Residents of New Hampshire, where Presidential hopefuls often court diners at greasy spoons, have come to expect high-level politico drop-ins. Not long ago, a doctor’s office in Portsmouth prepared itself for a visit from the Vice-President. A half-dozen staffers stood at attention in the waiting room, ready for duties both Hippocratic and patriotic. A white woman with blond hair who was several months pregnant entered and checked in with the receptionist: she, Kamala Harris, was there for her scheduled appointment. The letdown was palpable. The patient rolled her eyes. “I was, like, ‘Why would the Vice-President go to a doctor in Portsmouth?’ ” Harris, a thirty-two-year-old resident of nearby Seabrook, said recently. Generally, she goes by Kamii.
Some Presidents have plenty of name duplicates. There are more than a hundred George Bushes in New York alone; IMDb has listings for almost a hundred James, Jimmy, or Jim Carters. A few even achieve a prominence of their own. In the early sixties, the Washington Senators had a third baseman named John Kennedy, who also shared a birthday with the then President. The Virginia oncologist Donald L. Trump has inspired a rare bit of humility from the forty-fifth President, who once said that the doctor is “probably more important than Donald J. Trump, which is me.”
If measuring Presidential-name popularity on a scale of Barack Obama to Andrew Johnson, Kamala Harris would fall somewhere around Martin Van Buren: others exist, but they’re rare. Public-records searches suggest that you could count them on your fingers. Some, like their political namesake, seem to be reticent with the press. Others might reply to an inquiring text with “I am not the vice president.” Their name is one part common (Harris is the twenty-fifth most popular surname in the U.S.), one part less so (Kamala is five thousand one hundred and thirtieth among given names, according to MyNameStats.com). The forty-nine-year-old Kamala Harris of San Bernardino, California, made it four decades without encountering anyone with even her first name, let alone her first and last. Recently, she, too, visited a new doctor and was met with disbelief. “I showed my driver’s license,” she said. She was named Kamala, in the seventies, after a similar-sounding form of funk dancing that her father liked. This past summer, people would jokingly ask who she was going to pick as her running mate.
“It gets annoying quick,” Kamii said. She has become accustomed to the routine when she presents I.D. at her local dispensary: “It’s, like, a whole five-minute thing of ‘That’s so crazy, what are the odds?’ You have to just be polite and entertain it, you know?” Growing up was worse. Kids twisted her first name into vulgarities.
The Vice-President, as her grandnieces memorably demonstrated at the D.N.C., pronounces her first name like “comma-la,” with emphasis on the first syllable: KAH-muh-luh. Trump and his partisans have continually deployed it as “Kuh-MAH-la.” Perhaps they just can’t shake the preferred pronunciations of Kamala Khan, a Marvel superheroine who débuted in 2013, and Kamala the Ugandan Giant, a late pro wrestler who occasionally took on Trump’s pal Hulk Hogan. (That Kamala’s real name: James Harris.) More likely, it’s a disrespectful dig, with a subtext of othering. “I don’t think that’s right,” the San Bernardino Kamala Harris said, of such willful mispronunciations. But, if you called her KAH-muh-luh, that wouldn’t be quite right, either: she pronounces it like Pamela. So does Kamii in New Hampshire.
Kamala Plaisted, of Weston, Connecticut, does, too. She’s part of another select club: the former Kamala Harrises. Like Kamala DeLuz, of Sacramento (who goes by Denise, her middle name), Plaisted dropped Harris, her maiden name, when she got married, twenty years ago. Plaisted, who is of mixed European stock, was named in honor of the Indian-born actress Kamala Devi, whose husband, Chuck Connors, Plaisted’s mother adored. (Devi is also the Vice-President’s middle name.) She is pretty sure that she was once confused with the Veep, in the mid-nineties, when she gave her name to a clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue, who then called up an account with a San Francisco address. “The lovely girl was, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, there’s two of you!’ ” Plaisted recalled. Her name change has failed to insulate her from being bothered by impassioned non-constituents on the phone. “Some have been threatening,” she said. “And a couple have been, like, ‘Oh, please, you’re the only one that can help us! I know who you are!’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m not.’ ”
Mixups can have their benefits. Every once in a while, the New Hampshire Kamala Harris reported, she receives an unsolicited PayPal deposit from a mistaken would-be donor. It’s typically five or ten bucks, which has been a help to her as a single mother of three. “That side of it has been pretty cool,” she said. She doesn’t correct them. ♦
