Then Ace Smith, my chief strategist, pulled me aside.
“How’s it looking?” I asked.
“It’s going to be a very long night,” Ace said. My opponent was in the lead.
I’d always known that I could take nothing for granted. Even plenty of fellow Democrats had considered me a long shot, and some hadn’t held back in saying so. One longtime political strategist announced to an audience at UC Irvine that there was no way I could win, because I was “a woman running for attorney general, a woman who is a minority, a woman who is a minority who is anti–death penalty, a woman who is a minority who is anti–death penalty who is DA of wacky San Francisco.” Old stereotypes die hard. I was convinced that my perspective and experience made me the strongest candidate in the race, but I didn’t know if the voters would agree. The past few weeks, I’d done so much knocking on wood that my knuckles were bruised.
By 10 p.m., we were not much closer to knowing the outcome of the race. I was trailing, but we knew that a lot of precincts had yet to report. Ace suggested that I go out and address the crowd. “The cameras aren’t going to stay much longer,” he said, “so if you have a message for your supporters tonight, I think you should do that now.” It sounded like a smart idea to me.
I left the staff room, spent a few quiet minutes thinking about what I would say, then straightened my suit jacket and walked into the main room and onto the stage. I told the audience that it was going to be a long night, but that it was going to be a good night, too. My opponent was losing ground by the minute, I assured them. I reminded them what our campaign was about and what we stood for. “This campaign is so much bigger than me. It is so much bigger than any one person.”
At some point during my speech, I noticed a shift in the room. People seemed to be getting emotional. Back in the staff room, I later learned, two of my best friends, Chrisette and Vanessa, were sitting on the couch, sipping wine, listening to my speech. Chrisette turned to Vanessa:
“I don’t think she knows.”
“I don’t think she knows, either.”
“You gonna tell her?”
“Nope. You?”
“Nope.”
I was just finishing my remarks when I saw Debbie Mesloh, my longtime communications adviser, approaching. She mouthed to me, “Get off the stage and go to the back room, now.” That wasn’t reassuring. I finished my remarks and was making my way to Debbie when I was intercepted by a reporter and her cameraman.
“So what do you think happened?” she asked, putting the microphone in my face.
“I think we ran a really great race and it’s going to be a long night.” I said.
The reporter seemed confused, and so was I. The more questions she asked, the more it was clear we weren’t connecting at all. Clearly something had happened, and I was out of the loop. When I finally got back to the staff room, I learned what. While I’d been onstage, talking about what lay ahead, the San Francisco Chronicle had called the race for my opponent. No wonder people were crying! I’d been the only one out there who thought we were still in the game.
Realizing that our hometown paper had called the race against us felt like a punch in the gut. The mood was grim as my team and I huddled together in the greenroom. After so many months of working so hard, excitement was giving way to exhaustion. I looked around at the slumping shoulders and sad expressions. I couldn’t bear the thought of sending our volunteers home feeling this way.
Ace called me over. “Listen, I’m looking at the numbers, and a lot of our strongest areas haven’t come in. They called the race too early. We’re still in this.”
I knew he couldn’t see the future—but Ace wasn’t the kind of person who blew smoke. He knew California down to the precinct level, better than perhaps anyone in the state. If he thought we were still in it, I believed him. I told my supporters we weren’t giving up.
My opponent had a different view of things. Around 11 p.m., he stood up in front of the cameras and delivered a speech in Los Angeles declaring victory. But we waited. And waited—getting regular updates from the field and trying to keep one another’s spirits high.
Around 1 a.m., I leaned over to my childhood friend Derreck, who was like a cousin and who owned a chicken and waffle restaurant in Oakland. “Is your kitchen still open?”
“Don’t worry,” he promised. “I’ll take care of it.”
Sure enough, the next thing I knew, Delancey Street was filled with the mouthwatering aroma of fried chicken and corn bread and greens and candied yams. We all gathered around the aluminum pans and ate. About an hour later, with 89 percent of the precincts in, we were tied.
Finally, I turned to Maya. “I’m exhausted. Do you think anybody’s going to have a problem if I leave?”
“Everybody will be fine,” she assured me. “People are waiting for you to leave so they can, too.”
I went home and got maybe an hour or two of sleep, only to be jolted back awake by the sound of news helicopters circling in the sky. The Giants were celebrating their first World Series win in more than fifty years with a parade down Market Street. Most of the city was dressed in orange and black.
But the Giants’ victory wasn’t the only good news. More votes had come in, and I was now ahead in the race, albeit only by a few thousand votes. From the lowest of lows, now it felt like our campaign had vaulted to the peak of the mountain—on a day when music was rising from the streets and confetti raining down from the skies.
With two million votes still waiting to be tallied, there was a good chance we weren’t going to know the results for weeks. The counties had about a month to finish counting and certify their tallies.
My phone rang. It was John Keker, a storied lawyer in the Bay Area and a dear friend. He told me that he was assembling a team of top lawyers. “Kamala, we’re ready to convene to defend you if there’s a recount.” If there was going to be a recount, it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. The earliest that either of us could request one would be November 30.
In the meantime, members of my campaign staff, led by my campaign manager, Brian Brokaw, activated dozens of volunteers, who put off their vacation plans and got back to work. They fanned out across the state, in county after county, to monitor the vote counting in real time and report any irregularities. Days extended into weeks. Thanksgiving was fast approaching. And all the while, there was a roller coaster of results, making the whole thing pretty excruciating. It reminded me of my days trying cases, when a jury would go off to deliberate and there was nothing left to do but wait. We reconciled ourselves to the fact that nothing was likely to happen with the count over Thanksgiving weekend, so we sent everyone home to be with their families.
Early Wednesday morning, I headed for the airport to catch a flight to New York. I was going to spend the holiday with Maya, my brother-in-law, Tony, and my niece, Meena.
As we were pulling off the highway, I got a text from a district attorney who had supported my opponent. “I look forward to working with you,” it read.
I called my campaign team. “What’s going on? Have you heard anything?” I asked.
“We’re hearing he’s going to have a press conference. That’s all we know right now.” I was just pulling into the airport terminal. “We’ll check into it and get back to you.” I made it through security and onto the plane without hearing another word. I was in an aisle seat, and fellow passengers, in their Giants caps and jerseys, were walking past me asking, “Kamala, have you won yet? Do you know what’s going on?” All I could do was smile and say, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I took out my phone and realized that, going through the airport, I’d missed an incoming call. There was a voicemail from my opponent asking me to call him back. I dialed his number as the cabin doors were closing and the flight attendants were directing passengers to put their cell phones away.
“I want you to kn
ow I’ll be conceding,” he said.
“You ran a great race,” I said.
“I hope you know how big a job this is going to be,” he added.
“Have a nice Thanksgiving with your family,” I replied.
And that was it. Of the nearly nine million ballots cast statewide, I had won by the equivalent of three votes per precinct. I was so relieved, so excited, so ready to start. I wanted to call everyone, but the next thing I knew, we were barreling down the runway, and then we were in the air—with no Wi-Fi. My twenty-one-day election night was over, and all I could do was sit there. Alone with my thoughts. For five hours.
* * *
• • •
Because the count had taken so long, there was only a month to process the victory before my swearing-in. And beyond the election, I was also still processing the grief of my mother’s death. She’d passed away the year before, in February 2009, as the long, hard-fought campaign was just getting under way. I will say more about this in a chapter to come, but, needless to say, it was crushing to lose her. I knew what my election would have meant to her. How I wished she could be there to see it.
When January 3, 2011, arrived, I walked down the stairs of the California Museum for Women, History, and the Arts, in Sacramento, to greet the standing-room-only crowd. We had arranged for a wonderful inaugural ceremony, with Bishop T. Larry Kirkland Sr. giving the opening invocation and a gospel singer at the close. Flags were waving, dignitaries were there, observers peered down from the balcony. Maya held Mrs. Shelton’s Bible as I took the oath of office. But what I remember most vividly about the day was the worry I felt about saying my mother’s name in my address while keeping my composure. I’d practiced over and over again, and choked up every time. But it was important to me that her name be spoken in that room, because none of what I had achieved would have been possible without her.
“Today, with this oath,” I told the crowd, “we affirm the principle that every Californian matters.”
It was a principle that would be put to the test in the heady weeks that followed. Later that month, 37,000 homeowners lined up in Los Angeles to plead with banks to modify their mortgages so they could stay in their homes. In Florida, there were lines that quite literally stretched for days. “In the 1930s, we had bread lines,” said Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, during a segment on the foreclosure crisis. “Venture out before dawn in America today and you’ll find mortgage lines.”
On my first day in office, I gathered my senior team and told them that we needed to get involved right away in the multistate investigation into the banks. I had appointed Michael Troncoso, a longtime member of my team, as chief counsel in the attorney general’s office, and Brian Nelson as special assistant attorney general. I asked them to dig in and get us up to speed.
Inside the office we were preparing for battle. Outside the office, we were constantly reminded of who we were fighting for. At every event we held, there was always a group of people—sometimes five or ten or twenty—who had come in the hope of seeing me and asking for my help, face-to-face. Most brought their paperwork with them—accordion folders and manila envelopes overflowing with mortgage documents and foreclosure notices and handwritten notes. Some had driven hundreds of miles to find me.
I’ll never forget the woman who interrupted a small health care event I was doing at Stanford. She stood up in the audience, tears streaming down her face, desperation in her voice. “I need help. You need to help me. I need you to help call the bank and tell them to let me stay in my home. Please, I’m begging you.” It was heartbreaking.
I also knew there were tens of thousands of people just like her, fighting for their lives, who didn’t have the ability to track down the attorney general in person. So we went directly to them, holding roundtable meetings in community centers across the state. I wanted them to see us. I also wanted my team to see them, so that when we were sitting across from the bank executives in a conference room, we’d remember who we were representing. At one of these convenings, I was speaking to a man about the problems he was having with the banks. His young son was playing quietly nearby. And then the little boy came over and looked up at his father.
“Daddy, what does ‘underwater’ mean?”
I could see the awful fear in his eyes. He thought his father was literally drowning.
It was a terrible thing to contemplate. But the metaphor was apt: a lot of people had gone under. Still more were clinging by their fingernails to the edge. And every day that went by, more and more of those desperate people were losing their grip.
Over the course of our battle with the banks, we’d heard so many stories that underscored that these issues weren’t intellectual or academic; they were about people’s lives. At one homeowners’ roundtable, a woman described with pride the home she had saved up to buy in 1997—the first home she’d ever purchased as an adult. After falling one month behind on a loan payment in early 2009, she’d called her lender asking for advice. Representatives for the lender said they could help, but after months of their insisting she produce and fax them endless paperwork, of sending her documents without explanation and demanding that she sign, of keeping her in the dark as she sought answers to her questions, her home was foreclosed upon from under her feet.
Fighting back tears as she shared her story with me, she said, “I’m sorry. I know it’s just a house . . .” But she knew, as we all do, that it’s never “just a house.”
My first opportunity to get personally involved in the multistate talks arrived in early March. The National Association of Attorneys General—whose acronym, NAAG, is appropriate—was holding its annual multiday meeting at the Fairmont hotel, in Washington, DC. I flew in with my team. All fifty attorneys general were there, seated in alphabetical order by state. I took my spot between Arkansas and Colorado.
As the conversation turned from general business to the multistate investigation, it suddenly became clear to me that the investigation wasn’t complete; there were still many unanswered questions. Yet they were talking settlement. They had a number on the table, and I got the impression that it was basically a done deal. All that seemed left to do was divide the money among the states—and that was exactly what was happening.
I was dumbfounded. What was the number based on? How did they come up with it? How could we negotiate a settlement when we hadn’t completed an investigation?
But what shocked me most wasn’t the choosing of an arbitrary dollar figure. It was that in exchange for settling, the banks were going to be given a wholesale release against any potential future claims—a blank check of immunity for whatever crimes they might have committed. That meant that by settling with them on the issue of robo-signing, we could be prohibited from bringing a future case against them that related to the mortgage-backed securities that had caused the crash.
During a break in the session, I gathered my team. The settlement was going to be on the agenda again in the afternoon.
“I’m not going to that meeting,” I told them. “This thing is baked.” I knew that if I joined the meeting, the conversation would just pick up where it had left off. They weren’t going to turn back just because a new AG expressed concerns. But if they knew I would pull out of the negotiations if I had to, that might move some minds. California had more foreclosures than any other state, making it the biggest exposure of liability for the banks. If the banks couldn’t get a settlement with me, they weren’t going to settle with anyone. It was one thing to know I had this leverage; it was another to convince the others I was willing to use it. If I skipped the afternoon session, my empty chair would express that message better than I ever could.
My staff and I left the Fairmont and took a cab to the Justice Department. We called Tom Perrelli on the way, to let him know we were coming. Perrelli was the U.S. associate attorney general. It was his job, among other things, to oversee the multistate investigation on behalf of t
he federal government. I told him that of the ten cities hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis at the time, seven were in California; that it was my job to get to the bottom of it; and that I couldn’t sign on to anything that was going to preclude me from doing my own investigation.
Perrelli made the case that my investigation wouldn’t yield what I hoped it would, that going after the big banks was not something any one state could do, even the biggest in the nation. And, he added, that kind of litigation was going to take many years. By the time I got what California deserved, the people who needed help would have already lost their homes. This was the reason there hadn’t been a thorough investigation; there simply wasn’t time.
Later that afternoon, I met with Elizabeth Warren, who at that time was working at the Treasury Department, building what would become the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I raised the same concerns with her, and she was sympathetic and supportive. As an administration official, she couldn’t outright tell us to go our own way, but I got the strong sense that she would understand if I persisted.
We flew home that night and got right to work. I had been told that, as things stood, California was going to get somewhere between $2 billion and $4 billion in the settlement. Some of the lawyers in the office thought it was a big number, big enough to take. My point to them was: Compared with what? If the banks’ illegal scheme had caused a lot more than $2 billion to $4 billion in damage, then those really big numbers would start to look really small.
The Truths We Hold Page 9