportunity, helped build this country."

Politicians -- and recent Democratic presidential nominees, especially -- have leaned on their life stories, their parents and their childhoods as a way to explain themselves and their values to the American public, often holding out a humble background or a difficult childhood as a way to connect with millions of others who did not have the elusive white-picket-fence American upbringing.

"A lot of voters respond to this idea that parents, or a mother in particular, has handed down a set of values, and that those values are embedded in the American story, and those are the values that the would-be president is fighting for," said Matthew Dallek, a political historian who teaches at George Washington University. "It does the work for them of saying: 'I am one of you.'"

Biden grew up with a stutter as a child, and his family was forced to move in with his grandparents when money became tight. Barack Obama was raised by a single mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and a set of maternal grandparents. Bill Clinton's father died shortly before he was born, and the future president grew up having to put himself in the middle of arguments between his mother and grandmother, and, later, between his mother and stepfather. He has credited his mother, Virginia Kelley, with instilling resilience in him.

Like her predecessors, Harris has often turned to her childhood to define her values and telegraph a humble upbringing -- she is the daughter of academics, but was raised by a single mother. Her parents separated when she was 5 years old, but her earliest memories of her mother and father, a Jamaican economics professor named Donald Harris, were peppered with visits to civil rights demonstrations.

"They fell in love in that most American way -- while marching together for justice in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s," Harris said during her convention speech as the vice-presidential nominee in 2020. "In the streets of Oakland and Berkeley, I got a stroller's-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called 'good trouble.'"

Donald Harris, 85, is not featured as prominently in Kamala Harris' life story, but she has credited him with emboldening her with a sense of fearlessness. In her 2019 memoir, "The Truths We Hold," she recalls him telling her mother, the more cautious parent, to let her run and play outside.

"He would turn to my mother and say, 'Just let her run, Shyamala,'" Harris wrote. "And then he'd turn to me and say: 'Run, Kamala. As fast as you can. Run!' I would take off, the wind in my face, feeling that I could do anything."

Her mother, though, was "the most important person in my life," as Harris said at the 2020 convention. Allies of Harris who have lost their own mothers have said she has called to offer condolences and listen to their memories. Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., said the vice president has called him out of the blue several times since his mother died of COVID in 2020. He said Harris had told him that their mothers "are always a part of us, and we're in large part who we are because of our mothers."

In recent weeks, Shyamala Gopalan Harris has been the lead character in Harris's campaign speeches, including last week, when the vice president delivered an economic address at an event in Raleigh, North Carolina.

"For most of my childhood, we were renters," Harris said. "My mother saved for well over a decade to buy a home. I was a teenager when that day finally came, and I can remember so well how excited she was. I kind of understood what it meant, but -- we called her 'Mommy' -- Mommy was so excited, it just made us excited that she was so excited."

Tying a parent's life story to policy platforms, as Harris is aiming to do as she focuses her economic message on the high cost of living, is not just a political strategy but, in some cases, a driving reason for the fight to make those proposals a reality.

Biden has championed a cancer "moonshot" initiative, partly in honor of his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015. And in 2010, when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, he did so on behalf of his mother, who died of uterine cancer in 1995 and "who argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days," he said at the time.

Dallek said that Harris was laying out a life story that offered a contrast with her opponent, former President Donald Trump, who rarely speaks of his upbringing as the son of Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a Scottish immigrant, and his father, Fred Trump, a real estate developer in the New York City borough of Queens.

Trump's father was deeply influential in his son's life, but the former president does not often speak of any life lessons passed on, or about how growing up wealthy shaped his grievance-based brand of politics.

In that sense, Harris is taking advantage of a personal and political tactic that her opponent has not embraced.

"It's a way of connecting to voters through shared love and shared grief," said Erin C. Cassese, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware. "These stories have a way of reminding us what matters and what's at stake."