The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Would Kamala Harris Lie About Working at McDonald’s Circa 1983?

Posted on | August 29, 2024 | Comments Off on Why Would Kamala Harris Lie About Working at McDonald’s Circa 1983?

Other than the fact that she lies about everything:

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.)
Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she “work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s.” And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that “she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.”
At the same time, however, Harris’s image makers tweaked the story ever so slightly. According to an August 14 item in Politico, an early cut of a Harris campaign ad said she worked at McDonald’s to “pay her way” through college. Aides changed the script to reflect that “she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money,” as Politico put it.
The Politico story, which was published just hours after the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign with a series of detailed questions about Harris’s claims regarding her job at McDonald’s, didn’t say when exactly—or where—Harris worked at the restaurant. The campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon’s inquiries.
It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s. But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions about what is now a foundational narrative.
On Monday, the New York Times reported without attribution that Harris, who was born in Oakland, Calif., and moved to Montreal with her mother and younger sister when she was 12, “return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.” Harris was attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
If some details of the job have varied, while others are murky, that might be because there is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before that labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019.
The job goes unmentioned in both of her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019.
The Truths We Hold, published ahead of her maiden presidential bid, does include a passage on the “many jobs” she held in college, with no reference to McDonald’s. It also devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working class and assails the service industry’s “starvation wages.” Harris’s McDonald’s job is similarly absent from her 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.
Two biographies written about Harris make no mention of the job, either. . . .

Far be it from me to commit a logical fallacy — the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you can’t prove that Harris worked at McDonald’s, that’s not proof that she didn’t work at McDonald’s.

It is certainly curious — and probably not a coincidence — that the first time we know of Harris mentioning this alleged McDonald’s job is at a union rally during her first (and failed) presidential campaign. Whether she did or didn’t work at McDonald’s, this claim would help her seem as if she could relate to the plight of workers. But why not mention it in any of her previous campaigns, for California attorney general or U.S. Senate? Why wait until 2019? It’s sort of like Christine Blasey Ford waiting more than 30 years to mention the alleged sexual assault committed against her when she was a prep school girl. “Question the timing.”

How long before questions about Kamala Harris’s alleged employment at McDonald’s rate a “Republicans pounce” headline from the media?



 

Shop Electronics at Amazon

Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials

Shop Amazon Basics

Office & School Supplies

Category: Kamala Harris

Comments

Comments are closed.