The shifting convictions of Kamala Harris

Supporters of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign like to note that their candidate can "prosecute the case" against Donald Trump, a felon and recidivist Republican nominee.

Speaking at rallies, the vice president has embraced the message, recalling that as a former courtroom prosecutor, district attorney and state attorney general, she took on all manner of predators, fraudsters and cheaters. "So, hear me when I say," Harris tells the rapturous crowds of Insert State Here, "I know Donald Trump's type!"

It's a memorable line, and it has made Harris' identity as a prosecutor -- even more so than, say, as a female candidate or as the child of immigrants -- integral to her presidential pitch. "That's our choice," a video at the Democratic National Convention this week intoned, with Beyoncé's "Freedom" playing in the background.

"A prosecutor or a felon." But it's also an identity with which Harris has long wrestled, not just in her presidential campaigns but in the two books she's written on her life and career. Harris may know Trump's type, but when it comes to her prosecutorial past, she seems less certain of her own type.

Harris' books, a decade apart in publication, are worlds apart in their style and politics. Smart on Crime: a Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer, appearing in 2009 when Harris was serving a second term as San Francisco's district attorney, is a wonk's paradise, debunking myths about law enforcement and proposing a multiplicity of criminal-justice reforms. (Note the nifty triangulation: not tough or soft but smart on crime.)

The Truths We Hold: an American Journey, which came out in 2019 when Harris was a first-term US senator already eyeing the White House, is a more conventional memoir, spanning childhood, family and political campaigns, its policy ideas leavened with generic inspiration. (Reforms are needed "if not for ourselves," she writes, then "for our children and grandchildren." Also, it turns out "we are better than this.")

Read together, the books show how Harris sanded off the rougher edges of her law-enforcement record for her first presidential campaign, offering a more negative and politicized vision of prosecutors' influence in American life.

Now, in her latest bid for the presidency, Harris is placing her prosecutorial background at the forefront of her message, once again reinterpreting her record, beliefs and ideas -- or perhaps repackaging them -- in the face of shifting public opinion.

In Smart on Crime, the future vice president highlights the noble origins and intentions of the nation's criminal justice system and especially of the prosecutor's purpose and symbolism.

"Our founding fathers established a public office of prosecution to act on the notion that a crime against any one of us is a crime against all of us and worthy of our collective efforts to bring justice," she writes. "The role for law enforcement speaks to a basic philosophy of American justice: We are all in this together."

In The Truths We Hold, Harris' view of law enforcement is less sanguine. "America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice," she writes.

"I know this history well -- of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law."

These were not the hard-earned lessons of personal experience on the job; Harris says this was her view before she had even finished law school.

"Crime is a nonpartisan issue," Harris affirms in the 2009 book. "Democrats, Republicans and Independents all suffer from crime. And they all want to be safe."

Her views on law enforcement are not liberal or conservative because, when it comes to safety, "ideology doesn't matter."

Yet, by 2019, Harris was describing herself as a "progressive prosecutor," one who "used the power of the office with a sense of fairness, perspective and experience."

A progressive prosecutor's job is expansive: "to speak up for those whose voices aren't being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice."

To move the system in this direction, she argues, new laws must be passed and new officials elected. "Let's recruit more progressives into prosecutor's offices," Harris urges in "The Truths We Hold." In this retelling, nonpartisanship has become counterproductive to the causes that progressive prosecutors must champion.

In "Smart on Crime," Harris boasts of her success in winning convictions. "In five years, our felony conviction rates improved from 52 per cent to 71 per cent, and we more than doubled our conviction rates for crimes like gun crimes to more than 92 per cent.

" Save for a reference to a reduced backlog of unsolved homicides, such statistics -- and such pride -- are largely absent in The Truths We Hold.

In her first book, Harris emphasizes the need for greater police presence in America's streets. More officers walking the beat are a "reassuring sign," she writes. Cops make "law-abiding citizens feel safer" and serve to deter crime.

"If we take a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the streets, mine would shoot up." In Harris' second book, she is far more critical of policing. "We must speak truth about police brutality, about racial bias, about the killing of unarmed Black men," she writes.

Those views are not necessarily opposed -- communities can demand greater police presence even as they decry police brutality -- but Harris' evolution from one book to the other mirrors the evolving politics of the intervening decade, which saw the rise of Black Lives Matter and greater popular focus on police violence, sentencing disparities and mass incarceration.

Harris' background as California's top cop was a liability when she sought her party's nomination in 2019, a time when Democrats were up for social justice and down on law enforcement. Back then, her pledge to "prosecute the case" against Trump didn't get Harris as far as the Iowa caucuses.

Of course, the Venn diagram of 2009 Harris and 2019 Harris contains some healthy overlap. She is consistent, for example, in her description of the Back on Track program she started in San Francisco in 2005, helping first-time nonviolent drug offenders reenter society through community service, education and employment. In both books, she stresses that the program was not social work but sensible law enforcement, and that its graduates proved less likely to commit future crimes.

Such programs have become "part of the mainstream conversation," Harris writes in The Truths We Hold. (As if proving the point, Trump signed into law the First Step Act, a major criminal justice reform bill, just weeks before Harris' second book was published.)

But when Harris revisits some specific details of her work, the differences from one volume to the next can be striking -- as when she describes her successful prosecution of two adult men for raping a 14-year-old girl who had fled from a foster home.

In "Smart on Crime," Harris recalls how the girl entered the courtroom dressed "inappropriately" and chewing gum, "projecting the attitude that she had contempt for the whole experience -- the defendants, the court, even the jury."

The girl came from a troubled family background, Harris explains, and was predisposed to mistrust adults in authority. Harris worried that the jurors would be put off, less inclined to trust her story, that they might even feel that she had "asked for" what she got.

Harris' accounts of the case are broadly consistent, save one exception. "Before she testified and during a break," Harris writes in the first book, "I spoke with the girl and explained that her attitude had made my job more difficult and that it could create even more problems for her down the line."

Harris omits that conversation from The Truths We Hold," writing how much she "felt for that poor girl, and the horrific childhood that had led her to this moment."

As is often the case with political memoirs, what authors omit is as revealing as what they include. I imagine that, especially by 2019, when The Truths We Hold was published, Harris' conversation with the girl might have been criticized as shaming the victim, or preemptively blaming her for future troubles.

In hindsight, does Harris still believe it was a productive exchange, a bit of tough advice a young person needed to hear? Or did she come to regret it, as its absence in the second book might imply? Was Harris portraying the prosecutor she wished she'd been, unburdened by the one she truly was?

Harris might dismiss any distinctions between her two books as "false choices," a concept she frequently mentions in her writings. Tough on crime or soft on crime? Resources for criminal prosecutions versus money for crime prevention? Supporting cops or holding them accountable? These are all false choices, she writes. ("One year," she recalls, "my team even had blue stress balls made, with NO FALSE CHOICES emblazoned in white letters.")

At times, Harris may well be right to resist such dichotomies, and I can imagine the mantra coming up throughout her campaign. But there are limits to denying trade-offs. Politics, like prosecution, is the art of making hard choices among competing priorities, not just of winning convictions but of holding them.

Harris would hardly be the first politician whose messages shift according to new political circumstances. The Democratic Party's instincts on law enforcement have changed from Harris' years as a prosecutor, to her first presidential campaign, to the race of 2024. (So have the country's.)

The Harris campaign is now rebranding its candidate a "pragmatic prosecutor," no longer a progressive one, and, at least judging from Harris' rallies, a prosecutor's past is no longer automatically anathema on the left. Crowds have followed Harris' "I know Donald Trump's type" refrain with chants of "lock him up," prompting the vice president to chide her supporters.

"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on," she told an audience in Las Vegas. "The courts are going take care of that. We're just going to beat him in November."

In The Truths We Hold, Harris recalls the five words she would utter in the courtroom when rising from the prosecutor's desk and approaching the podium: "Kamala Harris, for the people."

That phrase, a slogan in her 2019 campaign and a theme of this week's convention in Chicago, "was my compass," she writes.

But where has that compass led her? It's hard to know now if Harris has finally found the match between her record and ideas and the demands of the moment, or if her repeated reinventions -- from "smart" to "progressive" to "pragmatic" to whatever comes next -- reflect the chameleon her critics accuse her of being.

Such judgments can be made only in hindsight, particularly if she wins the presidency. When governance forces false choices into real ones, which Kamala Harris will make them? Will she use the compass to lead the people or follow them?

In an interview with The New Yorker published in 2014, Barack Obama reflected on the powers of the presidency and the slow, incremental pace through which leaders can bring about major change. "At the end of the day," the president concluded, "we're part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right."

In "The Truths We Hold," Harris offers a similar sentiment. "That is the spirit we need to bring to building a more perfect union: recognition that we are part of a longer story, and we are responsible for how our chapter gets written."

In the mingling of her memoirs and her political aspirations, Harris is writing her chapter. And rewriting it, too.