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Oaklander Harris Is Biden’s Vice President by Doniphan Blair
At her presidential campaign kickoff rally, Kamala Harris jumbotrons to a diverse Oakland crowd. photo: D. Blair
“WE ARE A DIVERSE COUNTRY,” NOTED
California Senator Kamala Harris, when she announced her presidential run on Martin Luther King Day (January 21st) via ABC’s “Good Morning America”, “and some people would say that when there is a diverse population one can not achieve unity."
“I reject that notion,” she said pointedly, both her prosecutorial abilities and relaxed nature on full display. Indeed, Harris not only served the law but rocketed to its top, becoming a deputy district attorney in Oakland when she was 26, district attorney in San Francisco at 40 and California Attorney General at 47, mostly without breaking a sweat, due to her dedication to prep.
“When we emphasize commonality, we will achieve greater unity,” Harris continued on ABC. “We need a president who has vision of the future where everyone can see themselves... You see, our United States of America is not about 'us versus them,' it is about 'we the people.'”
While this suggests a pan-partisan strategy based on Harris's biracial heritage, diverse professional interactions, interfaith marriage and extensive globetrotting, as well as Oakland roots, it’s not going to be all “Kumbaya” choruses.
“I want to be perfectly clear, I am not talking of unity for the sake of unity. I'm not talking about some facade of unity,” Harris elaborated the following Sunday at her campaign's kickoff rally, which she held in Oakland.
Although Harris was born in Oakland, on October 20th, 1964, she gave a shout out to only Kaiser Hospital, which appears to make her more of a Berkeley brat (wouldn't she have mentioned a neighborhood, if she’d lived in one?).
Neighboring Berkeley—that famously free-wheeling center of the ‘60s—was where her Indian mother, a cancer researcher, and her Jamaican father, an economist, attended university, fell in love, marched for civil rights and transcended enormous obstacles, save their own interpersonal ones.
When they divorced, mom moved to Montreal to take a job at Jewish General Hospital, bringing with seven-year-old Kamala and younger sis Maya. While Canada is famously white, especially in winter, Montreal is the capital of a secessionist French state, Quebec, and a legendary Jewish community. Indeed, Harris attended Westmount High, alma mater of their poet-saint, Leonard Cohen, as she may have noted to her future husband, Douglas Emhoff, on their first date.
Kamala Harris in a crush of overjoyed supporters, post-rally Oakland . photo: D. Blair
Of Jewish as well as white extraction, Emhoff is a partner at the global law firm DLA Piper and specializes in intellectual property, including his vigorous defense of a cartoon character's trademark. Upon marrying without ceremony at the San Francisco courthouse in 2014, Harris became a mother of two late-teen step-kids, probably a bit of a shock for both parties.
As if that wasn’t crosscultural enough, Harris has regularly flown twelve time zones east to be with her mother’s family in central India, including a grandfather who served in India’s diplomatic corps and impressed her deeply.
Despite Montreal’s attractive European vibe or attending Howard University in Washington DC, Harris remained smitten with the Bay Area and returned to attend SF’s Hastings Law School. Graduating with honors, she was a shoe-in for deputy district attorney in Alameda County, where the Oakland courthouse was made famous by the political performance art of the Black Panthers.
Fortunately, Oakland welcomes back its own, as well as impoverished immigrants and wealthy cosmopolitans, despite the aggressive anti-gentrifier movement, spotlighted by this summer’s hit films “Sorry to Bother You” and “Blindspotting”.
About 20,000 Oaklanders, mostly of the newly-arrived white persuasion but with a strong people-of-color presence, showed up to evaluate and cheer Harris at her unprecedented presidential campaign’s kickoff rally in front of the mayor’s office, which is occupied by her childhood friend, Libby Schaaf.
Getting into the rally looked hard, with people lining up for blocks and Oakland failing to provide enough security, but the line moved quickly, Harris held off starting until most had arrived and it was an almost-entirely friendly affair.
There were a few naysayers, including a Mayan-looking and -dressed woman rebuking Harris’s record on immigration and a track-suited African-American man with a sign saying, “Do your research; find the truth; she is not for you or me.” Indeed, some Oakland radicals call her Kamala the Cop, or a “politrickster for the aristokkkrazy,” as poet, homeless activist and cineSOURCE contributor Tiny Gray-Garcia put it.
Of course, Harris needs more than the poet vote to get elected and a career in law enforcement does bring establishment cred. Harris parses critiques of her profession’s conservative slant by saying, “My whole life I had only had one client: the people.”
Fathers and daughters, probably of Oakland's new techie elite, enthusiastically support Harris. photo: D. Blair
Harris dedicated herself to the law just like Barack Obama, with whom she shares running for president in the middle of a first US Senate term and Asian-African intermingling (Obama’s step-father was from Indonesia and he lived there for four years). But instead of Obama’s elevated jurisprudence—constitutional law, Harvard law review editing and teaching—Harris went into the trenches of prosecuting criminals.
“I want a seat at that table,” is how she explained her strategy to San Francisco’s public defender Jeff Adachi, a courtroom opponent was well as a friend, “I want to change the world.”
While a failure to push progressive judicial initiatives belies that, according to her critics, Harris countered at her rally by claiming, “At a time when prevention or redemption were not in the vocabulary or mind set of most district attorneys, we created an initiative to give skills and job training instead of jail time for young people arrested for drugs.”
Rejecting old school drug wars, Attorney General Harris focused on gangs trafficking people and firearms, as well as drugs, and her department authored an innovative study of transnational organizations. She also prosecuted hate crimes against LGBTQ teens and advocated for California's marriage equality law, establishing precedents that influenced the Supreme Court’s “Same-Sex Marriage” decision in 2015.
Harris is not quite a writer like Obama, who considered becoming a novelist after his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father” (1995) turned bestseller, but her speech featured some pithy politi-speak, notably: “People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other but that is not our story… that is not our America!” and, “In this moment, we must speak truth about what is happening: seek truth, speak truth and fight for the truth.”
One truth that may prove problematic is that the young, ambitious and extremely attractive woman-of-color attorney inevitably encountered one of California’s most powerful men of any color, Willie Brown, also an attorney, as he was finishing fifteen prodigious years as the powerful Speaker of the California Assembly and about start two terms as San Francisco’s “da mayor” (his term).
Dating Brown, who was 30 years her senior and still married, presumably no longer offends anyone in America, now that conservative Bible-belters have converted to Trumpism, but some of his gifts might.
The deluxe BMW can be written off as something any rich guy would give a beloved girlfriend, but Brown’s facilitation of Harris’s appointment to state-wide insurance and medical oversight boards, with $400,000 remuneration over five years, might raise eyebrows on both sides of the aisle, even as it's dismissed as minimal compared to Trump’s philandering, fishy deals or felonies.
Although Brown broke with Harris to return to his wife, the California kingmaker continued to honor their friendship. Hence, it was not that hard for Harris to BART across the Bay and snatch the San Francisco district attorney’s office from the popular, if increasingly ineffective, Terence Hallinan, doyen of a famous local family of lawyers and liberals, in 2004.
Kamala Harris and one of her opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (2013-), who is hewing to a more conciliatory position. photo: unknown
With San Francisco dominating state-wide and national politics—from Governor Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom to Senator Diane Feinstein, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and ex-Senator Barbara Boxer (although she’s a Mariner)—Harris naturally jumped to California Attorney General in 2011. For her Senate race in 2016, Brown petitioned LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a powerful southern California challenger, to recuse himself. Harris won handily with 61% of the vote.
Brown’s patronage may come back to haunt Harris, especially in a presidential debate with a master of disaster, expert at smut, scandal and rabbit-punch jibes—unless Harris has an equally slicing rejoinder and sufficient equanimity. Fortunately, she’s disciplined and determined and undoubtedly has an answer to the Brown question that's as effortless as it is understandable, if not squeaky clean.
“Lord knows I am not perfect,” is how she put it at the Oakland rally. “But I will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect,” which may prove difficult duking it out in the bare-knuckled ring of American politics.
“Of course, we know this is not going to be easy guys,” Harris admitted. “And we know what the doubters will say… ‘It is not your time’… ‘The odds are long’… ‘It can’t be done.’” “But,” she concluded, “America’s story has always been written by people who can see what can be, unburdened by what has been.”
Despite her sometimes bubbly demeanor—she laughed a lot during her speech—she's obviously able to debate and destroy with the best of them, given she spend six years as the top prosecutor in California, the world's MOST litigious state.
Overruling staff and prudence, Harris pulled out of a settlement for Californian homeowners injured by the Great Recession, and personally called J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. After arguing with him "like dogs in a fight," according to her just-released autobiography, "The Truths We Hold: An American Journey" (2019), she negotiated a ten-fold settlement increase from the five major loan companies to $25 billion.
An opponent of for-profit colleges, she also extracted over a billion from the now-closed Corinthian Colleges, although her office passed on similar charges against Trump University, perhaps because of its donations to her office, an allegation she dismissed. Later in the Senate, she supported refinancing students in debt.
As usual, Harris has been hard at work. In addition to serving as senator, where she became famous for grilling US Attorney General Jeff Sessions about Russia in 2017, and publishing the now-obligatory autobiography, she put out a children’s book. “Superheroes Are Everywhere” (2019) emphasizes innovation, disregarding slogans and learning how to do detail, in a chapter entitled “Embrace the Mundane”.
African-American protestor holds up sign at Senator Kamala Harris's Oakland kickoff rally. photo: D. Blair
The main critique of Harris around California is that she was both a cop AND not cop enough. Hence, she failed to aggressively prosecute criminals —notably not going for the death penalty with a gang member who killed a cop—or, conversely, to rapidly reverse the disastrous Three Strikes Laws of the 1990s, although she strongly supported Governor Brown’s prison reform in 2016.
Harris’s record is conspicuously middle of the road, suggesting timidity to her critics, real politic to her supporters, or an eye on higher office, as public defender Adachi noted. Obviously, Harris has immense experience negotiating between the power centers of California's diverse bases, including across the critical economic divide.
While Harris was born to elite professionals, has hung with upper middle classers most of her entire life and spent the last 30 years among California’s wealthiest—sister Maya’s boyfriend is Tony West, general counsel of Uber, for example—she is also a person of color, who attended a traditional African-American university and has defended and spent time with people at the other end of the social pecking order or law.
Naturally, she supports Medicare for all, reversing Trump's tax giveaway to the rich and most progressive positions. Despite this being her first senate term, hence her first experience with legislative politics, she obviously feels capable, qualified and prepared enough.
“I love my country,” was how Harris explained her bold decision to run, on ABC. “I feel a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are. I am prepared to fight and I know how to fight.”
Indeed, “Oakland street fighter” is what David Brooks, the conservative but anti-Trump columnist, called her, even lauding her as the best candidate thus far (see his “Kamala Harris, Call-Out Star”).
If Harris garners the nomination, and Trump does as well, he will resort to his patented blend of tribalism, cynicism and lowbrowism, as well as covert racism and misogyny, although he did take note of her candidacy and admitted she may be the one to beat.
Before that beauty-and-the-beast match up, Harris will have to out-maneuver and -debate a vast field of Democratic candidates, which now numbers seven and will include up to a half-a-dozen more, some of whom have also noted she's a serious contender.
Kamala Harris is a woman in a hurry, both here coming into the US Senate and up her career ladder. photo: unknown
If Harris can maintain Oakland’s tolerant street multiculturalism and Michelle Obama's doctrine of staying high, while going low enough to confront the tough issues, she may have the right balance of court room wit and celebrity charm, multicultural chops and centrist inclusiveness to beat a sitting president who is almost her exact opposite: no legal experience, aside from being charged with crimes, anti-intellectual, uncouth and ugly.
“We are here knowing we are at an inflection in the history of our world, we are at an inflection point in the history of our nation,” Harris concluded at her opening rally. "We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before."
With Brexit and rightist takeovers across Europe prompting 30 prominent intellectuals to post the surprisingly desperate "Fight for Europe Manifesto", and pending or impending environmental, economic, digital, espionage or foreign war catastrophes, Harris is hardly exaggerating.
"And we are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question: Who are we? Who are we as Americans? So, let’s answer that question, to the world, and each other, right here and right now: America, we are better than this," Harris said, pausing for a long sustained cheer.
"We are better than this,” were her final words, which she repeated three times, articulating an ambitious challenge which she herself just may be able to prove to a majority of the American people.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .Posted on Feb 06, 2019 - 10:20 PM