Joseph Simonson, Chuck Ross, and Andrew Kerr highlight an interesting comment from Kamala Harris about her work history.
The first all-female audience ever on The Drew Barrymore Show was whooping and cheering for Kamala Harris, its guest of honor, this April when Barrymore’s sidekick, Ross Matthews, threw a softball at the vice president.
“I heard a rumor that you worked at McDonald’s?”
“I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald’s,” laughed Harris. “When I was at school … I did fries. And then I did the cashier.”
“I didn’t know that about you,” gasped Barrymore.
Neither did anyone who followed Harris’s long career in public life—that is, until she ran for president in 2019 and began to make the job a centerpiece of her biography.
Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she “was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as “her humble background.” (Harris is the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher, whom her campaign calls “a working mother,” and a tenured Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)
