By Jim Geraghty
Monday,
October 21, 2024
It
is almost required in conservative circles to insist that Kamala Harris is
stupid. And Lord knows, speaking off the cuff, she serves up some stinkers.
Since she was handed the Democratic Party’s nomination without any competition,
even her prepared remarks have been mostly anodyne fluff. She still regularly
demonstrates the political instincts of a lawmaker shaped by the far-left
environs of San Francisco, oblivious to what constitutes the political center
in swing-state America. In just the past week, she skipped the Al Smith Dinner,
told a heckler shouting “Jesus is Lord” that he’s at the wrong rally,
and responded to another heckler who accused her of “billions
of dollars invested in genocide” in Israel that “what he’s talking about, it’s
real, and so that’s not the subject I came to discuss today, but it’s real, and
I respect his voice.”
But
there’s this nagging complication — if Kamala Harris is as stupid as her
critics claim, why does she have the Democratic presidential nomination and a
roughly 50–50 shot of being the first female president in U.S. history? Do you
know how many ruthlessly ambitious Democratic men and women have desperately
yearned to get where she is? How many smart, tough, shrewd, often underhanded
and cold-blooded pols have tried to claw their way up the greasy pole and
fallen short?
And
somehow this supposed dunce managed to do it?
The
record indicates that whatever Harris’s results are on an I.Q. test or other
measure of intellect, she is particularly talented by another measuring stick,
one that may be even more important in politics: She is exceptionally skilled
at getting other people emotionally invested in her success.
There’s
some evidence that Harris has been drastically underestimated from her earliest
years. Back in 2004, her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, told
the Los Angeles Times a story:
Her mother remembers the patronizing tone of
a well-meaning Head Start official in Berkeley who excitedly informed her that
Kamala had been tested as highly intelligent: “You don’t understand — Kamala
could go to college!” What Shyamala G. Harris understood was that this man
assumed her daughter must be an impoverished girl from the rough side of town,
not a privileged child of foreign graduate students whose academic pursuits led
them to U.C. Berkeley.
(Note
this was back when it was okay to refer to Harris’s upbringing as “privileged,”
before “I grew up in a middle-class family” became the reflexive
start to every Harris statement.)
Almost
everyone knows about Harris’s relationship with then-state assembly speaker
Willie Brown while he was still married. It probably shouldn’t be labeled an
“affair” because that term implies secrecy, and there was nothing secret about
it. (The June 24, 1996, issue
of People magazine reported that, “Since 1981, Brown has been estranged
from his wife, Blanche Brown.”)
The
first time Kamala Harris’s name appeared in her hometown newspaper, the San
Francisco Chronicle, was in March 1994, when legendary Chronicle columnist
Herb Caen wrote about a surprise
60th birthday party for then-speaker Brown. “[Clint] Eastwood spilled
champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris, an Alameda [county]
deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a
girl. And she’s black.”
When
Brown was tuning 60, Harris was 29. The young Harris
makes a mortifying quick appearance in a 1995 ABC News Prime Time Live profile
of Brown. Asked by someone off camera, “Are you his daughter?” Harris
smiles and answers, “No, I’m not.”
Caen
wrote about the Brown-Harris relationship regularly; in a June 19, 1995, piece
on Brown’s bid for mayor, Caen wrote, “Brown has given up ‘girls’ in favor of a
woman, Kamala Harris, who is exactly the steadying influence he needs.” In
December 1995, writing about Brown’s mayoral victory party, Caen wrote, “The mayor-elect’s now-famous headgear — the
black baseball cap with ‘Da Mayor’ in gold letters — was an election night gift
from the new first-lady-in-waiting, Kamala Harris.” But one anecdote might have
included some inadvertent foreshadowing:
Mr. B’s after-the-victory party was in the
Ben Swig Suite at the Fairmont, which, he said, “should be the mayor’s
residence.” When a friend said “Well, it’d be OK for a bachelor,” Willie said,
“So what am I?” as Kamala glared from across the room. Keep an eye on these
two.
About
two weeks later, Caen reported the couple had split:
“It’s all over.” With those words,
mayor-elect Brown let word get around over the weekend that his long affair
with Kamala
Harris, an Alameda County asst. district attorney, has ended. This news
came as a shock to many, including those who found Kamala Harris attractive,
intelligent and charming. As a mutual friend once observed, “Willie has finally
graduated from girls to a woman.” Also flabbergasted: the brain-trusters who
found Kamala the perfect antidote to whatever playboy tendencies still reside
in the mayor-elect’s jaunty persona. The consensus: “Kamala and Willie just
looked right together.”
But
Harris’s name wasn’t just attached to Brown in the gossip column. On November
19, 1994, the Los Angeles Times wrote about Brown’s
appointment of Harris to two state positions:
Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his
rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given
high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda
County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
Brown, exercising his power even as his
speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California
Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
Harris, a former deputy district attorney in
Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s
girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her
“the Speaker’s new steady.”
Harris accepted the appointment last week
after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance
Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year.
The San Francisco Weekly calculated that the two
patronage positions in state government paid Harris more than $400,000 in
salary over five years — and remember, that’s in 1995 dollars; $97,088 a year
in 1995 is roughly $203,487.67 in today’s dollars, and $400,000 in January 1995 would be $839,124.42 in today’s dollars.
Years
later, that same publication shared an eye-popping detail of Brown’s
generosity during their relationship:
In fact, as Harris later tells SF Weekly,
the mayor gave her a 1994 BMW, which she traded in for the 1997 model she now
drives. The car remains a tangible link to a man whom many San Franciscans
associate with political chicanery and self-dealing — a connection that doesn’t
bode well for Kamala Harris.
(Fun
fact: Willie Brown once called cult leader Jim Jones, “a
combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and
Chairman Mao.” I suppose you could argue Brown was one-for-four in his
comparison.)
Harris
benefited from the assembly-speaker-turned-mayor’s habit of dating attractive
younger women and his tendency to use his powerful positions to help his
friends and supporters. In 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle completed a five-part series investigating Brown’s
“patronage army,” his ethics violations, his insider deals, and the millions in
soft-money donations to his campaigns:
Among the 3,000 supporters who packed Yerba
Buena Gardens for his January 1996 inauguration were some whose dreams were far
more personal.
They were lawyers, lobbyists, campaign donors
and political players — Brown’s “juice clientele,” as one state legislator
described them at the time — the mayor’s cronies, as they came to be known.
These insiders would form the core of “Willie
Brown Inc.”, a Sacramento-style political machine in which influence with the
mayor has been the trump card in quests for hundreds of millions of dollars in
contracts, land deals, favorable regulatory rulings and jobs.
The
FBI investigated Brown for five years, but no charges were ever filed against
him.
By
mid 2002, Harris was growing frustrated with her boss, Terence Hallinan, and
contemplating a run for district attorney. Hallinan had hired her in 1998 to
head up the office’s career-criminals section; she left after two years to go
work in the San Francisco city attorney’s office. In her 2003 campaign for the job, the San Francisco
Chronicle referred to Brown as Harris’s “political sponsor.”
“I
think he opened doors for her. He introduced her to people,” Mark Buell, a
prominent developer and philanthropist who played a pivotal role as an early
Harris fundraiser, told the Financial Times earlier this year. “Having
Willie’s name attached to something is pretty credible.”
Former
congressman and California Democratic Party chairman John Burton later told Politico, “I met her through Willie. . .
. I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met
her through Willie.”
Burton
made those comments in a detailed 2019 Politico profile of this largely ignored but
pivotal chapter of Harris life — the story of how she became a rising star in
the sharp-elbowed world of San Francisco city politics. The short version is
that Harris was exceptional at persuading wealthy San Franciscans to invest in
her political rise:
Her rise, however, was propelled in and by a
very different milieu. In this less explored piece of her past, Harris used as
a launching pad the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society,
navigating early on this rarefied world of influence and opulence, charming and
partying with movers and shakers — ably cultivating relationships with VIPs who
would become friends and also backers and donors of every one of her political
campaigns, tapping into deep pockets and becoming a popular figure in a small world
dominated by a handful of powerful families. This stratum of San Francisco
remains a profoundly important part of her network — including not just
powerful Democratic donors but an ambassador appointed by President Donald
Trump who ran in the same circles. . . .
As she advanced professionally, jumping from
Alameda County to posts in the offices of the district and city attorneys
across the Bay, she was a trustee, too, of the museum of modern art and active
in causes concerning AIDS and the prevention of domestic abuse, and out and
about at fashion shows and cocktail parties and galas and get-togethers at the
most modish boutiques. She was, in the breezy, buzzy parlance of these kinds of
columns, one of the “Pretty Thangs.” She was a “rising star.” She was “rather perfect.”
And she mingled with “spiffy and powerful friends” who were her contemporaries
as well as their even more influential mothers and fathers. All this was fun,
but it wasn’t unserious. It was seeing and being seen with a purpose, society
activity with political utility. . . .
Outfitted in sharp designer suits and strands
of bright pearls, Harris kickstarted her drive to become San Francisco’s top
cop — in its ritziest, most prestigious locale. Predominantly white Pacific
Heights — hills upon hills, gobsmacking views of the Golden Gate strait,
mansions built and bought with both new tech money and old gold rush cash — is
home to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom and others, one of the
country’s foremost concentrations of politicians and their patrons.
Every
ambitious Democrat in San Francisco, past and present, wants the deep pockets
of the movers and shakers in their corner. Many try; Harris succeeded in
closing the sale.
Chalk
it up to charm or charisma, or other people seeing her as a useful vessel for
their priorities and agenda. Also note that compared to the rest of the
country, the political spectrum in San Francisco runs from A to B. Everyone is
a Democrat and almost everyone is a progressive of some stripe. This means that
an ambitious candidate needs qualities beyond political stances to stand out
from the crowd.
The Financial Times offered some more details:
By day, Harris would toil in the courts. By
night, she was gravitating to the glittery world of San Francisco. She might be
at the symphony opening with [longtime friend and state assemblyman Mark] Leno
or the Getty mansion with Newsom and other swells. She was, by all accounts,
bright and beautiful. But there was some other, ineffable quality that made her
shine. “It was impossible not to survey the room and have your eyes fixed on
her,” said Leno, recalling his first encounter with Harris in a crowded union
hall in 1995. “She’s just a presence.”
You
would be surprised how many celebrities played a role in the 2003 San Francisco district attorney race. Woody Harrelson
helped incumbent Hallman raise money, while Harris was backed by actors Chris
Rock and Delroy Lindo, comedian Eddie Griffin and talk-show host Montel
Williams. (Williams and Harris briefly dated.)
And
when push came to shove, the most powerful figures in San Francisco Democratic politics
chose to back her in subtle ways over two older, better-known white men:
Members of the low-profile but powerful San
Francisco County Democratic Central Committee are wrangling over the
temperamental district attorney’s fate. Hallinan badly needs the Central
Committee endorsement to bolster his bid for a third term in November. Behind
him sits Bill Fazio, a defense attorney who has twice lost to the incumbent by
thin margins. Both men studiously avoid looking across the room, where neophyte
candidate Kamala Harris huddles with her campaign team. Harris has been
lobbying Central Committee honchos — who include U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and
House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi — for months, asking them to deny their
influential support to both male candidates.
And in the end, that’s exactly what the
leaders of San Francisco’s one-party system do. In a significant victory for
Harris, they vote “no endorsement,” withholding their blessing for the first
time from the incumbent DA. A few days later, Harris adds a valuable
endorsement from Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union to her
growing trophy list, which includes a number of other union locals and
Democratic clubs that traditionally have gone for Hallinan (she even bags the
Irish American Democratic Club).
Hallinan
and Fazio tried to make Harris’s past relationship with Brown an issue,
insinuating she would turn a blind eye to any corruption connected to Brown. In
what was likely her first high-profile interview, Harris
fumed about the tactic:
Harris routinely tries to distance herself
from her ex-squeeze, whom she hates even talking about. The mere mention
of their former liaison makes her shoulders tense, her hands clench, and her
eyes narrow.
“I refuse,” she says vehemently, “to design
my campaign around criticizing Willie Brown for the sake of appearing to be
independent when I have no doubt that I am independent of him — and that he
would probably right now express some fright about the fact
that he cannot control me.”
“His career is over; I will be alive and
kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing.”
Kamala (pronounced “KAH-mah-lah”) Harris is
clearly striving to be her own person, to act independently of special
interests, to negate the bimbo/sugar daddy imagery propagated by her opponents.
And in person, she does this successfully — she consistently comes across as
forthright, intelligent, and competent.
That
profile predicted, “In a high-profile sprint against an aging incumbent, Harris
— with her brains, connections, and buppie glamour — might just emerge
victorious.”
The
editors of San Francisco magazine headlined their article about the
Harris-Hallinan runoff, “Beauty and the Beast.” In
2019, the article’s writer, Joan Walsh, wrote that the headline and article
embarrass her now, describing Harris as “black-eyed, raven-haired,
latte-skinned,” and “smart and strategic, ribald and flirty.” Walsh wrote that
a close friend of Harris “told me Harris initiated the breakup [with Brown],
once it became clear that Brown would never leave his wife.” Walsh also wrote
that she interviewed Brown, and Brown affirmed that Harris ended the
relationship: “She ended it because she concluded there was no permanency in
our relationship, and she was absolutely right.”
Harris
did emerge victorious in that district attorney’s race; ironically, she was
elected the city’s top law-enforcement officer while violating the law. In October 2002, “The San Francisco Ethics Commission found
that district attorney candidate Kamala Harris violated the city’s campaign
finance law — misconduct that will cost her campaign up to $34,000 in penalties
and spending on corrective measures.”
By
2004, the Los Angeles Times was
raving about the “striking 39-year-old single woman with a radiant smile
who is known for her intellect, work ethic and, as one attorney puts it, ‘the
aura of her personality.’. . . On this day at Delancey Street, the district
attorney is stylishly dressed in a pinstriped suit, high heels and a doubled
loop of pearls. Who would play her in a movie? ‘Maybe someone like Halle
Berry,’ suggests one admirer.”
In
a lengthy profile, Times correspondent Scott Duke Harris wrote, “With an
Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris strikes some observers as a
California version of Barack Obama, the Illinois lawmaker of racially mixed
heritage who keynoted the Democratic convention and is favored to be elected to
the U.S. Senate.” It was among the first of many times that Harris would be
compared to Obama.
By
her second term as district attorney, the Obama comparisons were common. On
June 19, 2009, San Francisco Weekly wrote, “The rumor mill is
already swirling with hints that her ultimate goal is the chair currently
occupied by America’s first black POTUS, Barack Obama.” That November, PBS
journalist Gwen Ifill called Harris, “the female Barack Obama.” Ifill had just
written a book about a rising generation of black leaders, entitled The
Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. (She had signed the deal to write the book before she was offered the
job of moderating the 2008 presidential debate.)
And
in office, Obama himself proved to be an outspoken fan. At a Democratic
National Committee luncheon in California in 2013, Obama said, “She’s brilliant
and she’s dedicated, she’s tough. . . . She also happens to be, by far, the
best-looking attorney general. . . . It’s true! C’mon.” New York magazine’s
Jonathan Chait wrote that Obama needed “gender sensitivity
training” and “the example he’s setting here is disgraceful.” Obama called
Harris to apologize for the remark.
At
every key moment in her career until her presidential campaign, Harris has had
bigger, wealthier, more powerful, and more influential names sizing her up and
concluding she was the one. And she’s taken that and her politicking skills to
two terms as city district attorney, two terms as state attorney general, one
term as senator, and one term as vice president. Because she dropped out of the
2020 Democratic primary before any votes were cast, she’s never actually lost a
race in her life; the closest she came was finishing second out of three
candidates in the first round of that 2003 district attorney race, qualifying
for the runoff.
Since
becoming the Democratic nominee, she has raised more than $1 billion in less than three months. The
Harris campaign has 2,500 staff members located in 353 offices. As the Washington
Post laid out, her campaign has “more staff, more volunteers, a
larger surrogate operation, more digital advertising, a more sophisticated
smartphone-based organizing program and extra money for extraneous bells and
whistles typically reserved for corporate product launches and professional
sports championships.” The New York Times examined efforts in four pivotal counties — Erie County,
Pa., Kenosha County, Wis., Maricopa County, Ariz., and Cobb County, Ga., and
concluded that “Democrats, in many places, are outpacing Republicans in terms
of paid staff and doors knocked.”
If
Kamala Harris is such a hapless dunce, how does she keep getting so many other
people to work around the clock to elect her?
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