Vice President Kamala Harris evoked one of the most popular TV shows of the contemporary era — the frenetic, comic, inclusive “Modern Family” — to situate her own life and domestic circumstances in a way Americans might relate to.
Coming around at the end of the segment below to the notion that it’s “not the 1950s anymore,” Harris speaks of a family situation that, while not post-war era traditional, hardly sounds unfamiliar to the contemporary American.
Answering a question triggered by Republican Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders‘ assertion that Harris must suffer a lack of humility from not being a biological parent to her children, Harris’s retort describes her family situation — she is the adoptive mother of her husband’s two children from his previous marriage — as a family “by love.”
(“We have our family by blood and we have our family by love — and I have both,” Harris says. “And I consider it to be a real blessing.”)
Q: I saw the governor of Arkansas said ‘my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble.’ How did that make you feel?
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 6, 2024
Vice President Harris: I don't think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who are not… pic.twitter.com/MsOmhEnDGH
Subtly digging at Sanders, who implied Harris had no kids to keep her humble, Harris says “I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up,” before describing her family life and how important her children are to her, mentioning vis-a-vis “Modern Family” that her husband’s ex-wife is a friend of hers.
Harris also reveals she was sensitive to her potential new role as a parental figure long before she met her husband Doug Emhoff‘s children.
Harris ascribes her sensitivity to being a “child of divorce” — again a common contemporary situation — and what it taught her about the needs of children, or at least what she extrapolated from her own experience.
Describing her decision not to meet her now-daughters until she thought it was appropriate, Harris explains:
“I was very thoughtful and sensitive to making sure that until I knew that our relationship was something that was going to be real, I didn’t want to form a relationship with the kids and then walk away from that relationship. My own experience told me, you know, that children form attachments and you really want to be thoughtful about it.”
