Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

  In March 2017, two months after she was sworn into the U.S. Senate, Harris had transferred $1 million-plus left over in her attorney general campaign bank account to another campaign account called “Harris for Governor 2026,” just in case. The money was sitting there in 2018, after she made the decision to run for president. So she contributed it to favored charities: $100,000 to the Los Angeles Brotherhood Crusade, which helps low-income residents; $71,000 to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles; $100,000 to a firefighters fund; $50,000 to the Anti-Recidivism Coalition; $41,000 to the California Peace Officers’ Memorial, which tends to a monument across from the capitol that includes the names of all California peace officers who have been killed in the line of duty, Isaac Espinoza among them; and $37,500 to the United Farm Workers. She gave money to organizations that promote science education for girls, shelter domestic violence victims, and provide services to domestic workers. The giving was generous and knowing. Each recipient could help a candidate running in a California primary in March 2020.

  Although Harris had not formally announced her candidacy, the New York Times, Washington Post, and others reported in year-end stories that Harris was getting ready to run, as were Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren. Bernie Sanders also was running, and Joe Biden was likely to enter the race. CNN identified twenty-nine potential Democratic presidential candidates, including four from California.

  * * *

  The release of her autobiography, The Truths We Hold, at the start of 2019 generated some buzz, and many questions. The title was intentional. The campaign was going to be about truth and justice, although when she talked about the book in interviews, she told interviewers she was not prepared to make any announcement about her plans at that moment.

  On January 9, 2019, during a morning appearance on the ABC talk show The View, one of the cohosts, Whoopi Goldberg, opened with “So, I’m supposed to ask you, are you running?”

  “I’m pleased to announce on The View that I’m not ready to make my announcement,” Harris replied, smiling. They laughed uproariously.

  “I’m very tempted,” Harris said, once the laughter quieted. “But I’m not yet ready.”

  She waited to make her announcement on ABC’s Good Morning America, on January 21, the day of service named in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. “The American people deserve to have somebody who is going to fight for them, who is going to see them, who will hear them, who will care about them, who will be concerned about their experience and will put them in front of self-interest,” Harris said.

  Her kickoff rally was on the next Sunday, January 27, in Oakland. Her consultants knew how to put on a show in Oakland, having done it in October 2007 when they managed Hillary Clinton’s California presidential campaign and drew fourteen thousand people to downtown Oakland. They worked assiduously to make certain Harris’s crowd would be even more impressive, and it was. American flags and red, white, and blue bunting draped Oakland City Hall; the sun was shining, and twenty thousand people showed up. Harris talked about Martin Luther King Jr. and recalled that Shirley Chisholm had made her historic announcement as the first Black woman running for president more than forty years earlier.

  Harris’s speech was full of populist themes and mentions of African American heroes. She told the crowd that she was born at the Kaiser Permanente hospital not far away and had worked in the Oakland courts as an Alameda County deputy district attorney, saying how proud she was when she stood in a courtroom and said, “Kamala Harris, for the people.”

  “For the people” was her theme that day. It was meant to reflect the rationale for her run.

  “I’m running to be president, of the people, by the people, and for all people,” she said.

  One of the faces in the crowd was Jackie Phillips, the principal at Cole School in Oakland who had known Harris as the teenager who was always ready to have fun but who also was determined to make something of herself. She was “proud beyond words.”

  The event got rave reviews. Even President Trump, aficionado of big crowds, acknowledged in a New York Times interview that Harris’s Oakland event was “the best opening so far.”

  It was Harris’s way: enter the race early, show strength, and, perhaps, thin the field. There was plenty of promise. She got off to a great start. But a statewide race in California was one thing. A national campaign was quite another.

  33 Timing Is Everything

  Fox News proclaimed that Kamala Harris was the front-runner less than two weeks after she announced her candidacy. That was not true then or ever. Joe Biden was the front-runner from start to finish. But Harris was in the top tier, and that meant she was being scrutinized as never before.

  Journalists and commentators questioned whether she’d been as good a prosecutor as she had claimed to be. Some wondered if she’d been too good and had become so steely and tough that she would lack the common touch that Obama had on the trail and not connect with her next jury, the American people. The Los Angeles Times asked Feinstein whether she would support Harris. The senior senator damned Harris with faint praise: “I’m a big fan of Sen. Harris, and I work with her. But she’s brand-new here, so it takes a little bit of time to get to know somebody.” Biden was her man.

  Harris based her campaign in Baltimore, though she had no connection to Baltimore. She did know that in the United States, news travels east to west, and that to be taken seriously, she needed to be in the East. Maya Harris was campaign chairwoman in the East, while much of Harris’s brain trust remained in San Francisco. Juan Rodriguez, who managed her Senate campaign, was campaign manager. He was not yet thirty-five. Born in Burbank, Rodriguez is the son of immigrants from El Salvador who came to the United States at age nineteen to escape the violence in their homeland and seek a better life. His mom worked cleaning houses. His dad was a carpenter. He went to UCLA, then got a master’s degree in business administration from Pepperdine University in Malibu, and worked as an intern for Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa before rising in Harris’s organization.

  In the campaign, competing factions soon developed. Setbacks, including some self-inflicted ones, caused rifts. Harris had a habit of ducking reporters and showing up late for events, and she had shifting stands on single-payer health care, and small messages on legalizing the commercial sale of marijuana and decriminalizing prostitution between consenting adults—an idea that appalled some of the people who applauded her when in 2016 she brought the first criminal case against the owners of Backpage.

  In February, she told an interviewer on The Breakfast Club podcast that she had smoked marijuana in college, offering: “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

  Donald Harris, her father, was not amused, and he blogged that his deceased grandmothers and parents “must be turning in their graves right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.” He removed the post, but not until it was widely reported. For Harris, the episode was an unforced error, a lesson that in a presidential campaign, every word uttered by the candidate matters.

  Coming from California and having run three statewide races, Harris should have had a fund-raising edge. She didn’t. Despite her impressive kickoff in Oakland, Harris raised $12 million in the first quarter of 2019, a mediocre showing. By comparison, Senator Barack Obama raised more than $25 million in the first quarter after he announced his candidacy, and that was twelve years earlier in 2007.

  In a large field that included strong women, such as Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand, Harris was not standing out. She wasn’t as far to the left as Warren or Bernie Sanders. Nor did she capture the imagination of voters who flocked to former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg stood out as the only candidate who, as he put it, was “the only left-handed, Maltese-American, Episcopalian, gay millenni
al war veteran in the race.” He was Harvard educated and a Rhodes Scholar, and he seemed to answer the yearning of voters, including many in California that Harris might have been counting on, who wanted a generational change. Worse for Harris, she could not define her reason for running beyond being someone who would prosecute the case against Trump, and she could not pull voters away from Joe Biden.

  Harris’s first big chance to turn the race came in the first debate, on June 27, 2019. An hour into it, she paused, inhaled, turned to Biden, and attacked him over his work decades earlier in the Senate with segregationist senators to restrict busing to achieve school desegregation.

  “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

  Her willingness to attack the front-runner on the defining issue of race in the United States made clear that she was running to win. Her fund-raising spiked upward. She got a jolt in polling. Journalists concluded that she was the clear winner in the first debate. But the win and the polling spike were fleeting. A New York Times story the following day reflected a recurrent problem for Harris. Her spokesman said she supported busing as a method for school integration but “declined to provide additional information.” After raising the issue, she was dodging the issue. From the New York Times:

  The question for Ms. Harris is whether she can sustain her momentum from Thursday. Since the start of her campaign, she has performed well when working from a well-crafted plan but has sometimes suffered from self-inflicted wounds when forced to speak extemporaneously. And, as is often the case when one candidate attacks another in a multicandidate field, it remains to be seen if she helped herself or merely wounded Mr. Biden.

  The attack surprised Biden and seemed to hurt him on a personal level. He later said on The Tom Joyner Morning Show, “I thought we were friends, and I hope we still will be.” Biden in that interview recalled that in 2016, she asked him to come to the California Democratic Convention in San Jose and endorse her candidacy for U.S. Senate. He did. His appearance and heartfelt speech cemented the California Democratic Party’s endorsement of Harris over Loretta Sanchez.

  That was then. In 2019, Harris was doing what she thought she needed to do to win.

  * * *

  In a general election, Harris’s background as a prosecutor, someone who had put people in prison for their bad acts, would play well. But in the primary, she was challenged by social justice activists who questioned whether she was, in fact, a “progressive” prosecutor.

  “Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors,” Lara Bazelon, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Bazelon’s piercing analysis appeared on January 17, 2019. It resonated throughout the campaign.

  In the second Democratic presidential primary debate held at the end of July in Detroit, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii picked up on that theme and was brutal. As a prosecutor, Gabbard said, Harris “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations” and failed to investigate evidence that might have exonerated a death row inmate, a reference to the Kevin Cooper case. It was out of context. But on a stage crowded with ten candidates, Harris was not able to aptly respond. She made it worse when she appeared on CNN with Anderson Cooper. Rather than taking an affirmative position or setting the record straight, she came off as imperious: “This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I’m a top-tier candidate and so I did expect that I’d be on the stage and take some hits tonight. When people are at zero or one percent or whatever she might be at, so I did expect to take some hits tonight.”

  Harris backtracked on some of her positions she had taken as a district attorney and attorney general, notably saying she regretted that in some counties, parents of habitually truant children were jailed as a result of the law she advocated. Their incarceration was an “unintended consequence,” she said in 2019. But just a few years earlier, January 2015, when she was sworn in for her second term as attorney general, she said in her inauguration speech, “It’s time to say that in the State of California it is a crime for a child to go without an education.” The episode raised the basic question: Kamala Harris took positions, but what were her principles?

  * * *

  By early November, the campaign was running out of money, and it fell to campaign manager Juan Rodriguez to impose layoffs and face the vitriol from people who were let go.

  Rodriguez had been the starting quarterback of his high school football team as a junior and senior. Quarterbacks learned how to take a sack. In the crumbling Harris campaign, the blitz was on. The New York Times deconstructed Harris’s faltering campaign on November 29, in a piece that ran nearly three thousand words under a headline that read: “How Kamala Harris’s Campaign Unraveled.”

  “The 2020 Democratic field has been defined by its turbulence, with some contenders rising, others dropping out and two more jumping in just this month. Yet there is only one candidate who rocketed to the top tier and then plummeted in early state polls to the low single digits: Ms. Harris.”

  Rodriguez was taking the sack. But quarterbacks don’t get sacked unless there is a breakdown around them. So it was in Harris’s campaign. The tone of any campaign is set from the top. Maya Harris second-guessed strategists, who knew it was folly to get between the Harris sisters. Messaging was flat. There was way too much internal drama. Campaign aides who lost their jobs because money was running out were sniping as they left.

  Democrats don’t win their party’s presidential nomination without winning primaries in southern states, and Harris needed to do well in South Carolina where Black voters were key. Harris’s campaign, like the campaigns of the other Democrats, did not anticipate the unshakable strength of Joe Biden’s support among Black voters. Harris’s failure to move up in the polls affected her fund-raising, and without money, she couldn’t buy airtime in the early states for ads that might have helped her in the polls. It was a vicious circle. By the end of 2019, Harris had raised $40.3 million, slightly more than half of the $76 million raised in 2019 by Pete Buttigieg. Harris failed to catch on with small-dollar donors, who provide much of the Democratic presidential candidates’ money. Federal Election Commission statistics show 54 percent of her donations came in increments of $200 or less, way below Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who received 74 percent of her $127 million in increments of $200 or less. On one day in the summer, Harris raised a mere $4,000 in online donations.

  There was, however, one hope.

  Presidential candidates are restricted to raising $2,800 per donor for the primary and another $2,800 for the general. Given the cost of campaigning, candidates end up relying on super PACs, especially during the primary. Super PACs, which must operate independently from candidates, can accept donations of unlimited size. Seeing that the campaign was failing, one of Harris’s wealthy supporters and two former campaign aides banded together to create a super PAC called People Standing Strong. The committee raised $1.2 million. Of that, $1 million came from M. Quinn Delaney, a wealthy liberal from Oakland who funds candidates and campaigns she believes advance the cause of racial justice. Delaney and her husband, real estate developer Wayne Jordan, are among Harris’s most loyal supporters.

  Timing in politics matters. At 11:42 a.m. EST on December 3, 2019, Politico’s Christopher Cadelago broke th
e news that a super PAC supporting Harris had started reserving airtime in Iowa—this after Harris’s campaign, running on fumes, had not aired a single ad in Iowa since September. Dan Newman and Brian Brokaw, the consultants working on People Standing Strong, had wired $501,000 to television stations in Iowa to start airing a pro-Harris ad and were preparing to send another $500,000. It was to be the largest purchase of airtime on behalf of any candidate who was not a self-funding billionaire.

  “We were her only shot. We needed to be on the air,” said Brokaw, who had managed Harris’s 2010 run for attorney general.

  The ad almost certainly would have grabbed voters’ attention and perhaps set Harris apart from the pack. The spot featured Harris’s greatest hits, clips of her grilling Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Attorney General William Barr, and former attorney general Jeff Sessions, with her signature: “I’m asking you a very direct question. Yes or no?”

  “I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous,” Sessions fumbles in the ad.

  The narrator’s voice: “Kamala Harris exposes Republicans. She makes them nervous. And leaves them unable to defend their lies and corruption. She’ll do the same to Donald Trump.… Kamala Harris, the Democrat for president that Donald Trump fears most.”