by Dan Morain
Her daughter, Meena, graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School and is a part of Harris’s political organization. Meena is married to an executive at Facebook, Nik Ajagu; she writes children’s books, was an executive at Uber, and is a founder of Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a reference to the poem by Maya Angelou: “Now you understand / Just why my head’s not bowed. / I don’t shout or jump about / Or have to talk real loud.”
Meena’s version of “Phenomenal” is a cross between a political organization and a clothing brand; it sells T-shirts and sweatshirts with various inspirational phrases. One is I’M SPEAKING, the line “Auntie Kamala” repeated to great effect during her debate in October 2020 with Vice President Mike Pence.
19 “Just a Dude”
It was a typical California Democratic Party convention on the weekend of June 1, 2019. Outside the Moscone Center convention hall in downtown San Francisco, not far from Kamala Harris’s condo, a group of men wore bright white pants with red paint splattered on the crotches. They were demonstrating against circumcision. Sex workers, some dressed as dominatrices, called for the decriminalization of their craft.
Inside, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the icon of the Democratic Party in the age of Donald J. Trump, got heckled for being too soft on the president, and an animal rights activist with a man bun burst onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from Kamala Harris, then a presidential candidate who was talking about gender pay inequity. If she was taken aback, she didn’t show it. She had a look of bemusement and didn’t move.
As he started to mansplain about the need to rescue chickens or some other farm animals from slaughter, Karine Jean-Pierre, who was interviewing Harris at the MoveOn.org event and was a fraction of the man’s size, threw herself between the candidate and the guy, and tried to wrest the microphone back.
Then Douglas C. Emhoff, a Century City entertainment lawyer dressed in a blue blazer, jeans, and a HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT T-shirt, leaped onto the stage, his lips curled in fury. Along with buff security staffers, Emhoff muscled the man offstage. Emhoff didn’t punch the guy, but he looked as if he might.
Brooklyn born and New Jersey and Los Angeles raised, Emhoff is Kamala Harris’s husband. When they met in 2013, he was a hardworking attorney managing the Los Angeles office of an international law firm, Venable LLP, representing corporate and entertainment industry clients. He had a son and a daughter from a previous marriage, is a decent golfer, a Lakers fan, and was a middle-aged guy trying to navigate the dating scene. Like many Californians, he paid little more than passing attention to politics. Emhoff contributed a grand total of $5,800 to Los Angeles politicians and $650 to California state politicians in the 2000s. The state donations went to two candidates seeking state assembly seats. Neither won. Through a payroll deduction, Emhoff donated $100 a month to his law firm’s federal political action committee, an obligatory amount, given his leadership role in the firm, and $100 toward John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign; he was hardly a big political spender.
As a lawyer, Emhoff defended clients fending off allegations of breaches of consumer privacy, an ad firm in a suit by Taco Bell over the use of a chihuahua in an ad campaign, movie studios in a pay dispute with workers, and Merck in class action lawsuits over a drug that allegedly made users’ thighs brittle.
At Venable, Emhoff represented a Los Angeles company that buys rights to viral videos and that accused another L.A. company of violating its copyright on such classics as “Gorilla Teaches Toddler How to Use Her Middle Finger,” “Broken Urinal Shoots Out Water,” “Physics Teacher Gets Hit in the Nuts,” and the unforgettable New York subway scene captured in “Rat Takes Pizza Home on the Subway.” The case settled.
For obvious reasons, dating was complicated for Kamala Harris. She had to be careful about her choices, and her work first as district attorney of a major city and then as the attorney general of California was all-consuming. Some guys might have found dating the top cop of the state of California a bit intimidating. Whatever relationships she had stayed private.
Emhoff recalls their story in a video posted on the internet by Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of former South Bend mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Here is what happened:
Chrisette Hudlin, a decadeslong friend of Harris’s, and her husband, filmmaker Reginald Hudlin, had gone to Emhoff seeking his counsel on a knotty legal issue. At the end of the session, Chrisette asked Emhoff whether he was single.
“Why are you asking?” Emhoff replied.
Chrisette had a single friend she had known for thirty years, she explained. Emhoff asked who it was.
“Kamala Harris,” Chrisette replied.
“How do I know that name?” Emhoff asked.
Chrisette jogged the lawyer’s memory—the California attorney general.
“I said, ‘Oh my god, she’s hot,’ ” Emhoff told Chasten Buttigieg.
Chrisette gave Harris’s number to Emhoff, warned him that it was confidential, and told him not to mess it up, or else the Hudlins would take their legal business elsewhere. Harris writes in her autobiography that Chrisette called Harris to tell her about this guy she had met: “He’s cute and he’s the managing partner of his law firm and I think you’re going to really like him.”
That night, Emhoff texted Harris from a Lakers game. She came down to Los Angeles that weekend.
“I was like just a dude as a lawyer,” Emhoff told Buttigieg, “and then I met Kamala on a blind date set up by legendary filmmaker Reginald Hudlin.” In other words, it was a typical L.A. love story.
The relationship blossomed under the radar. Even some of Emhoff’s good friends were taken by surprise. In the small world of corporate L.A. law, for instance, attorney Ron Wood would see Emhoff at Peet’s Coffee in Brentwood and in the lobby of the Century City high-rise where they worked. Both were divorced and single fathers, and they bonded at lunch and over drinks about the complexities of the dating scene, the pressures of corporate law, and the loss each felt not being able to go home at the end of their days and on weekends to be with their children. “Like a lot of career divorced single dads, he took his family obligations seriously,” Wood said.
One day in 2014, Wood and Emhoff were waiting in line at one of their regular lunch spots, a grab-and-go Chinese place, when Emhoff showed off the engagement ring he had been given by his fiancée. He had proposed to her, but the couple decided to both wear rings. His was nothing fancy. But the engagement was big news and it came out of nowhere. Emhoff had kept the relationship that quiet. Wood was even more floored when Emhoff told him the name of his fiancée. Wood, a Howard University alumnus, is friends with Harris from their college days. They had kept in touch in the years since, and Wood had been among her campaign contributors. In the weeks ahead, after the engagement became public, he’d bump into Emhoff and Harris when they came into Peet’s, sweaty after their spinning class. “In a world of eight billion, how do they collide?” Wood wondered. But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Both are leaders in their own worlds—smart, active, and accomplished. “It seemed entirely right.”
Harris had a test for Emhoff before the deal was sealed. She remembered that her first campaign finance chairman, Mark Buell, once said you could learn a lot about a person’s character by playing golf. So she assigned him to play a round with Emhoff. Buell chose Mayacama golf course, an exclusive club in the Sonoma County wine country. Emhoff could swing a club. But that wasn’t the point. “He was the sweetest guy,” Buell said. Clearly, he had passed the test.
Harris and Emhoff were married on August 22, 2014, in a private ceremony at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, a beautiful mission-style building that is a favored Southern California wedding venue. Harris’s sister, Maya, officiated. Harris writes in her autobiography that she placed a garland around his neck, an Indian tradition. Emhoff, who is Jewish, stomped on a glass, as is tradition.
They were both forty-nine; he was born seven days before hi
s bride. After the wedding, Harris and Emhoff had a party for their San Francisco–based friends at the Presidio Officers’ Club. “She looked truly very happy,” said Erin Lehane, a supporter and friend who also works for the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California.
Emhoff, the second husband, is steping down from his law firm, DLA Piper. When he worked there, he didn’t lobby. But the firm’s Washington lobby arm represents defense contractors, health insurers, entertainment conglomerates, and many more.
Starting in 2014, people could see him on the Harris campaign trail; he was a regular presence in 2016 and 2019, too. Someone tweeted a video of him dancing at the 2019 San Francisco Pride parade in a convertible as Harris laughs at what Emhoff calls “these dad moves with my dad bod.” In 2020, he was on a far bigger stage, stumping for the Biden-Harris ticket. The Washington Post described him as “the evolved hubby” who has “become one of the unexpected breakout figures in the 2020 campaign, a headliner in the unconventional, pandemic-plagued race for the White House.”
Emhoff’s children, Cole and Ella, are named for the jazz greats John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. Ella Emhoff introduced Harris at the Democratic National Convention. They call Harris “Momala.” Harris, the proud stepmother, places that term of endearment on the bio of her @KamalaHarris Twitter account.
* * *
The guy with the man bun was escorted out of the Moscone Center. It being San Francisco, he made himself available for media interviews. I took a pass.
20 Woman in a Hurry
The question was not whether Kamala Harris would win a second term as California attorney general in 2014. The question was whether she’d serve out that second term.
“I hope so,” she told me in August 2014, being coy.
Kamala Harris was in a hurry. People had been assuming that Harris would run for governor in 2018 or the U.S. Senate in 2016 if Barbara Boxer retired. What if a Senate seat should open? “I have not thought about that.” I can’t say I fully believed her. She was moving fast.
In 2014, no Democrat dared challenge Kamala Harris in her bid for a second term. Her Republican opponent, Los Angeles lawyer Ronald Gold, built his campaign to become California’s chief law enforcement officer around his view that marijuana should be legalized. That prompted Debra J. Saunders, then a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, to call him “Acapulco Gold.” Gold spent less than $130,000 on his campaign and received no discernible support from the California Republican Party.
Harris, who had long supported medical marijuana, dismissed a reporter’s question about what she thought of legalizing the commercial sale of weed with an incongruous laugh. Although she later embraced the notion, the commercial sale of marijuana was not the issue that would sway the 2014 race for attorney general. And in her first four years, Harris had shown herself adept at not taking stands when doing so was not politically necessary.
One example is gambling. In California, attorneys general are responsible for overseeing gambling. Sixty-one Indian tribes in the state own sixty-three casinos that generate a combined $8 billion a year; another eighty-eight card rooms produce $850 million in annual revenue. The state lottery generates $2.5 billion a year. Altogether, California almost matches Nevada for being the biggest gambling state in the country.
During Harris’s tenure, legislators considered legalizing internet poker and sports wagering. Indian tribes, among the largest campaign donors in California, were split. Card-room owners and horse-racing interests liked the idea, so long as they could get a piece of the action. Harris said she was studying the question in 2014. The issue pitted moneyed interests and potential campaign donors against each other. She never did take a stand. The issue remains unresolved.
For years, Harris had been decrying elementary school truancy, saying habitual absences would haunt vulnerable kids for the rest of their days. But she did not publicly voice her opinion during the 2014 campaign on an issue that affected many children who attended California’s tougher schools: tenure. The powerful California Teachers Association, among her supporters and campaign donors, supported protecting teachers with tenure. But in 2014, a state judge ruled that California’s teacher tenure rules violated the civil rights of poor students, reasoning that younger teachers are assigned to the schools with the biggest number of them and are the first to receive layoff notices.
“Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students,” Judge Rolf M. Treu wrote in an opinion that President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, praised. Harris’s deputies appealed the ruling on behalf of the California state superintendent of public instruction, and the lower court ruling was overturned in 2016 as Harris was running for U.S. Senate.
So Harris took positions when she needed to and when those stands might help her politically. But she also understood one of the truths of politics. Whenever a politician takes a stand, she or he risks alienating someone. With virtually no competition in 2014, Harris didn’t have to take stands on the issues she chose to avoid, and she didn’t.
Harris had done plenty to deserve a second term. She had extracted concessions from banks to help homeowners crushed by the mortgage crisis. She filed lawsuits to enforce environmental laws by requiring that polluting businesses not open unless they could limit emissions that would damage the lungs of people living nearby, invariably in poor and minority communities. One of the suits protected kids attending an elementary school in Long Beach from the exhaust emitted by diesel-powered trains.
She sought to enforce privacy laws, in a state where the tech industry is dominant, and would do much more of that in her second term. She vastly expanded the number of records that were readily accessible to the public on the California Department of Justice website related to deaths in police custody.
She established a solicitor general’s unit within the Office of Attorney General to argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court. That bothered some of the most senior and skilled deputies who looked forward to the intellectual challenge of arguing their own cases. But experts believe the unit improved the quality of the state’s appeals.
Certainly, she could have done more. Some advocates believe she didn’t go hard enough after police brutality. But she was mindful of who she is, a Black woman who opposed the death penalty and had infuriated police before. She knew she needed law enforcement’s buy-in to make any sort of long-lasting change. She worked to neutralize police opposition by not missing the funeral of an officer who died in the line of duty. She also traveled to local police agencies to present awards for their heroic work.
Harris spent $3.6 million on her reelection campaign, and she had $1.3 million left over for a future candidacy. By piling up huge margins in the Bay Area and Los Angeles County, she won with 57.5 percent of the vote. Perhaps in an indication that she had failed in her first four years in statewide office to connect with Republican bastions and Southern California suburban counties, Harris won only twenty-six of the state’s fifty-eight counties against a lackluster opponent.
On January 5, 2015, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the state’s chief justice, administered the oath of office to Harris for her second term, and Cantil-Sakauye’s role that day captured the evolution of California and its political leaders. Her mother emigrated from the Philippines, and young Cantil-Sakauye lived with her parents for a time next to a brothel in an alley in Sacramento. She put herself through college by waiting tables and dealing blackjack in Reno, became a prosecutor and trial court judge, and was elevated to the position of chief justice by Governor Schwarzenegger. She was a Republican but would quietly quit the party after watching the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Addressing the modest crowd at the Crocker Art Museum in downtown Sacramento, Harris spoke in ambitious terms about her state and the leaders it produced: “People around the country look to California. They look to u
s, to see what change looks like. They look to us, to see what innovation can be. They look to us, because we are unburdened by what has been and instead are inspired by what can be.”
Harris listed her proudest achievements: going “toe-to-toe against an army of the highest-paid hired guns the Wall Street banks could put on retainer” to wrest $20 billion for California homeowners and helping create the California Homeowner Bill of Rights. During her first four years, she said, California Department of Justice agents seized twelve thousand pounds of methamphetamine and took twelve thousand illegal guns off the street.
“I promise you this: in my next term, we’re going to double down,” Harris said. “I am going to use the power of this office to lift up the next generation of Californians.”
She set out an agenda that included protecting unaccompanied minors who arrive at the southern border after fleeing Central America and confronting the “crisis of confidence” in law enforcement. She promised to use her new eCrime Unit to “prosecute online predators that profit from the extortion, humiliation and degradation of women by posting images without their consent.” She planned to create the Bureau of Children’s Justice and pledged a continued focus on combating elementary school truancy.
“It’s time to say that in the State of California it is a crime for a child to go without an education,” Harris declared.
That was on January 5, 2015. But Kamala Harris was a woman in a hurry.
Ten days later, Harris announced her next step.
21 Joe Biden Gives Harris a Hand
Three days after Kamala Harris took the oath of office for her second term as California attorney general, Senator Barbara Boxer announced that she would not be running for reelection in 2016, opening a seat that had been occupied since 1992. That was on January 8, 2015, a Thursday.