Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

  * * *

  Harris could have been forgiven if she was confident that she’d win when she held a luncheon fund-raiser at Boulevard, one of downtown San Francisco’s finer restaurants, on October 20, 2016, her fifty-second birthday. Her friend, New Jersey Democratic senator Cory Booker, was a special guest. Harris stood to speak. As she often did, Harris addressed gun control, gun violence, and school shootings.

  San Francisco is a city attuned to gun violence like few others. In 1978, Dan White, a former San Francisco cop and firefighter who had quit his post as San Francisco supervisor, evaded detection by climbing through a side window at city hall. He walked into Mayor George Moscone’s office, demanding that Moscone reinstate him. When Moscone refused, White pulled out a handgun and shot him four times, killing him. Then White stalked Harvey Milk, the city’s first gay supervisor. Stepping into Milk’s office, White fired five times. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, hearing the gunshots and smelling gunpowder, rushed to Milk and checked for a pulse. There was none. Under the city’s succession plan, Feinstein became mayor of a city in shock.

  Feinstein had been a U.S. senator for six months on July 1, 1993, when, on the thirty-fourth floor of a downtown high-rise less than a ten-minute walk from Boulevard, a failed businessman armed with two Intratec DC9 semiautomatic pistols, a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition put on a headset to muffle the sound and inexplicably opened fire at a law firm, killing eight people. In the wake of that massacre, Senator Feinstein won passage of a federal assault weapons ban, though that ban expired a decade later.

  At Boulevard, Harris spoke to the gathering about police reports she had read detailing the slaughter of “Babies. Babies. Babies.”

  Then she stopped herself.

  “Erin, I am so sorry. I forgot.”

  Erin Lehane, one of the donors to Harris that day, had brought her daughter, Rose, who was seven, the one kid in the audience.

  Harris, who had known Rose since she was a baby, looked her in the eyes and promised that she would talk with her after the event was over. Once the guests started clearing out, Harris pulled two chairs close together, leaned in toward Rose, and asked whether her remarks had frightened her.

  Lehane could not hear everything Harris was saying. Rose later told her mom that Harris told her not to worry, that there were so many people who would protect her—her mom, her teachers, the police.

  “She tried to be reassuring,” Lehane said. “She asked if Rose had questions. She spent a huge chunk of time. There was no camera. There was no press. Nobody knew. She was very human in that moment and wanted Rose to feel safe.”

  Lehane could see that Harris was keeping her entourage waiting. Staffers were looking impatient. They had other events to attend.

  “It was a very human moment for someone who didn’t have a lot of time to be human,” Lehane said.

  * * *

  Kamala Harris, certain that her race was over in the closing days, began campaigning for other candidates seeking legislative and congressional seats. She was making allies, collecting chits, knowing she’d want to cash them in at some point. Even before votes were cast and counted, there was speculation about her next step.

  “Those in the know point to a run for the White House,” San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phil Matier and Andy Ross wrote on November 6, 2016, two days before the fateful election day.

  As polls closed in the East on election night 2016, Harris’s campaign staff ordered guacamole, chips, and tapas at a restaurant near the California Department of Justice offices in downtown Los Angeles. All the while, they were looking at their phones, checking the needle on the New York Times probability meter, refreshing it, not believing what they were seeing, Harris’s press secretary Nathan Click recalled.

  “Holy fuck,” Sean Clegg, one of Harris’s main strategists, said.

  Clegg was the first to declare what they all were thinking. Distraught and realizing that the improbable had occurred, Clegg rushed to Harris’s election-night venue, Exchange LA, the renovated art deco downtown event space that once housed the Pacific Stock Exchange.

  Harris had been at another restaurant with her family and her close friends Chrisette and Reginald Hudlin and their children. As the reality set in, Harris wrote in her autobiography, the Hudlins’ son, Alexander, not yet a teen, looked at the soon-to-be senator-elect with tears in his eyes.

  “Auntie Kamala, that man can’t win. He’s not going to win, is he?”

  The child’s fear hit Harris hard. She hustled to Exchange LA, huddled in an alcove with Clegg and Juan Rodriguez, and tore up the hopeful speech she had written in anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s victory.

  On that night, some Democratic leaders elsewhere in the country gamely offered to work with President-elect Trump. Not Harris, not on this night. She wasn’t wearing a necklace of severed heads like the mythological warrior goddess Harris spoke about in her first run for office thirteen years earlier, but her words, handwritten on scraps of paper, suggested that she was becoming Kali-like. The politician who so often was criticized for failing to take stands threw caution into the trash.

  At about 10:00 p.m., Harris took the stage, her husband by her side, with maybe one thousand people watching, many of them in tears and all of them in a state of disbelief. She proceeded to repeat the word “fight” no fewer than twenty-six times in a speech that ran about eight minutes. There was no teleprompter.

  “Do we retreat or do we fight? I say we fight. And I intend to fight. I intend to fight for our ideals.

  “I intend to fight for a state that has the largest number of immigrants documented and undocumented of any state in this country, and to do everything we can to bring them justice and dignity and fairness under the law and pass comprehensive immigration reform. Bring them out from under the shadows, fight for who we are. I intend to fight.

  “I intend to fight for Black Lives Matter.

  “I intend to fight for truth and transparency and trust. I intend to fight.

  “I intend to fight for a woman’s access to health care and reproductive health rights.

  “I intend to fight against those naysayers who suggest there is no such thing as climate change.”

  Harris promised to fight for the civil rights of all people and to fight to defend marriage equality. She pledged to fight for students against loan debt, to fight against Big Oil and science deniers, and to fight for workers’ right to collective bargaining and for gun safety laws.

  “So, guys, here is the deal. Our ideals are at stake right now. We all have to fight for who we are.”

  Harris had won that night in a cakewalk, by a 61.6 to 38.4 percent margin. She got 7.5 million votes, winning all but four of California’s fifty-eight counties. She received 3.1 million more votes than Trump in California, though 1.2 million fewer than Hillary Clinton’s 8.7 million votes.

  At the end of Harris’s speech, the campaign staff did the obligatory balloon drop, though it was a mistake. No one was in a mood to celebrate. The room emptied quickly. Harris and her campaign team agreed to meet at the campaign office on Wilshire Boulevard the following morning.

  That next day, she made some thank-you calls to supporters and began thinking about the committee assignments that would give her the greatest impact. She and her team also decided on her first public appearance as senator-elect. It would be at the headquarters of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an immigrant advocacy organization. Reporters covering the event noticed that she choked up when she recalled children asking whether they’d be deported.

  “You are not alone,” she told the gathering, “you matter and we’ve got your back.”

  Senator Kamala Harris had staked out the posture she would bring with her to Washington. Harris didn’t discuss her next campaign that night or the day after. However, her team of consultants could not help but think ahead and contemplate what might come in Campaign 2020.

  26 Stepping onto the Nati
onal Stage

  By Election Day 2016, Kamala Harris and her staff were already months into laying the groundwork for the launch of a Senate career that would propel her into the national spotlight.

  But those plans were not her idea—they were urged upon her by her staffers. That’s because Harris was too superstitious to consider the possibility of victory until after the polls closed. Focusing on anything else, even for a minute, she thought, could trip up a candidate or damage a political career. But by mid-September, she had a comfortable lead over Sanchez. So when her senior advisers talked to a wider circle of supporters, the subject of what would happen after the election came up regularly. In one of those conversations, a senior Obama administration official told Harris directly that not looking past Election Day would be a big mistake and that she needed to ask for committee assignments. Harris responded that she hadn’t made those requests because she hadn’t yet won. The official tried to explain the ways of Washington: if Harris were to wait, she would find herself at the end of the line.

  Superstition notwithstanding, Harris took the official’s advice and asked her campaign staffers to begin working on transition matters. They got to work immediately. That included gaming out how to help Harris get on the committees she wanted, especially those that would give her a high enough national profile to deliver on her ambitious campaign promises.

  For starters, she wanted to get on the Environment and Public Works Committee. That committee had jurisdiction over water and forest management, vital as the climate changed and critically important to California. Droughts had become prolonged, and Sierra forests and oak and brush in the hills closer to the coast were burning with a ferocity never before seen. Obama had gotten on that committee as a freshman senator in 2005 and enjoyed it very much. Harris was also interested in the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, given that California is home to two million veterans.

  Above all, she wanted to get a seat on the Judiciary Committee, because it dovetailed with her skills and experience as a prosecutor and her interest in criminal justice reform. It was also one of the highest profile of all Senate committees. Its hearings frequently were televised. Judiciary also had a notoriously long line of senators coveting seats on it.

  * * *

  In 2016, the conventional wisdom, the polls, and every other signal pointed to a Hillary Clinton presidency. That meant planning not just for the Senate transition but also for how Harris would plug into the machinery of an incoming Clinton administration and the ripple effects that would have across Washington.

  Harris had attributes that most other freshman senators lacked, mostly the backing of Obamaworld. Besides helping her make wise transition decisions, top Obama administration officials and other prominent advisers could give her some standing, maybe pull a few strings and set her apart from the rest of the incoming class.

  Harris had national visibility already, too, and support from some of the most prominent Democrats around. Ron Wyden of Oregon was one of several senators who had helped with her Senate campaign. Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York endorsed her on the day she announced.

  There was also the issue of money. Washington campaign advisers had told Harris that she needed to raise $40 million to mount a successful campaign, roughly the same amount that Warren had raised in her 2012 race. Her California team knew she would not need that much. Besides, Harris was not an enthusiastic fund-raiser, never fully comfortable asking acquaintances for money. She ended up raising $15 million for the 2016 race and spending $14.1 million on the campaign. But because she came from a state known as a cash machine for Democrats, she could use the leftover cash to tithe to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for use in other races around the country. Her willingness to help fellow Democrats put her in good standing with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who was the direct recipient of Harris’s largesse as the overseer of the Democrats’ national Senate campaign effort. It was widely expected that Schumer would breeze to reelection and then replace retiring minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada as the Senate’s top Democrat.

  Deciding who gets assigned to what Senate committee is a complicated and murky process. There is no clearly articulated protocol. Even if there were, tradition decreed that virtually all the decisions would be made by Schumer. And that gave Harris good reason for optimism.

  Committees weren’t the only minefield Harris would have to traverse. In a legislative body that runs on seniority and alliances, there were other important relationships Harris would have to cultivate and manage. One of the most important ones would be with the senior senator from California, Dianne Feinstein. Given her seniority, Feinstein had amassed significant power in the upper house. She could help Harris, or not. Developing an alliance with Feinstein would be tricky. Friction dated to Officer Isaac Espinoza’s funeral in 2004, when Feinstein publicly rebuked Harris for not seeking the death penalty against Espinoza’s killer. Harris would have to walk a tightrope between being too deferential to Feinstein and being too brash or independent. The patchy relationship between Harris and Feinstein had improved. But there was a need for sensitivity and caution. Harris was entering Feinstein’s world. Mostly, Harris, like the rest of the nation, would need to recalibrate and reassess, as Donald Trump, the great unknown, prepared to take office.

  * * *

  As is the tradition of the Senate, incoming freshmen were required to be in Washington early, on Monday, November 14, the start of a weeklong onboarding event known informally as the Senate Boot Camp.

  Harris told staff she wanted two things. One was a holdover from the initial plan: they would hire as diverse a staff as possible. They’d been told, for instance, that there were few if any Black chiefs of staff at the time and only one who was a legislative director, another key position.

  Her second decision was new: they would make sure anyone who had planned on joining a Hillary Clinton administration and was now out of work would be respected and listened to or met with, as possible.

  That would mean hundreds of phone calls and emails to answer and dozens of meetings to schedule with Harris or with senior staff. Two of her closest aides, Debbie Mesloh, who had been with her since before she was ever elected, and Michael Troncoso, who had been an integral part of her staff at the Office of Attorney General of California, had moved to Washington to spearhead the effort and to make sure that everyone got a proper response. Both would stay for several months.

  One silver lining of the 2016 election had been that three women of color would join the mostly White and male Senate. When Harris reported for duty in the basement of the Hart Senate Office Building, she found herself just down the hall from the other two. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, an ally from their fight against banks in the wake of the foreclosure crisis, would be the nation’s first Latina senator. Tammy Duckworth, the disabled war hero from Illinois, was the first Thai American woman elected to the Senate. They all bonded immediately.

  To Harris’s welcome surprise, Feinstein stepped up as a key partner and ally from the start. The display of generosity surprised—and even shocked—some of her staff, who had hoped for the best but prepared for the worst. Feinstein and outgoing senator Barbara Boxer helped Harris with the many unexpected logistical issues, like office space politics. Feinstein also helped Harris with staffing and offered up her own staff to help with anything Harris needed. And Feinstein gave Harris some advice that would not only help shape her time in the Senate but propel her into the political stratosphere: Harris should think about joining the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, more commonly known as Senate Intel.

  As one of the longest-serving committee members, Feinstein cautioned that it was a beast of a job, with grueling hours, long committee hearings, and numerous closed sessions at which some of the nation’s most sensitive and urgent matters are discussed in secret. Because senators cannot hire their own staffers to help them with the daily deluge of top-secret
information, a lot of the work falls on senators themselves, and the workload is huge. Feinstein warned Harris that if she landed on the committee, she could expect to receive a bulging packet of classified intelligence reports and memos to pore over late into the night in order to be ready for the morning barrage of decisions and meetings.

  Feinstein also warned Harris that there was another drawback to being on the committee. Because all of its work, by nature, is classified, it’s largely a thankless and anonymous task. And there was almost nothing Harris could do while on the committee to make a name for herself in the Senate or to establish a national profile and further her political career. As such, many senators, especially freshmen and those with aspirations to higher office, historically looked elsewhere when submitting their committee assignment requests. Harris put in for the job anyway.

  * * *

  It was a busy time. Harris was entertaining offers from several ranking Democrats on key committees, including Wyden of Oregon, who was infuriating Republicans with his deft poking as ranking member of the Finance Committee. One of the first questions Wyden asked Harris after the election was: “Hey, Kamala, you got any interest in being on the Finance Committee?” Wyden also wanted to see Harris on the Environment and Public Works Committee, given their mutual interest in protecting western states from enormous wildfires. And Wyden knew her reputation as a tough inquisitor would come in handy.

  Everyone wanted Harris “because she’s that talented and valuable as a senator,” Wyden recalls telling her. “She knows there are queues and all the rest, but I think it’d be fair to say that there are a lot of ranking members that were hoping she’d be on their committees.” Harris responded by telling Wyden about her own agenda and what she wanted to accomplish.