Kamala Harris has been trying to connect with the little people, the ones in semi-flyover country who might be a little squeamish about her San Francisco liberalism.

In just one example, Harris has stated — inaccurately as it turns out — that she paid her way by working at McDonald’s.

I am not exactly sure what she paid her way through, because it turns out that the fast food job was for pocket money and not to pay rent, a mortgage, student loans or tuition. It was likely for the things I used my pocket money for: makeup, magazines like Mademoiselle and Glamour that taught me how to put on makeup, and unhealthy snacks that made the makeup irrelevant.

I would venture that over 80% of boomers and Gen Xers, and maybe even millennials earned their extra cash while slinging burgers. But it’s a little pretentious to put that on your resume as proof that you are a woman of the people.

Nothing wrong with it, but it follows a Kamala pattern: make yourself seem bigger than you really are.

I worked at Roy Roger’s, who had better burgers by far than McDonald’s. I was forced to wear a cowgirl hat, a white peasant blouse, a bandana skirt and a kerchief around my neck.

I never thought that working in a fast food restaurant made me special, or that it was like working in the coal mines.

It never equated with what my grandparents had to do, which was leave school in the third grade to go and work to support their respective families. It didn’t even match what my mother did, working at a drugstore and then as a telephone operator after high school and turning over her paycheck, unopened, to her parents.

Do I consider my time with the franchise akin to working in a salt mine?

No. Did the money I earned filling orders for rude strangers help pay my bills? Not really, since my father was paying most of them anyway.

Did my time in the trenches make me a better person? Hardly, since that was the summer when I really learned to curse.

It was my first job, and it was my worst job, but it was nothing special. And I would be incredibly embarrassed to include it in a campaign ad. But this is typical of the Harris campaign.

It seems as if the current VP takes bits and pieces of her life and burnishes them as if she were writing fiction and not an actual memoir.

In that sense, it is ironic that her campaign has attacked JD Vance for his inauthenticity, when it is she who is plucking out details from an existence no less privileged than the one I lived.

Kamala Harris is, like most of the people running for office these days, a product of the middle class. In her case, with two professional academics for parents and a lot of wealthy mentors who helped her along the way, she grew up squarely in the middle of the economic hierarchy.

And to be fair, there is no honor in poverty, even though I have written admiringly of those who overcame adversity and triumphed.

There is, however, honor in honesty.

Harris has been given a lot of breaks in her life, and to ignore that and pretend that she is just like every one of us who had to work behind a counter and get grease stains on our really unattractive uniforms is a bit ridiculous.

This “one of us” narrative doesn’t help her with the blue states, because they don’t care and are already voting for her.

They would vote for her if she was the new CEO of Amazon. It doesn’t help her in the red states, because they see what an inauthentic ruse this is, this attempt to connect with the middle of the middle.

I wish that candidates would simply say, this is who I am, this is how I grew up. I may not be like you but I will work hard to serve your needs.

I don’t need to have been born on a reservation to know that Native Americans have been horribly treated by our government. I don’t have to be Black to know that racism still exists. I don’t have to be a man to know that an awful lot of women used the MeToo movement to destroy lives instead of redress grievances.

And I don’t have to have worked in a fast food restaurant to know what it is to be a normal American.

Empathy is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers