On the menu today: I have no beef with Charlie Cooke’s brilliant trilogy, “A-hole, Lunatic, Idiot.” But I do think the caricature of Kamala Harris as a bumbling dunce makes it easy to underestimate her, particularly in the closing weeks of an exceptionally close and high-stakes presidential campaign. Harris’s past is littered with older and more experienced men who saw her as easy pickings and came up short on Election Day. Read on to learn how Harris’s political career got started, her connection to Clint Eastwood, how she persuaded the wealthiest and most powerful elites of San Francisco to back her when she was a little-known underdog, the BMW she received as a gift, who ended her relationship with Willie Brown, and the speculation that Halle Berry would play her in a movie someday.
A Closer Look at Harris’s Origins
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?
ADDENDA: You’re going to want to read this long, detailed, fascinating, and often grim portrait of modern China by Thérèse Shaheen, about a country ruled by a regime with grand ambitions but beset by worsening demography, debt, overproduction, and environmental disasters:
Mass urbanization and overbuilding is driving subsidence, another aspect of China’s environmental disaster. Technically, subsidence is the downward vertical movement of Earth’s surface. The result: China’s cities are sinking. The overpopulated cities, with their massive infrastructure and tall buildings, are simply too big for the land on which they sit. A primary cause is the overuse of groundwater beneath the cities, with the weight of overbuilding causing gradual sinking into the voids beneath. While subsidence is not unique to China, the problem there is especially large and entrenched. About 900 million people live in China’s cities. A third of them are already impacted by the effects of subsidence, according to analysis in the journal Science earlier this year. Nearly half of China’s more than 80 major cities, including Beijing (population 22 million) and Shanghai (population 25 million) are sinking. . . .
In its zeal to industrialize, Beijing has long abused the basic human rights of its citizens and shown scant regard for the environment. The push into alternative-energy technology is just following that same trend. What we’re seeing through the impacts of extreme weather, though, is in large part the wages of failed policies. Desertification has led to the inability of the land to absorb or channel the rainfall that is wiping out urban areas, with flash floods washing away whole communities. Western media, under heavy censorship, reveal only snippets of these crises, but citizen journalists have documented dozens of dam breaches, road and bridge collapses, and other failures resulting from shoddy “tofu dreg” construction compounded by weather extremes. “Tofu dreg” has for years referred to poorly designed and managed government construction projects. Over the decades, tens of thousands of Chinese have been killed by failed infrastructure.
Thanks to those who watched my appearance Friday night on Abby Phillips’s Newsnight on CNN; you can watch one segment about undecided voters here and a stoic discussion of masculinity here.
Thanks to Gary for his kind review of Dueling Six Demons: “Jim Geraghty combines his extensive knowledge and experience of geopolitical hotspots with a lot of fun pop culture references. I just kept reading and reading. Can’t wait for the next one.”
And thanks to Girardot for the kind review of Gathering Five Storms: “This is a very good page-turner, particularly as the story built to its climax. The epilogue alone is worth waiting for!”