Kamala's Way by Dan Morain

Author:Dan Morain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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,

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