Harris's résumé a year after she graduated college makes no mention of McDonald's
The first all-female audience ever on The Drew Barrymore Show was whooping and cheering for Kamala Harris, its guest of honor, this April when Barrymore’s sidekick, Ross Matthews, threw a softball at the vice president.
"I heard a rumor that you worked at McDonald’s?"
"I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald’s," laughed Harris. "When I was at school … I did fries. And then I did the cashier."
"I didn’t know that about you," gasped Barrymore.
Neither did anyone who followed Harris’s long career in public life—that is, until she ran for president in 2019 and began to make the job a centerpiece of her biography.
Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she "was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s."
McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as "her humble background." (Harris is the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher, whom her campaign calls "a working mother," and a tenured Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)
Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. "Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college," campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she "work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s." And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that "she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s."
At the same time, however, Harris’s image makers tweaked the story ever so slightly. According to an August 14 item in Politico, an early cut of a Harris campaign ad said she worked at McDonald’s to "pay her way" through college. Aides changed the script to reflect that "she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money," as Politico put it.
