Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

  On Saturday morning, Kamala Harris arrived early at the downtown San Francisco office of her campaign team, which was made up of Ace Smith, Sean Clegg, and Dan Newman. They had serious business to discuss. They took their places at the conference table, which was fashioned from old oak seats salvaged from California Memorial Stadium on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, when it was retrofitted to protect against the Hayward fault line that runs directly beneath it. The conference room walls were decorated with drawings by Thomas Nast and covers from Harper’s Weekly dating to the Lincoln administration and Puck, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century magazine devoted to political humor and satire. Its Shakespearean motto: “What fools these mortals be!”

  Harris had wanted to run for governor once Jerry Brown retired in 2018. People around her envisioned her becoming the first woman to govern the nation’s largest state. Fellow San Franciscan Gavin Newsom wanted to run for governor, too, having toyed with the possibility of challenging Brown in 2010. Harris had administered the oath of office to Newsom for his second term as lieutenant governor earlier that week. She also thought she could have beaten her “frenemy” if he ever ran against her. But with Boxer retiring, she considered instead a different political prize.

  Harris wanted to know what impact she could have as one of one hundred senators. She wanted to know how she could best represent the folks who, as she was wont to say, aren’t in the room, the people who need a hand, immigrants, people of color. Although she supported Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run, Harris was part of the Obama wing of the party, not the Clintons’, and the House and Senate were in Republican hands. Harris was trying to imagine herself as a member of the minority party at the bottom rungs of the seniority ladder.

  In recent decades, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had emerged from gubernatorial offices to become president. But Senators John Kerry, Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and others showed that this launching pad was not the only way to go. American politics had become nationalized, one of many unfortunate consequences of the diminution of state and local news organizations and their concomitant reductions in statehouse and city hall coverage. For all the power a governor had, especially one in California, the media were focused on Washington, as were voters.

  The consultants told the tale of two politicians from Massachusetts. Did Harris see herself as a leader in the mold of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who regularly drove national discussion, or Governor Deval Patrick, who, for all his talent, was little known beyond the Bay State?

  As a senator who had spent time as a district attorney and an attorney general, Harris could have an outsized impact on the confirmation of justices to the Supreme Court. In 2015, no one could have guessed how the 2016 presidential election would turn out. But a bright and ambitious senator from California could find herself in Iowa and New Hampshire testing presidential waters sooner rather than later. Harris took it all in and went home to think it through with her husband, sister, and Tony West.

  On that Sunday evening, Newsom told Harris he wasn’t going to run for the Senate seat and made that decision public on Monday, all but announcing that he would run for governor in 2018. On that Tuesday, eight days after being sworn in for her second term as attorney general, Harris made her announcement. She was running for the U.S. Senate. And as is her way, she made it loud. She raised no less than $92,452 on that first day. Her team spun the story line that she was unbeatable, and it was believable.

  “She has been dubbed the female Obama. She cooks. She goes to the gym in a hoodie,” the Guardian wrote. “She views lawyers as heroes and takes on mortgage companies the way Elizabeth Warren takes on Wall Street.”

  On the day of Harris’s announcement, Senator Warren issued a statement calling her a “smart, tough, and experienced prosecutor who has consistently stood up to Wall Street.” Senator Cory Booker asked his Twitter followers to go to a website where they could donate to Harris. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called her “exactly the kind of leader we need in the Senate.” All three would compete with Harris for the 2020 presidential nomination. For now, they were all part of a team.

  * * *

  In 1992, Barbara Boxer ran for the Senate seat held for four terms by Alan Cranston, while Dianne Feinstein ran for a second seat held by a Republican appointed to serve out the term of Pete Wilson, who had defeated Feinstein in the 1990 gubernatorial contest. Boxer and Feinstein both faced stiff competition: Democrats included Gray Davis, who would become governor in 1998; Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy; and an influential Los Angeles congressman, Mel Levine. In 2015, voters might have expected a high level of interest in the state’s first open U.S. Senate seat in a generation. And sure enough, there was no shortage of ambitious politicians.

  Democratic members of Congress from Southern California—Adam Schiff, Xavier Becerra, and Loretta Sanchez—all were thinking about running, as was San Francisco hedge fund billionaire and climate change activist Tom Steyer, a Democrat. Steyer could have funded the race on his own. As Meg Whitman and other wealthy candidates found, however, Californians have not been kind to self-funding candidates. Steyer thought better of it. Becerra and Schiff were little known outside the Beltway.

  Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa considered a candidacy, too, and would have been a tough opponent. He is a deft campaigner, has a million-dollar smile, was a staunch Clinton backer, and had taken stands that would have appealed to many Californians.

  He and Harris also were friends, having met in 1995, during Villaraigosa’s first term in the assembly. For a time, they spoke regularly. Villaraigosa was touched by how Harris would end the conversations by telling him in a sisterly way that she loved him. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown was on his way out of Sacramento in 1995 but saw a bit of himself in Villaraigosa and acted like a mentor. Villaraigosa grew up in East Los Angeles, the son of a single mom and an alcohol-angry father who was never around. Young Antonio would put cardboard in his shoes when the soles developed holes. He dropped out of high school and got arrested for a brawl in a restaurant, but he found a teacher who believed in him, went to UCLA, then law school, and got a job with the teachers’ union in Los Angeles. In 1994, he was elected to represent part of downtown Los Angeles and emerged as one of the assembly’s most liberal members, pushing for gun control and higher taxes on wealthy Californians when neither issue was popular.

  He rose to become Assembly Speaker before terming out and moving back to Los Angeles, where he was elected the city’s forty-first mayor in 2005. For a time, Villaraigosa’s campaign consultants included the same San Francisco–based crew that represented Harris. As Villaraigosa contemplated entering the Senate race, Willie Brown urged him to express his fealty to Harris instead. “His loyalty and his relationship with her should be so valuable, and he should, in my opinion, see it as an opportunity to demonstrate that,” Brown said. And Villaraigosa’s former mentor added, “I am hopeful that his candidacy will be rewarded with a statewide office—at some point.”

  Brown was telling Villaraigosa, then sixty-two, that he should stand aside for Harris and wait his turn, whenever that might come. It was a fundamentally offensive notion, given what Villaraigosa had achieved in a state where Latinos account for 40 percent of the population.

  But having been mayor of the nation’s second-largest city, Villaraigosa preferred being chief executive. Like Newsom, he wanted to be governor. For Villaraigosa and the other Southern Californians, the decision came down to ability to raise money, polling, and a basic fact about the California electorate: although California’s population is in Southern California, Northern California Democrats have an edge, because people in the Bay Area turn out in greater percentages to vote. (Villaraigosa did run for governor in 2018 against Newsom, without Harris’s support.) Putative opponents all thought better of running against Harris, with one exception.

  * * *

  On May 14, 2015, five month
s after Harris entered the race, Loretta Sanchez, a ten-term member of Congress from Orange County, announced she was running. On paper, Sanchez could have been strong. Her story was compelling. She is one of seven kids of immigrant parents and is the sister of another member of Congress, Linda Sanchez. She went to Head Start. Sanchez’s hope was that Latino voters and her roots in the population center of Southern California would propel her to the Senate. But as a candidate, she was prone to gaffes.

  Early in her campaign, Sanchez used a stereotypical war whoop as she described the difference between Indians and people whose families came from India. She apologized to offended Native American leaders. At a candidates’ debate, Sanchez made what she thought was a clever point and broke into an odd dance move called the “dab,” made popular at the time by Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.

  Harris reacted with a double take.

  On important policy, Sanchez was out of step with California Democrats. In Congress, she sided with gun manufacturers and President George W. Bush by casting a vote to grant gunmakers immunity from lawsuits over their products. It was a bill pushed by the NRA. The result was that manufacturers of weapons used in mass shootings received immunity from lawsuits by surviving family members of those massacres.

  * * *

  Since announcing her candidacy on January 13, 2015, Harris had been busy, locking up endorsements and dialing for dollars. By mid-May, when Sanchez entered the race, Harris had raised $3.977 million—not bad given the federal cap of $2,700 that an individual could give for a single election at the time. The money came from old San Francisco friends, such as Mark and Susie Buell; Wall Street billionaires George Soros and Ronald Perelman; and Hollywood stars, including Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, Sean Penn, Kate Capshaw, and Don Cheadle, as well as from attorneys, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, labor unions, and scores of smaller donors. The $3.977 million nearly matched the $4.2 million Sanchez would raise for her entire campaign. Harris’s campaign team marveled at the candidate’s seeming air of invincibility. But it was short-lived.

  Evidently unsure about the issues, Harris dodged reporters through much of early 2015. In April, three months after her announcement, Harris had a huge kickoff in San Francisco. Former Michigan governor Jennifer M. Granholm, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, several members of Congress, and city officials were there. But as Carla Marinucci, then of the San Francisco Chronicle, reported, the press was denied access. It was a bizarre way to start a campaign.

  Although she was running to be a U.S. senator, Harris was not taking stands on international issues such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the NATO alliance, or the Middle East, let alone federal issues that mattered to California related to the environment and water. By refusing interviews, she was reinforcing the view among reporters and rivals that she was overly cautious. The situation would get worse later in the year.

  Harris’s California campaign consultants were adept at winning statewide races. Their stable of winning statewide clients included Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, and Harris, among others. Their goal was to have Harris amass millions and to keep spending lean in 2015, saving it for much-needed ad buys as the election approached and voters started paying attention to the race.

  The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, run by Washington insiders and working through Maya Harris, had a different vision of what a top-tier California candidate needed. It presented an organizational chart that included a cast of dozens, at an extravagant cost. Word spread that Harris’s campaign was overspending. In October 2015, the Sacramento Bee reported that Harris’s campaign was burning through money as quickly as she was raising it, “spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on mail-fundraising appeals, a large campaign staff anchored in Los Angeles and prominent fundraisers scattered across the country.” In November, the Los Angeles Times reported on a campaign shake-up. A Californian, Juan Rodriguez, was installed as campaign manager and several staffers from D.C. were axed. Then an anvil fell on the campaign in the form of a December article in the Atlantic detailing how Harris’s campaign had “splurged on luxury cars, airline tickets, and first-class accommodations.” The magazine reported bills totaling $18,000 at such luxury hotels as Washington’s St. Regis, the Waldorf Astoria in Chicago, and the W in Los Angeles. The piece cited “anemic fundraising [that] have dimmed her aura of inevitability.” Donors were upset that their money was being wasted, and Team Harris feared that after seemingly winning the race in April 2015, the candidate was in danger of losing it. Rodriguez set about imposing discipline, trimming salaries, and reining in spending. In Harris’s favor at that moment was the fact that competition, in the person of Sanchez, was thin.

  In 2016, Republicans were an afterthought. To have even an outside chance of winning in California, a Republican candidate would have needed the star power of Schwarzenegger or Reagan and the bank account of a billionaire willing to spend $100 million. The national Republican Party was not going to spend a dime in California, knowing that its money could be put to far better use in smaller states where a few million dollars could tip a Senate race.

  Under California’s primary system, the top two vote-getters in the primary face off in the general election, regardless of their party. Hapless Republicans split their small and shrinking piece of the electorate in the 2016 primary, allowing Sanchez to win the second spot against the clear front-runner, Harris.

  To become competitive in the November runoff, Sanchez, as the less liberal Democrat, would need to appeal to Republican voters while not straying too far to the right that she alienated Democrats. Sanchez did win Republican endorsements from former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan. He hadn’t been in office since 2001. Hugh Hewitt, a radio talk show host for the conservative Salem Media Group, also endorsed her. So did Congressman Darrell Issa, the San Diego County Republican who infuriated Democrats with his shrill attacks on the Obama administration and an over-the-top investigation into the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

  Harris set her sights on winning the endorsement of the California Democratic Party. To do that, she called Vice President Biden and asked that he come to the state party convention in San Jose in February 2016. He did. He opened his speech by singling out Harris, recalling that she had been close to his son Beau, who had died the year before of cancer. Forty-five minutes into the speech, which went on for nearly an hour, Biden got to his main point. It was the same point he would make during the 2020 presidential campaign: “Our people are not the problem. Our politics is the problem. It has grown so petty, so personal, so angry, so ugly.” With Biden giving his blessing to Harris, the California Democratic Party endorsed her. President Obama also endorsed Harris. Sanchez blundered by seeking to diminish Obama’s endorsement, suggesting in an interview with a Spanish-language television outlet that he endorsed Harris because they are both Black. No Democratic politician was or is more popular in California than Obama. But her comment was in keeping with her gaffe-prone campaign, to Harris’s good fortune.

  Entering 2016, there was never much doubt which candidate would win. Harris, meanwhile, had to tend to a demanding day job, running the California Department of Justice.

  22 Picking Her Shots

  Corinthian Colleges, once one of the nation’s largest for-profit colleges, occupies a special place in the shameful history of moneymaking institutions that prey on people seeking an education to better themselves.

  Trump University, the for-profit company that Donald Trump created to capitalize on his brand and his Apprentice television show, gained its share of infamy as well. As attorney general, Kamala Harris sued Corinthian but not Trump University. Those decisions help illustrate Harris’s way of conducting the public’s business.

  * * *

  Politicians regularly travel to New York seeking campaign money, just as politicians from New York and other states come to California for money.

  Harris, wanting to raise
money and build a national profile, made a pilgrimage to Manhattan in September 2011. Then New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman helped her draw a crowd with the help of a New York lawyer whose practice was built around representing clients with issues before state attorneys general. The trip was political business as usual, or so it seemed. Trump was among the New Yorkers who donated to Harris on that trip, $5,000 dated September 26, 2011. Trump donated another $1,000 on February 20, 2013. His daughter Ivanka Trump added $2,000 on June 3, 2014. The Trump Organization had business in many states, California included, and it made sense to cultivate the state’s chief lawyer. Those were the sorts of donations Trump and his family made as they went about their business.

  In May 2011, the first news stories appeared that Schneiderman had opened an investigation into the New York–based “university” that bore Trump’s name, over allegations that the company peddled overpriced seminars that were all but worthless to people looking to strike it rich in real estate. By August 2013, Schneiderman sued Trump over the practices at the school.

  Trump responded by attacking Schneiderman, accusing him of barraging him with requests for campaign contributions. Trump’s claim that there was something nefarious about Schneiderman’s solicitations prompted an investigation by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, a New York State watchdog agency. The case ended without charges in 2015, after Trump descended the gilded escalator in Trump Tower on June 16 and announced his improbable presidential candidacy. Trump and his so-called university settled suits brought by New York and private plaintiffs for $25 million in November 2016, after he won the election.