Today RealClearPolitics reporter Paul Sperry tweeted that the Harris-Walz campaign is no longer referencing her alleged job at McDonald’s when she was in college, and has not responded to media questions about the location of the McDonald’s store (obviously somewhere in California, if anywhere) or the exact dates of her employment.
“So what?” you well might say. And under normal circumstances, I well might concur. The Harris campaign is anything but normal, however. This a candidate for President who is trying to get elected as a generic Democrat, which she most assuredly is not even in an era of extreme, anti-democratic Democrats. Her party has decided that its best, indeed its only chance to win in the wake of the catastrophic Biden administration’s record is to create a thumbs up or thumbs down vote on Donald Trump, an election in which the identity, record, beliefs and policy agenda of his opponent are irrelevant as long as his opponent isn’t demonstrably senile. This relegates almost all of the campaign discussion to trivia and boiler plate puffery, and mostly to how Harris and her managers choose to package her, because to most American, those who haven’t been paying attention to an inert Vice-President, packaging is literally all there is.
Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area in the summer after her freshman year in college, is a relatively recent addition to her official life story. It first surfaced in 2019, when Harris ran for President and tried to wrest the nomination from Joe Biden, a politician whose trademark has been his working stiff roots. Since taking over the top of the 2024 ticket from poor Joe, Harris has again been evoking the fast food job to portray what the Washington Post called “her humble background.” (Harris, the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher and a tenured Stanford economist, does not come from a humble background.)
Harris’s campaign said this month that she used her McDonald’s job to pay for college. That was obviously hooey, so according to an August 14 note in Politico, the new narrative is that she worked at McDonald’s “to earn a bit more spending money.”
Muuuuch better.
The next version I foresee : Kamala worked to earn money so she could contribute to a charity that feeds starving children in Appalachia…
The fact is that the Harris Campaign can’t or won’t say where the McDonald’s she worked at was or provide any further details about the claim at all. Why would that be? For example, I worked for a summer at a Baskin Robbins ice cream store. It was in Belmont Center, in Belmont, Massachusetts. I could take you to the exact spot where it was; I could tell you the name of the store’s manager. Maybe the store is even still there. (It’s not; I just checked.) But how hard is that? Never mind: the mainstream media takes Harris at her word (but Donald Trump lies all the time—did you know that?). Wher are those factchecks? (To be fair, Snopes did one.)
The New York Times reported this week that Harris “return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.” No evidence or attribution is provided. Nice journalism there, Grey Lady! (But we know your real job in this election…)
Meanwhile, Harris’s fast food job was unmentioned in both of her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019, even the most recent one that discussed the “many jobs” she held in college. Nor do the two biographies written about Harris (Boy, I can’t wait to read those) make no mention of Mickey D’s either.
The Washington Free Beacon tracked down a copy of Harris’s October 1987 job application to be a law clerk position the Alameda County district attorney’s office. On that form, Harris, who was in law school at the time, was asked her to list every position she held in the last 10 years. She didn’t mention the Golden Arches. (Again, a personal perspective: I kept my ice-cream-scooping job on my non-theatrical resume until I was almost 30.)
None of this proves that Harris is faking her Big Mac and fries creds, but then it is notoriously difficult to prove a negative. The failure of her campaign, however, or Harris herself, to provide any verification at all, combined with her already spectacularly devious manipulation of her positions and beliefs since becoming the Democrat standard-bearer, makes this episode just one more reason to distrust Harris, and to violently roll one’s eyes when the Democrats fulminate about Trump’s “lies.”
Ethics Alarms 
I worked at the W 10th St McDonald’s across from my high school throughout my entire college experience. The store is still there. They may still remember me.
It absolutely matters if she claims to have working class experience and doesn’t.
Yes it matters; but, I think it’s gonna have to be shown that she never worked at McDonalds before I call it a lie.
FYI: I worked at two different McDonalds for nearly a year. One in Bloomington, IN and the second one in Evansville, IN.
This “working-class experience” thing is really bogus. If you’re not working class, whatever you do is not a working-class experience. I pumped gas, worked at a radiator repair shop, worked in the college mail room, drove the Yale Shuttle bus, was a messenger at a Sears Credit Central in Lynn, Massachusetts and painted houses and apartments, all just to get by. But I was raised in a financially solid family, attended Catholic grade, high school and law school and a private college with only a small amount of student loan only from law school. So, none of my experience working those various jobs were anything like those of people for whom those sorts of jobs are their lot. Mrs. OB and I lived paycheck to paycheck while I taught grade school and then high school and she learned computer programming, but we had skills and degrees and the security my extended family provided. I was privileged. It’s what we’ve done for our children. It’s what all responsible adults do. And fuck the “check your privilege” assholes out there. I was privileged and I’m grateful for having been so spoiled. They should be telling Harris SHE should check her damned privilege, and she should stop acting as if she has any idea on earth what it’s like to be working-class. I don’t, and neither does she, being married to a partner at DLA Piper.
C’mon Jack…she’s EXCITING…and, you know, like….JOY…am I right?
PWS
Incidentally, HBO has been running the film “Joy” all month.
I’m sure it’s a coincidence…
That kind of employment is double the wage a burger flipper would earn.
As an aside, the recent big data broker’s breach surely reveals half that redacted data.
McDonald’s corporation has weighed in to settle it. They say they’ve only ever had one clown on their payroll.
Heh!
PWS
Actually, McDonald’s did weigh in. When asked for confirmation, they responded by saying they have no record of Harris ever working at any McDonald’s.
They would have had a record of having issued her a W-2, and given the size of the company that was probably computerized by the 80s. No guarantees that those files haven’t been purged or lost by now, though. Along those lines, though, any wages would have been reported to the Social Security Administration and then to the IRS. I don’t know how specific their records are, but SSA would have something showing she worked somewhere that year.
On the other hand, most McDonald’s are franchises, so the franchise owner would be the one having the employment records and issuing the W-2 (they have the exact same requirements to issue W-2s though). That person may still be alive and might know where his or her records (if any) might be.
There are only so many McDonald’s stores running around in whatever town she went to school or lived in. Some digging would likely be fruitful.
Old Bill, you are correct.
It’s a big issue that I think we don’t do a good job of dealing with or talking about. And there is so much lying and obfuscation that doesn’t help and makes things worse. It muddies the waters.
But wait, there’s more. Rumor has it that William Henry Harrison was not really of humble birth, but was often touted as a man of the people, “born in a log cabin.” It sounded good, might have stretched the truth.
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When we sold the family house in Brighton, NY (perhaps we were the third owners in tract built in 1956) it occurred to me that my parents had the same land line phone number from 1967 until 2022. My parents got the number in 1967 upon moving to Rochester, and then later we moved about a half mile once, in 1972. The only thing that ever changed was area code, which was retained by Buffalo, so Rochester got a new one, 585. That’s not class privilege, though I got some of that, too. That is…stability privilege?
Some people grow up in poor but stable circumstances, in the same house for decades. Some people grow up poor and move a lot when they get evicted, sometimes leaving in the middle of the night, skipping out on the rent. I believe Joseph Califano said his family moved a lot for that reason when he was growing up.
For what it’s worth, Rob Henderson in his memoir _Troubled_ claims he owned very little as a child and and kept everything he owned in a black garbage bag that he took with him as he moved from one foster family to the next, until he eventually was adopted into a stable working class family (later disrupted when the parents divorced). (I haven’t read the book. Most of his material on Substack is paywalled.)
I am fond of Marty Nemko’s story that his father lost all of his relatives in the Holocaust. I’ll quote it.
“My father is a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family to the Nazis. After the war, he was dumped onto a cargo boat and dropped in the Bronx, with no English, no money, no education, and knowing no one. His first job was sewing shirts in a Harlem factory. On the weekend, he sold shirts he had sewn on the streets of Harlem, out of a cardboard box.” –Marty Nemko.
Chris Rock once played a SNL skit as Black Nationalist “Nat X.” Saturday Night Live. If I recall correctly, Nat X had one show guest with a very humble background. “His father was a sharecropper, and his mother was a maid for homeless white people!”
Thanks for reading.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Charles, I guess one or two generations of familial stability and support are overlooked in favor of a government program in attempts to assure a good outcome for a kid. A village and a government program won’t take the place of a functioning family for one or two generations. The idea you can take a bereft kid and let him into Harvard and give him a job at Goldman Sachs and he’ll become a master of the universe in twenty years is stupid and sets up kids (and government programs) for failure.
“Some people grow up in poor but stable circumstances…”
Yep. My clothes were homemade, my brother and I were on medicaid, dentist visits were at Tufts where the students got to practice on us. (That’s a Little Shop of Horrors experience for another time.) And yet every free event – be it museums, the orchestra, the Boston Ballet – was taken advantage of. My parents were musicians (not their professions but often a side gig), very well read, and intellectually curious. When I was older, summers were spent at Tanglewood. I babysat Seiji Ozawa’s kids and was at an after party with Leonard Bernstein. Good times indeed. A vivid college memory is my roommates and I all crawling into the same bed to stay warm because we couldn’t afford to turn the heat up. We would cuddle together and watch old Hollywood musicals and sip tea (the generic kind that came in the black and white box cause we couldn’t afford that either.)
Privilege? It wasn’t money that fueled my childhood but culture and an understanding that a well rounded experience is what makes for a well rounded adult. I hope my grown children will someday feel the same.
There is a sort of privilege that is rarely mentioned in the U.S., which is “two parent privilege.”
Apparently there is a recent book, _Two parent privilege_ by someone named Melissa S. Kearney.
It gets more complicated…in part because sometimes children have one parent because the other died of disease or in combat or in a work accident.
I am told that “father absent families” where the father died in war or at work are statistically different from “father absent families” where parents divorced or never got married.
But what if she worked at McDonalds so her Brahmin Indian mother could fill the bathtub with collard greens?