Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

  10 Harris and Obama

  In September 2004, her first year as San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris, always scouring the political landscape, cohosted a fund-raiser at the Four Seasons Hotel for a fellow traveler, an Illinois state senator from the South Side of Chicago who worked for a small law firm and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. His name was Barack Obama.

  Obama already knew to come to San Francisco, an important stop for any Democratic politician on the rise. The year before, Susie and Mark Buell had hosted an Obama fund-raiser and their aide had made sure Harris and Obama met. The 2004 event was the first of many times the two rising stars helped each other. Obama was about to win a U.S. Senate seat representing Illinois and had become a huge draw after he stirred the nation at the 2004 Democratic National Convention with the speech in which he said, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”

  The March following the Harris fund-raiser for Obama, the newly elected senator returned the favor, headlining a fund-raiser for Harris at the North Beach nightclub Bimbo’s 365. The crowd stood shoulder to shoulder.

  The comparisons between Harris and Obama were unmistakable, if facile: they are biracial, smart, and attractive; both accomplished attorneys; and both reflective of the new face of the Democratic Party, if not the nation itself. The May 2006 edition of Ebony magazine named them both as being among the “100+ Most Influential Black Americans.” Her photo was number five; his was number sixty-seven.

  * * *

  In February 2007, District Attorney Harris, looking beyond San Francisco, traveled to frigid Springfield, Illinois, for Obama’s launch of his presidential campaign. By March, she had become the most prominent elected official in California to endorse Obama.

  “That was probably not the right political calculation at the time,” said Buffy Wicks, who was Obama’s chief California organizer in 2007 and later joined his White House staff. Wicks, now a member of the California State Assembly, noted that California in 2007 and 2008 was Hillary Clinton territory. The former First Lady and senator had locked up many of the major endorsements early, including San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Senator Dianne Feinstein.

  Obama made his first presidential campaign stop in California in March, drawing a crowd of twelve thousand outside Oakland City Hall, the same location where, as a U.S. senator, Harris would announce the start of her presidential candidacy in 2019. “I am so psyched,” District Attorney Harris, sitting in the front row, told political reporter Carla Marinucci, then of the San Francisco Chronicle. “The energy, the diversity… people are excited, and it’s not just about Barack. It’s about them.”

  That night, Harris was among the sponsors of a fund-raiser at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in downtown San Francisco that would raise $1 million. Obama was on a fund-raising blitz during which he amassed an astonishing $25.7 million in the first quarter of 2007, nearly matching Clinton’s haul and making clear that his candidacy was anything but quixotic. Obama was not likely to defeat Clinton in California. But Harris’s task was to serve as Obama’s surrogate. So there she was, speaking on his behalf, stumping up and down the state, spending a weekend in early December in Salinas, telling local Democrats who were taking a straw poll that Obama was mounting “one of the most extraordinary presidential campaigns in our lifetime.” Obama won that straw poll.

  * * *

  In San Francisco, left-leaning voters did not hold the controversy over the Officer Isaac Espinoza case and issues at the crime lab against Harris, and she ran for reelection in November 2007 without opposition. That hurdle out of the way, the newly reelected district attorney traveled to Des Moines to knock on doors for Obama in the frigid days of December leading up to the Iowa caucuses, spending New Year’s Eve there. On January 3, 2008, the night of the Iowa caucuses, I stood not far from her in Hy-Vee Hall in Des Moines as she listened to Obama promise “a nation less divided and more united.”

  In the California primary a month later, Obama carried San Francisco, but Clinton won the state easily, 51.5 percent to 43.2 percent, ensuring that the race would continue for months. Clinton’s California campaign manager was Ace Smith, who would soon become Harris’s chief strategist.

  When Harris ran for president, a Politico reporter asked her about carrying on Obama’s legacy.

  “I have my own legacy,” she told the reporter.

  11 The Mad Dash

  On the night of November 4, 2008, Kamala Harris joined hundreds of thousands of deliriously happy people who crammed into Chicago’s Grant Park for the celebration of her friend’s historic election.

  “Change has come to America,” President-elect Barack Obama told the throngs in Chicago and the millions who watched on television and over the internet.

  There was speculation that Obama would find a place for Harris in Washington, and she was thinking about making that her next move. On November 12, 2008, eight days after Obama was elected president, and just eleven months into her second term as San Francisco district attorney, Harris made up her mind. Capitalizing on the Democrats’ euphoria over Obama, Harris declared her intention to run for California attorney general in 2010. I wrote that day that she “long had focused on running for attorney general, the state’s chief law enforcement officer and a post that can serve as a steppingstone to the governor’s office.”

  District Attorney Harris, accompanied by her chief strategist Ace Smith, spent the day of her announcement giving interviews to Los Angeles television reporters explaining why she was running. At the end of the day, they stopped to visit Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at Getty House, the mayor’s residence in the Hancock Park neighborhood, not far from downtown Los Angeles. They lingered a little too long. Smith checked his watch and realized they had no time to get to Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. The driver sped, weaving through traffic. Once they got to the airport, Harris took off her high heels and they dashed, got through security, and rushed to the gate as the door was about to close. Once in their seats, Smith turned to Harris, smiled, and said, “That’s how the campaign is going to be.” They’d run like crazy, and when it looked like they weren’t going to make it, they’d run a little harder and slip by with the thinnest of margins to spare. She got the message. It would be a wild ride.

  Luckily for her, Smith had special insight into the office of attorney general, having managed Jerry Brown’s run for the office in 2006. But it went deeper. He was an infant when his father, Deputy Attorney General Arlo Smith, was assigned to help bring an end to the saga of Caryl Chessman, the Red Light Bandit, who was executed in 1960 after being convicted of kidnapping and rape of women on a Los Angeles lovers’ lane. Chessman had written memoirs while on San Quentin’s death row and had become the focus of the movement to abolish capital punishment. Arlo Smith served four terms as San Francisco district attorney until his defeat in 1995 by Terence Hallinan. In 1990, young Ace helped run his father’s campaign for California attorney general. Arlo lost to Republican Dan Lungren by 28,906 votes out of more than seven million cast.

  Harris’s announcement two years ahead of the election had become one of her ways of campaigning: come out early, big and bold, with the goal of paring down the field of likely Democratic primary opponents. Within a month of Harris’s announcement in 2008, California Republican leaders were at work devising a plan of attack against her, having created what they called the “AG Rapid Response Team.” Internal emails show they hoped to recruit crime victims, Republican district attorneys, a credible Democrat to challenge Harris, and the police. Police unions usually backed Democrats. But Harris continued to pay a political price for her decision not to seek the death penalty against the killer of Officer Isaac Espinoza. In early 2009, the San Francisco Police Officers Association leaders informed Harris that the union would under no
circumstances endorse her. In solidarity with San Francisco officers and in remembrance of Officer Espinoza, other police organizations were also lining up in opposition.

  Heading into the 2010 election, Republicans believed they could win the office of attorney general. The team assembled to devise the strategy included two Republican operatives, former California Republican Party chairman George “Duf” Sundheim and Sean Walsh, who was one of Governor Pete Wilson’s top aides and later Wilson’s business partner.

  Wilson got his start in politics at age thirty-three by winning an assembly seat in San Diego in 1966, the year Reagan was elected California governor. San Diego, a navy and marine town, had a large defense industry and was reliably Republican at the time. Wilson was an ex-marine and lawyer who became San Diego mayor for three terms from 1971 to 1983 and a U.S. senator in 1983 when Reagan was president. In 1990, Wilson defeated former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein to become governor, succeeding another Republican, George Deukmejian. That was when California was a swing state. It’s not now, in no small part because of Wilson’s politics.

  Governor Schwarzenegger, a Republican, started his administration in 2003 by veering to the right. But by his 2006 reelection campaign, he had moved to the middle, and he became a warrior for alternative energy and against climate change. Schwarzenegger explained the brutal truth at a 2007 California Republican Party convention in the desert resort town of Indian Wells: “In movie terms, we are dying at the box office. We are not filling the seats.”

  Reporters covering the event described an almost silent reaction. The party that had produced Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson was out of step with California voters on gun control, the environment, abortion, same-sex marriage, and, especially, immigration. Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of California’s population, turned against the GOP after Wilson won his 1994 reelection by becoming a champion of Proposition 187, an initiative that promised to end all government-funded services to undocumented immigrants, including public schooling and nursing home care. It was, at its core, an attack on new Americans and their families. The California Republican Party has been on a downward slide ever since. By 2010, it had become a rusting hull; a mere 31 percent of the voters registered as Republicans. Now that it’s the party of Donald J. Trump, GOP registration is below 25 percent in California.

  With visions of reviving the party, Wilson recruited statewide candidates for the 2010 election: a young Black man for secretary of state, a Latino for lieutenant governor. Silicon Valley billionaire Meg Whitman led the ticket by running to succeed Schwarzenegger as governor. She would spend $159 million, most of it from her own pocket. For attorney general, Wilson recruited Steve Cooley, the three-term district attorney from Los Angeles County.

  In approach, demeanor, and appearance, Kamala Harris and Steve Cooley could not have been more different. San Francisco District Attorney Harris promised to bring innovation and reform to the criminal justice system if she were elected attorney general in 2010. She would defend the environment, consumers, and marriage equality. Harris, now age forty-six, clearly intended to ascend as high as she could. Los Angeles County District Attorney Cooley promised to defend the death penalty and traditional marriage. He was sixty-three and was running for the final office he would hold. He would be tough to beat, but first he needed to get past the primary.

  * * *

  Kamala Harris was going through a rough patch as the race was beginning, though none of it was public at the time. She and Maya had been making sure that their mother, Shyamala, made it to her chemotherapy sessions. Harris recounted in a 2018 New York Times op-ed an incident when her mother was hospitalized, near the end:

  For as long as I could remember, my mother loved to watch the news and read the newspaper. When Maya and I were kids, she’d insist we sit down in front of Walter Cronkite each night before dinner. But suddenly, she had no interest. Her mighty brain decided it had had enough.

  She still had room for us, though. I remember that I had just entered the race for California attorney general and she asked me how it was going.

  “Mommy, these guys are saying they’re going to kick my ass,” I told her.

  She rolled over and looked at me and unveiled the biggest smile. She knew who she’d raised. She knew her fighting spirit was alive and well inside me.

  On February 11, 2009, the rock of the family, the scientist who studied cancer and sought its cure, and the woman who more than anyone else raised and shaped two strong and accomplished women, died of cancer in Oakland. In the months and years ahead, friends would notice Harris’s eyes welling up at the important milestones in her life when someone mentioned her mom.

  * * *

  District Attorney Harris had used her experience as a prosecutor to her benefit in her campaign. But her record in San Francisco was complicated. When Mayor Villaraigosa endorsed her early in her 2010 run for attorney general, he declared, “Kamala has spent her entire professional life in the trenches as a courtroom prosecutor, and she has raised conviction rates in her community to the highest in 15 years.”

  Journalist Peter Jamison, then writing for SF Weekly, dug into the San Francisco district attorney’s statistics and found that Harris based her statement on plea deals reached with defendants. Plea agreements are, of course, an important part of the criminal justice system. But when Harris deputies took serious crimes to trial, conviction rates were significantly below the statewide average.

  Prosecutors at the San Francisco Hall of Justice had an especially tough day on February 9, 2010. A jury wrongly convicted one man, and a separate jury, after deliberating for only one day, acquitted three gang members of the murder of two rivals in a trial that had lasted five months. Harris was not directly involved in either case, but both happened on her watch.

  In the trial that led to the acquittal, defense lawyers found that DNA evidence was mishandled for one homicide and testimony from the key witness was inconsistent. One of the defendants had a broken right hand in a cast and yet purportedly was able to jump a fence in an escape. And although he was right-handed, he was accused of firing the shots. The quick not-guilty verdicts raised questions about the prosecutor’s decision to bring the charges.

  “They should only bring cases they ethically believe they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” attorney Kate Chatfield, who represented one of the three men, said.

  On that same day, a separate jury returned a guilty verdict against Jamal Trulove in the shooting death of his friend Seu Kuka in 2007 in a Sunnydale housing project at the south end of the city. Trulove wept as the verdict was read—for good reason, as it was later shown.

  Trulove was an aspiring rapper who had appeared on a reality television show, the VH1 series I Love New York 2. An eyewitness claimed she was 100 percent sure that Trulove committed the crime. The lead prosecutor contended that the witness was testifying despite facing retaliation and possible death, and she had been relocated and given money to cover her expenses. District Attorney Harris didn’t prosecute the case but echoed her deputy, praising the “brave eyewitness who stepped forward from the crowd.” A judge sentenced Trulove to fifty years to life in prison. Trulove’s conviction would count as a statistic that would buttress Harris’s claim of increasing felony convictions. But years later, the truth emerged.

  Trulove’s appellate lawyer had become convinced of his innocence. In January 2014, with Harris as attorney general, a state court of appeals reversed Trulove’s conviction, concluding that the San Francisco “prosecutor committed highly prejudicial misconduct” and that the yarn about the witness testifying despite fearing for her life “was made out of whole cloth.” In March 2015, two months after Attorney General Harris announced her candidacy for U.S. Senate, a new jury in San Francisco acquitted Trulove of all charges. The matter wasn’t over. Trulove, who had spent eight years behind bars, sued the police and city, though not Harris, alleging officers framed him, and a federal jury awarded him $14.5 mi
llion in 2018. In March 2019, as Senator Harris was running for president, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors settled the Trulove case by awarding him $13.1 million.

  “Kamala Harris tried to be progressive. I very much appreciate that,” Marc Zilversmit, Trulove’s appellate attorney, said. “At a time when being progressive on crime was a third rail, she put some of these good ideas into practice. There was a lot more that she could have done.”

  As she ascended to higher office, Harris would point to her experience as a prosecutor and her successes. It was her calling card. But the job cut both ways, and the wrongful conviction of Jamal Trulove haunts her time as San Francisco district attorney.

  * * *

  Harris ultimately faced five Democratic opponents in the primary, all of them men. The more men, the more likely a merry outcome for the one woman in the race. The five guys would eat into one another’s sources of support, and Harris would stand out. One potential female candidate was Jackie Speier, a Democratic congresswoman from Hillsborough, south of San Francisco, who let it be known in early 2010 that she was thinking of running. As a young congressional aide, Speier accompanied her boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, to Guyana in 1978, as he investigated Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple cult. Ryan was assassinated on that trip, and Speier was wounded in a series of horrific events that led to a mass suicide and murder of more than nine hundred people. Speier still carries lead in her body from that attack. In the California State Legislature and in Congress, Speier built a reputation as a maverick who stood up to banks over such issues as interest rates and consumer privacy. Those positions resonated in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 2008, the Great Recession, and the home foreclosure crisis, which hit California especially hard. But soon after Speier’s name was floated, Harris’s campaign disclosed that she had raised $2.2 million for the attorney general’s race, an impressive sum that would be tough for a candidate just starting out to match. Speier opted to remain in Congress.