by Dan Morain
When Kavanaugh was forced to return before the committee on September 27 to respond to Blasey Ford’s allegations, the two sat side by side at witness tables. Each offered far different but equally riveting testimony.
Harris, drawing on her experience as a prosecutor who had held the hands of victims of sex crimes, began by apologizing to Blasey Ford for her treatment by Republicans trying to neutralize her as a threat to Kavanaugh’s confirmation:
“Dr. Ford, first of all, just so we can level set, you know you are not on trial.… You are sitting here before members of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee because you had the courage to come forward, because as you have said, you believe it was your civic duty.” Harris then guided Blasey Ford through a series of questions as she would any victim of a sexual assault.
Turning to Kavanaugh, Harris tried to extract a commitment from him that he would ask the White House to order the FBI to do a supplemental background investigation in order to, once and for all, get to the bottom of the allegations. She was not successful. The next day, the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee voted to send his confirmation to the full Senate, and on October 6, 2018, Kavanaugh was confirmed by the slimmest margin in the court’s history, 50–48.
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In the Kavanaugh hearing, there was the unmistakable echo of the confirmation of Clarence Thomas in 1991, when Kamala Harris was a deputy district attorney in Oakland. Then, a law professor, Anita Hill, was the reluctant witness. In 2018, Blasey Ford, the psychology professor, didn’t want to testify. In 1991, Dianne Feinstein watched Hill testify on a television while waiting for a flight at Heathrow Airport. Voters’ reaction against the treatment of Hill by men in the Senate helped Feinstein win election to the Senate in 1992, the “Year of the Woman.” As a senator twenty-six years later, Feinstein took it upon herself to withhold Blasey Ford’s letter, out of concern for the impact on Blasey Ford’s life and because she sought to protect her request for confidentiality. Harris worried, too, about the impact on Blasey Ford, but she also believed the central allegation needed to be investigated.
In 2019, Time magazine listed Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford as being among its top one hundred most influential people from the year before. Mitch McConnell wrote the blurb that accompanied Kavanaugh’s photo. He referred to “unhinged partisanship and special interests” that sought to “distract” the Senate from considering his sterling credentials. Harris wrote the blurb that appeared next to Blasey Ford’s photo:
Her story, spoken while holding back tears, shook Washington and the country. Her courage, in the face of those who wished to silence her, galvanized Americans. And her unfathomable sacrifice, out of a sense of civic duty, shined a spotlight on the way we treat survivors of sexual violence. Christine Blasey Ford’s ambition wasn’t to become a household name or make it onto this list. She had a good life and a successful career—and risked everything to send a warning in a moment of grave consequence. At her core, she is a teacher. And through her courage, she forced the country to reckon with an issue that has too often been ignored and kept in the dark.
Their friction over Feinstein’s handling of Blasey Ford’s letter aside, Harris stuck by her endorsement of Feinstein’s reelection. Feinstein won another six-year term in November 2018.
31 A Death in the Family
Ever since she flummoxed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Kamala Harris had become a favorite of Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, and other late-night comics. Increasingly, she had also become a target for Fox News commentators, Donald Trump, and the people in his orbit. Jason Miller, a President Trump loyalist and a talking head on CNN, accused Harris of being “hysterical” during her questioning of Sessions, a classically sexist characterization.
“Really? Really, if anyone was hysterical maybe it was the old man saying that her questions were scaring him,” Colbert said, defending Harris in one episode.
Harris’s questioning of Sessions elevated her above the crowd of Democratic senators. Her star rose even higher after her performance in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. In the closing weeks of the 2018 midterm campaign, she was in high demand. She filled every request possible, even though, unnoticed by her public, she was again confronting the fragility of life. One of her close staffers was sick with cancer, and Harris was quietly aware that he was not likely to make it.
On the surface, Harris kept moving. Clearly contemplating a presidential run, Harris made stops in all the most important states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada. As Election Day neared, she spent at least $709,500 of her campaign funds to help Democratic Senate and House candidates and made donations to state parties and candidates in Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and back home in Orange County, California.
Reporters were there in South Carolina on October 19, 2018, as Harris denounced Republican efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and unnamed forces sowing “hatred and division.” The crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to her, a day before she turned fifty-four. A week earlier, Joe Biden visited South Carolina, the state that would propel him to the Democratic presidential nomination, as it did Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before him.
Along the way, Harris proposed a middle-class tax cut intended to help people earning $100,000 or less and to raise taxes on big banks. Her proposal was intended to counteract the tax cut President Trump and congressional Republicans had pushed through in 2017. Trump’s tax cut greatly benefited corporations and wealthy individuals, but by limiting federal deductions for state and local taxes, the measure cost people in California, New York, and other states that have high property values and that levy high state income taxes.
From South Carolina, she jetted to Iowa. CNN’s Maeve Reston was in Cedar Rapids on October 23, reporting that a young English teacher told Harris that the senator “had spoken for all the women who have experienced sexual assault when she questioned the then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford.”
Harris invited the woman to come close and folded her in a hug as the woman wept.
Reston offered her analysis: “It is far too early to assess Harris’ viability within an enormous field of likely 2020 candidates. But with her prosecutorial style and unflappable demeanor during the Kavanaugh hearings, she clearly forged a unique connection with women, one that could serve as a powerful driver in her campaign if she decides to run.”
With a headline saying Kamala Harris “May Be the Antidote to Trump,” Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu wrote about the enthusiastic reception Harris was receiving in Iowa, following her performance in the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Kavanaugh. Basu wrote, “And when, at one point, she walked out of the hearing room in frustration, she gave voice to women everywhere who were feeling the same way. ‘I can’t sit here anymore and be a part of this,’ she could be heard saying in a hallway. ‘It was so disgusting that they were pushing this through.’ ”
The column continued: “She comes across as whip smart, warm, impassioned and, maybe most importantly, someone who embodies the aspirations and struggles of every American.” And this: “Hearing Harris address the Iowa Asian-Latino Coalition earlier brought reminders of the transcendent power of America’s first mixed-race president, and his contention that there was only one America. Lately, that has not rung true. But imagine adding a female perspective to Barack Obama’s diverse background.”
Edward-Isaac Dovere, among the reporters following Harris in Iowa, wrote in the Atlantic on October 26, 2018, that “everywhere she’s been, and in the airports in between, from women across ages and races. Crying. Saying thank you. Telling her their own stories.”
And he quoted her: “It’s about diagnosis and then there needs to be treatment, right? That’s also speaking truth—the diagnosis: You have cancer. So that is the truth, now let’s deal with it: What’s the treatment required? To deny it and not speak the truth means to let it fester.”
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br /> The statement was at once a metaphor and literal. The beast that is cancer was on her mind that week.
* * *
Like many young men drawn to working in politics, Tyrone Gayle was smart, hardworking, savvy, and idealistic. He had a winning smile, could be funny, and could be sharp-tongued with a reporter who annoyed him. In 2012, he worked to elect Tim Kaine of Virginia to the U.S. Senate. In 2014, he was press secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he was one of Hillary Clinton’s top press officers.
During the 2016 campaign, Gayle was diagnosed with colon cancer but, after treatment, appeared to have beaten it. In 2017, newly elected senator Kamala Harris hired him as her first press secretary. He quickly became integral to Harris’s operation and to her life in D.C. He helped shape her media strategy and keep up on the news she needed to know. They also shared a common heritage. His parents were Jamaican immigrants, as was her father. He helped her build her Spotify playlist. Where her tastes went to Bob Marley and hip-hop, he persuaded her Boyz II Men was worth a listen.
Then his colon cancer reappeared, no doubt reminding Harris of her mother’s battles with cancer in 2009. Although Tyrone often had no choice but to be absent from the office, Harris made a point of keeping him in her loop, texting him, calling him, soliciting his advice, telling him he looked handsome as his hair fell out and he lost weight. On May 5, 2018, she wished him all the best when he married the love of his life, Beth Foster. Harris and her husband had thrown a wedding shower for the couple in April and gave them a crystal vase. Beth and Tyrone had met in 2012 when she worked on President Obama’s reelection campaign and Gayle was working for Senator Kaine.
A little less than six months later, on October 25, 2018, Lily Adams, Gayle’s friend and Harris’s communications director, got a call from Beth Foster Gayle. The situation was dire. Adams got in her car and drove to New York. She also relayed the information to Harris. The senator canceled whatever obligations she had that day, thirteen days before the midterm elections, and headed to Reagan Washington National Airport, got a shuttle to New York, and made her way to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Beth Foster Gayle told the story to Anderson Cooper of CNN:
“And she unobtrusively came into the hospital room. She held Tyrone’s hand. She told funny stories about him. And she said, ‘Goodbye.’
“And she hugged me just as everything in my entire world was falling apart. And she looked deep in my eyes and told me that she would have my back forever. And it is a moment I will never forget for as long as I live.”
* * *
As the election neared, Trump returned to his old playbook by attacking immigrants and trying to stoke voters’ fears. He warned that a supposed caravan of immigrants was making its way north from Central America. As if an invasion were coming, the commander in chief dispatched soldiers, supposedly to defend the southern border against unarmed, destitute, and desperate immigrants.
On October 26, the day after Gayle died, evidence surfaced that Trump’s bellicosity played havoc with the minds of people already on the edge. On that day in Plantation, Florida, federal authorities arrested Cesar Sayoc Jr., a onetime wrestler and stripper, who had been living in a van plastered with pro-Trump signs and messages condemning the media and Democrats. He was charged with sending bombs to several prominent Democratic critics of President Trump, including Harris. Each package had a photo of the intended recipient with red Xs over her or his face. None went off, and Sayoc was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2019.
Harris went about her political business, appearing in Atlanta and speaking at Spelman College, America’s oldest private historically Black liberal arts college for women:
“We can honor the ancestors by voting early. And certainly in the next 10 days, we can send a message that if someone is trying to suppress our vote, then we will vote them out of office. Because that is a fight worth having.”
In the days ahead, she would visit Florida, where she stumped for Democrats Senator Bill Nelson and Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, who was running for governor (both lost); Wisconsin, where she campaigned for the defeat of Republican governor Scott Walker (he lost, too); Iowa again; Arizona; and several other states. Democrats reclaimed control of the House of Representatives in 2018, though not the Senate. She would remain in the minority.
But her star was ascending, and she was setting out to win the biggest race of all. First, though, she had an important stop to make.
On the weekend after Election Day, Tyrone Gayle’s family and friends gathered for a memorial at the Howard Theatre, not far from where Harris got her undergraduate degree. In her eulogy to Gayle, Harris called him “a warrior, a gentle friendly warrior.” She said, “He understood that those of us sitting in these powerful offices have a sacred responsibility to do everything we can for those people who aren’t sitting in those offices.” She added, “He made me a better public servant. And a better person.”
32 “For the People”
Kamala Harris, her closest advisers, and her family converged on the Park Hyatt Residence, Maya Harris’s Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park on July 28 and 29, 2018. They were there to discuss what Harris’s consultants—Ace Smith, Sean Clegg, Juan Rodriguez, and Dan Newman—had been calling the “Thing.” Should she do the Thing? What if she did the Thing? How would the Thing play out? What effect would the Thing have on their work and their lives?
The Thing was the most consequential decision of Harris’s career and probably theirs: whether she should run for president of the United States. Maya Harris, Tony West, Doug Emhoff, Smith, Clegg, Rodriguez, and Harris’s Senate chief of staff, Nathan Barankin; his successor, Rohini Kosoglu; Harris’s communications director, Lily Adams; and a few others gathered in the building’s conference room and gave their best analyses. Pollster David Binder, who had been Obama’s pollster, had done a deep inquiry. Participants in focus groups said she came off as strong and having moral authority, as opposed to President Trump, who could not be trusted.
The competition among Democrats would be tough, but her life experience, her career as a prosecutor, and her positions on the side of immigrants could set her apart. Her fund-raising team believed that with her connections to the Bay Area and Los Angeles—the ATM for Democratic presidential candidates—Harris would have a leg up raising money.
Harris mostly listened, though more than once she told the group that if she decided to run, she would run to win. She was not interested in running for second place. Most important, she did not want to lose to Donald Trump. Beating Trump was the existential issue. She understood that a small fraction of presidential candidates ever win their party’s nomination, and that at best, her chance of getting into the general election would be 10 percent. She had to want to run, and know why she was running. If she made it to the general election, she wanted to be as certain as possible that she would be a strong general election candidate.
In 2017, the California State Legislature voted to move the state’s primary up to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March, a step that her campaign team helped choreograph. If Harris decided to do the Thing, she thought she’d have a home state advantage over the competitors. She needed to do well enough in Iowa and New Hampshire, better in Nevada, and win in South Carolina. That would give her momentum for the March 3 primary in delegate-rich California. With a win in California, she’d be hard to stop.
No one was a cheerleader. They all tried to remain sober about the path forward. On the final day, it fell to Tony West to argue the cons. There’d be a toll emotionally and physically. Harris needed to know that a full campaign would lay her and her family bare, that every word she uttered would be scrutinized as never before. It was a huge risk, not just for her but for the people she loved, including Doug’s children, Harris’s stepchildren. They’d all be subject to opposition research. Harris had been in the Senate less than
two years. Shouldn’t she build more of a record? What if they threw a party and no one came? That would damage her standing and perhaps derail her career.
At the end of it, the politician who had been criticized on occasion as being overly cautious decided to jump in. All the way in.
* * *
Harris dashed through the next months, though the dash was controlled and calculated. As her campaign team staffed up and quietly rented space for a headquarters in Baltimore, Harris barnstormed from the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh in September to the campaign trail, stumping for candidates running in the 2018 midterms, many of them in states relevant to the Democratic presidential primary.
In committee hearings that fall and early winter, she questioned Trump administration officials about the treatment of pregnant refugees in custody at the border, and she demanded that the Department of Homeland Security reunite children who had been separated from their parents. She introduced legislation to require that Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wear body cameras, and she was one of the authors of antilynching legislation. She toured the destruction caused by the Camp Fire, which killed eighty-six people that fall and destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise. An inconvenient piece of unfinished California business surfaced. In early December 2018, the Sacramento Bee reported that in 2017, after Harris had been sworn in as senator, California attorney general Xavier Becerra settled a harassment claim against Harris’s director of the Division of Law Enforcement for $400,000. He had come with her to her Senate staff. The settlement was an embarrassment for the senator on multiple levels, at least in part because it reflected on her role as a manager. Her aides said she didn’t know that the complaint was filed, let alone that it was being settled. But the Division of Law Enforcement is a major part of the California Department of Justice and its director reports to the attorney general. Harris forced the aide to resign from her Senate staff after the Bee story appeared. He had been with her since she was San Francisco district attorney in the mid-2000s. Time to move on. She visited Afghanistan later in December.