(Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP) (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
The Washington Free Beacon posted a hilarious hitpiece on Vice President Kamala Harris this morning. It’s a three-reporter byline, featured prominently on their website, and heavily promoted by its editors.
Their big scoop: HARRIS LEFT HER JOB AT McDONALDS OFF HER RESUME. PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN!!!
Yes, for real.
These dipshits are doing GOTCHAS by digging up Harris’s post-college and law school resumes and pointing out that she left off a few weeks working the deep fryer between her freshman and sophomore years at Howard University. This hard-hitting investigation is just asking questions about why the Vice President didn’t mention the McDonalds gig when she applied to be a summer law clerk at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office in 1987. Instead, she included stints at Charles Schwab, the FTC, a senate internship, and clerking at a law firm.
“Harris, who submitted the application as a second-year student at then-University of California, Hastings College of the Law, included granular life experience on her résumé—’extensive travel in India, Africa, [and] Europe” and “lived in Montreal, Canada for six years’—but not McDonald’s,” they intone ominously, adding that “Politicians who worked menial food service jobs as teens are often quick to mention it as proof of their working class bona fides.”
Hundreds of reporters have interviewed the manager at the Baskin Robbins where Barack Obama once scooped cones, they sneer. Why hasn’t Harris made this a feature of her biography until now?
Of course Harris was not a politician 37 years ago. She was a 22-year-old law student applying for a professional clerkship where her ability to operate a deep fryer was irrelevant. Presumably she left off babysitting gigs, retail experience, and whatever other afterschool jobs she held before grad school, like a normal person. Although these are the same geniuses who insisted that law students are supposed to spend the first year learning about English common law, not woke shit like Dred Scott, so YMMV.
But forget about whether it would be a good career move for a job applicant — particularly a Black woman — to suggest that her career choices were either “You want fries with that?” or “May it please the court.” The reality is that Harris was banging out that paper application on a manual typewriter, and sending it through the US mail. The form had space for three jobs, which she filled with relevant work experience. And the additional CV is brief, because career services always told you to keep it to one page or you’d look like an asshole.
Of course there are other ways to ensure that your essential rectal nature is apparent to the world. And writing garbage hitpieces about a presidential candidate leaving McDonalds off her professional resume is a damn good one.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.