Following a fleeting visit to California on Thursday, President Barack Obama has caused eyebrows to raise with a flattering comment about the State’s Indian-American Attorney General Kamala Harris – not just about her legal brilliance but for her looks as well, indeed calling her America’s “best-looking” A-G.
“She is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” Obama said at a Democratic fundraiser in Atherton, adding: “She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country — Kamala Harris is here.”
“It’s true. Come on. And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years,” he said as his audience cheered but appeared surprised over his remark.
If some thought it was a “sexist” comment on Obama’s part and others questioned his political correctness, a lot many who took to the blogosphere appeared to concur with him, saying he was right in what he said about Harris.
Daughter of an Indian mother, Dr Shyamala Gopalan (a breast cancer specialist from Chennai), and a Jamaican-American father, Donald Harris, (a Stanford economic professor), the 48-year-old Kamala Harris became California’s first woman attorney general in January 2011, after a tight race in which she defeated los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley.
While Harris herself offered no comment, Obama’s remark became a major preoccupation for talking heads on television, newspaper columnists and the social media enthusiasts.
With his comment on Harris’s looks, Obama has “jolted the political world’s central nervous system”, commented “Politico” journal. CNN simply said, “Obama likes the look of California’s attorney general”. The New York Times felt Obama has “left behind a debate about whether he tripped over the line of political correctness”.
Reacting to the “sexist” charge raised by some, los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian thought Obama was being “accurate” with his description of Harris. “Does merely stating the obvious make the president sexistIJ More wolfish than sexist, I’d say. And this may be a little problem he needs to work on,” wrote Abcarian.
Obama was right about Harris, wrote Jonathan Capehart in The Washington Post, noting: “He spoke the God’s honest truth. But that wasn’t the only thing he said about the talented attorney with a national future. In fact, it was the last part of what he said.”
But Jonathan Chait of New York magazine tweeted that Obama’s comment was “disgraceful and really terrible for workplace equality”.