Harris' Hurdles, and the Stakes
A Harris presidency has the potential to complete the turning point for America that Barack Obama started. But first she has to get in the driver's seat.
This writer first encountered Kamala Devi Harris in the summer of 1995 when volunteering for then-California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s campaign for mayor of San Francisco during a merchant walk on Grant Avenue in North Beach. I thought she was smart and articulate and enjoyed being a fly on the wall, witnessing at least the mechanisms of a major political campaign. As Brown’s girlfriend, she was also the loyal trooper.
By the close of that campaign, some months later but not far away at the victory rally at the Longshoremens’ Hall in Fisherman's Wharf, She presented Brown with a ball cap emblazoned with the words “DA MAYOR,” a title that would stick to him throughout his two terms.
But Harris would not stay with Brown long. Although separated from his wife Blanche since the 1980s, he remained married to her for family reasons, and that wouldn’t change. As he acknowledged in a recent interview, she was the one who dumped him, though he remained as one of many critical political relationships.
At the time, Harris was already a well-regarded veteran prosecutor specializing in child sex abuse cases at the storied Alameda County District Attorney's Office, where former governor and Chief Justice Earl Warren had also started a career. When San Francisco's DA Terence Hallinan recruited her to run the career criminals unit in 1998, Harris may well have seen her connection to Brown as both a blessing and a curse politically. Her experience in the office at that time appears to have proved that out.
Hallinan was a singular figure who embodied everything wrong with San Francisco politics. The son of a wealthy pro-Soviet activist and lawyer, his inherited privilege and politics eased his way into the city’s Progressive ranks. He also had a history of violent, boorish, and misogynistic behavior. Riding Brown’s coattails, he was elected DA in 1995 and mismanaged the office while trying to build a reputation as a “progressive prosecutor,” much like Chesa Boudin, who had been elected to the office on a similar platform before being recalled.
Seemingly a perfect fit to be a manager in both record and image for Hallinan’s office, she was recommended to him not only by Brown but by Dick Iglehart, a veteran prosecutor brought in to be Hallinan’s chief deputy and keep the office professional. According to Hallinan’s former spokesperson, Fred Gardner, Harris’ was an excellent and loyal performer in the office who mentored younger lawyers through difficult cases.
Still, her performance and ambition aroused paranoia in Hallinan and Darrell Solomon, yet another in a series of chief deputies brought in to bolster Hallinan’s shambolic leadership. Harris left the office with several other deputies, and Solomon himself soon left. While Harris went on to direct child abuse and neglect cases at the City Attorney’s office, the DA’s office had a reputation by 2003 as the worst-performing prosecutor’s office in the state and as a plea bargain and diversion mill. The Thomas Theorem would soon play out for Hallinan as Harris cut short his run for a third term that year.
Harris’ subsequent record as District Attorney and Attorney General tends to confound ideologues, reflecting both a firm faith in the American justice system's importance and a strong commitment to reducing its potential to worsen inequality. Law professor and Boudin booster Lara Bazelon wrote that she “was on the wrong side of history” in 2019, and some conservatives echoed her criticisms. That said, Bazelon is pragmatic about the current moment.
The “Kamala the Cop” badge is now increasingly seen as an asset in the campaign against former President Donald Trump, whose previous life as a shifty property magnate, even before his recent 34 felony convictions, had, as the Flying Squad would say, “considerable form.”
Collective recognition of the necessity of the current moment - saving American democracy from the most significant electoral threat it’s faced since Huey Long - may have saved Kamala Harris from the circular firing squad of American left-liberalism. But will it save her from increasingly corrosive attacks from the right?
Trolls have already come out the gate justifying attacks on Harris’ relationship with Brown, attempting to frame her as a homewrecker and political golddigger who lacks “tradwife” credentials. Characterizations of Harris as a “DEI Vice President” may be condemned by mainstream and even some edgier conservatives but nevertheless still fuel dog-whistle attacks on a candidate that bot drovers foreign and domestic can use to highlight her ethnicity, gender, and “just wrong background" to rationalize and inflame the sentiment of relative deprivation and entitlement that drives diehard Trump voters.
A stickier criticism of Harris is the perception—a false one—that she’s done little as Vice President. In many ways, that goes back to her being a better lawyer than a self-promoting politician, with a career trajectory marked by caution.
In addition to her nationwide advocacy for fundamental rights, she’s also made her tenure on the job into a masterclass on foreign policy and America’s place in an evolving world order. She’s repeatedly been tough, empathetic, and effective in dealing with foreign leaders behind the scenes. She deeply gets the need for continued assertive but open engagement by America with a world where authoritarian regimes are increasingly willing to throw geopolitical Hail Marys to ensure the survival of their regimes at the peril of others.
But most voters have yet to be aware of this. Her speech at the Munich Security Conference back in February, in the wake of the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, offers a peek.
As President, Kamala Harris has tremendous potential to finish turning a corner on America’s trajectory at home and abroad, which the Obama administration left largely unfinished. But first, we must save her from our contemporary politics.