How Vice-President Harris’s public persona has evolved, from tough prosecutor to frozen interviewee to joyful candidate.  Illustration by Richard Chance; Source photographs by Ethan Miller / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty A certain strain of the commentariat has identified Kamala Harris as the stylistic heir to Barack Obama. But there are better examples among the Democrats who are playing that particular role, Vinson Cunningham argues, in a sharp critical essay, from this week’s issue, examining the Vice-President’s public persona. Instead, Harris’s political identity has a closer spiritual connection to the formidable Congressional Black Caucus and to a latter-day Al Sharpton, who has shrewdly wielded insider power, Cunningham writes, and “knows how to keep on the right side of the street.” Cunningham proposes a small-screen model, as well. “If Harris has a televisual twin, it’s Clair Huxtable, of ‘The Cosby Show,’ played by Harris’s fellow Howard University alumna Phylicia Rashad,” he writes. “Harris and Huxtable are both attorneys who sometimes get telegenically tough, and who portray upward mobility—in politics as in life—as totally compatible with the day-by-day dictates of justice.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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