The first all-female audience ever The Drew Barrymore Show cheered and cheered for his guest of honor Kamala Harris in April when Barrymore’s buddy Ross Matthews threw a softball at the vice president.

“I heard a rumor that you work at McDonald’s?”

“I did. Yes, I worked at McDonald’s,” Harris laughed. “When I was in school… I made fries. And then I was a cashier.”

“I didn’t know that about you,” Barrymore gasped.

This was also true for everyone who followed Harris’ long career in public life – until she ran for president in 2019 and began to make the office a central part of her biography.

Harris’s job at McDonald’s, which she reportedly spent at a branch in California’s Bay Area the summer after her freshman year of college, is a new addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail or in two books. It is absent from a job application and resume she submitted a year after graduating from college. Outside biographers did not write about it. It was only when Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke at a labor rally in Las Vegas that she mentioned the job, telling the crowd she was “a student when I worked at McDonald’s.”

McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast-food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is not about politics but about image, is using her job at the fast-food chain to show what the Washington Postin a credulous article this month about the Harris-McDonald’s connection, describing it as “her humble background.” (Harris is the daughter of a prominent cancer researcher, described in her campaign as a “working mother,” and a tenured economist at Stanford who separated when Harris and her sister were children.)

Earlier this month, Harris’ campaign said she used her McDonald’s salary to pay for college. “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at McDonald’s to pay for college,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. An ad from a super PAC supporting Harris said she “paid for college at McDonald’s.” And former President Bill Clinton joked at the Democratic National Convention that she would “break my record as president for spending the most time at McDonald’s.”

At the same time, however, Harris’ image makers have changed the story slightly. According to an August 14 article in Politico, An early cut of a Harris campaign ad said she worked at McDonald’s to pay for college. Staff changed the script to say she actually took the summer job just to earn some extra spending money. Politico put it.

The Politico History that took place just hours after the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign with a series of detailed questions about Harris’ claims about her job at McDonald’s, but did not say when exactly – or where – Harris worked at the restaurant. The campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon‘s inquiries.

It’s possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s. But the absence of this detail in public records and her campaign team’s reticence and refusal to provide further details raise questions about what is now a basic narrative.

On Monday, New York Times reported without citing sources that Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, and moved to Montreal with her mother and younger sister at age 12, “returned to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.” Harris attended college at Howard University in Washington, DC

If some details of the job differ or others are unclear, it may be because there is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before the union rally in Las Vegas in June 2019.

Her two memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019, do not mention the job.

The truths we havepublished before her first presidential bid, includes a passage about the “many jobs” she had while in college, but makes no mention of McDonald’s. It also devotes a chapter to working-class struggles and attacks the “starvation wages” of the service industry. Harris’ job at McDonald’s is also absent from her 2009 book. Smart on Crime: A professional prosecutor’s plan for more security.

The job is also not mentioned in two biographies about Harris. In a 2021 autobiography by Stacey Johnson-Batiste, Harris’ lifelong friend who grew up with her in California, McDonald’s is not mentioned anywhere in the text. Dan Morain, author of Kamala’s Way: An American Lifesaid the Free Beacon He said he was “not aware” of her work at McDonald’s.

During Harris’ nomination speech to the Democratic National Committee earlier this month, which several media outlets dubbed a “reintroduction,” she made no mention of McDonald’s. Harris also refrained from mentioning the Golden Arches at a rally in Milwaukee the same week.

The Free Beacon Harris also obtained a copy of Harris’ October 1987 application form for a law clerk position in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. On that form, Harris, then a law student, listed several jobs — including a month-long office job at a stock brokerage — in a section that asked her to list all the jobs she had held over the past 10 years. McDonald’s is missing.

Harris lists three jobs on her application and five in total on an attached resume, according to documents obtained through a public records request. Harris, who submitted the application as a sophomore at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, listed extensive life experiences on her resume — “extensive travel in India, Africa (and) Europe” and “lived in Montreal, Canada for six years” — but not McDonald’s.

Politicians who worked menial jobs in the restaurant industry as teenagers are often quick to point to that as a way of proving their working-class affiliation. Future President Barack Obama said during his 2008 campaign that his first job selling ice cream at Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu taught him the virtues of responsibility and hard work.

But unlike Harris, there was no secret about Obama’s first job. News agencies published the address of the restaurant. Photographers posted pictures of the restaurant online. Baskin-Robbins proudly states on its website that Obama used to sell ice cream for the chain. The manager of the store joked after the 2008 election that she was something of a media expert after she had spoken to reporters from Good morning AmericaCNN and a Norwegian television station ask questions about Obama.

“Now I’m used to talking to reporters,” Baskin-Robbins manager Sherill Fernandez told Los Angeles Times in 2009. “It’s always the same questions. And the same answers.”

The same cannot be said of Harris. Although the Just Although Harris reported she worked at an Alameda location, her campaign team has not provided further details to other news organizations. The former owner of a McDonald’s in Alameda that opened in 1982 — a year before Harris reportedly worked there — did not respond to a request for comment.

The McDonald’s Corporation, which prides itself on its 84-year history and employs a full-time archivist as its official historian, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It did not comment on Harris’ claims to have made the fries.