The Rise and Fall of Kamala

Kamala Harris is kind of a basic sorority ditz, but you're not supposed to admit that.

The previous NYT article about Kamala Harris revealed some embarrassingly off-Narrative facts about her commitment to Wokeness. This new one makes up for it by explaining that Kamala is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being anyone has ever known:

The World According to Kamala Harris

The rise of Kamala Harris, the tenacious child of high-achieving immigrants, is atypical. But her story is also distinctly American.

By Robert Draper
Reporting from San Francisco, Calif., and Washington, D.C.
Oct. 26, 2024

… Third, she is the daughter of an Asian woman and a Black man — a human Venn diagram “living in the intersections as a woman of color,” said her friend Mini Timmaraju, the president and chief executive of Reproductive Freedom for All. From Ms. Harris’s childhood in the Berkeley flatlands of California to her current position in the White House, she has lived with the awareness that her gender and racial background have made the world prone to prejudging her.

“It’s not a new thing for her, being disrespected for reasons that have nothing to do with her actual capabilities,” said Jill Louis, an attorney and friend of Ms. Harris since the two were sorority sisters at Howard University. “Does she talk about it? No. Because she’s not a whiner.”

Still, said Ms. Louis of her friend, “You learn to put those shields up early.”

The theme of this article is that Ms. Harris must be more impressive than her rather thin list of accomplishments and her ditzy sorority old girl way of thinking and speaking would suggest … because look at all the racism and sexism she must have overcome in 21st Century America!

That armor has confounded even those who have known her for decades. One of them, the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, once Ms. Harris’s political mentor and boyfriend, reflected on her in a recent interview. “She’s still a mystery,” he said. “Still a mystery. And she’s going to keep it that way.”

Or maybe, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no there there.

A Succession of Risks

From certain angles, Kamala Harris lives the life of a perfectly normal American woman.

…. So yes, she is normal.

She is definitely not weird like that horrible J.D. Vance who has weird things to say!

But ordinary, no.

Kamala has risen all the way to being the boss of Tim Walz, who was, let me remind you, a high school assistant football coach. You can’t get much more extraordinary than that.

What Ms. Harris characterized in her acceptance speech as her “unexpected” journey to the precipice of the Oval Office becomes somewhat less so when considering her origins.

Her father, Donald Harris, a product of Jamaica’s entrepreneurial class,

Despite Britain owning Jamaica from 1655, its cultural roots were established during the 150 years of Spanish rule, so it doesn’t exactly have a One Drop Rule like the United States. Hence, Donald Harris, being from the mixed race “entrepreneurial class” is not “black” in Jamaica. He’s more like Malcolm Gladwell, whose mother came from the middle caste.

What impact does that have on Kamala? I’ve never seen that discussed.

… After her parents separated when she was 5, Ms. Harris fixated on a single role model, her mother. Shyamala Gopalan Harris hailed from upper-crust Tamil Brahmin stock…

Ms. Harris is, in sum, a child of high achievers, raised in a household frequented by intellectuals and civil rights activists. …

What are Kamala’s intellectual interests, if any? I’m drawing a complete blank on this question. Generally speaking, the mainstream media is quick to explain that Democratic candidates like Obama and Bill Clinton aren’t just ward-heeling politicians but are deeply, sincerely fascinated by highbrow theories. But nobody seems interested in explaining what books, if any, are read by Kamala.

Obviously, Donald Trump, like Michael Jordan, has written more books than he’s read. But Democratic nominees aren’t supposed to be so crass. But Kamala …

By the time she was 12, Ms. Harris had already visited Jamaica, India and Zambia and was attending school in Montreal, after her mother took a job at McGill University there. As difficult as such a transition would have been for any child, much less a girl of color thrust into an overwhelmingly white student body,

It’s more complicated than that. She lived in the English-speaking part of Montreal during the height of the Anglophone Quebec Nationalism movement to retake Montreal from the economically dominant English-speakers like herself.

But the Francophones are less of a one-drop rule group than the Anglophones.

All this ethnic complexity might give Kamala an interesting perspective. Yet, if so, nobody in the mainstream media has ever heard her express it.

she came out of it with passable French

Does she still speak French? How about Tamil? (Obama spoke Indonesia’s synthetic language as a child but lost it.)

and a determination to “return home for college,” as she later wrote.

“Home” turned out to be the prestigious historically Black university, Howard, the Washington, D.C.-based alma mater of one of her childhood heroes, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

But being the best black college is, well, pretty fair to middling.

At Howard, where she carried a briefcase to class and was on the school debate team, she struck her classmates as a preternaturally worldly young woman determined to forge her own path. “She always had her own style and was never a follower,” said Stacey Johnson Batiste, a friend since kindergarten. “She’s been wearing pearls as long as I can remember.”

Kamala was popular at Howard, rushed the top sorority, but doesn’t seem to have distinguished herself academically. Not being intellectually impressive at Howard seems to suggest she was at the Ta-Nehisi Coates level of IQ.

At what is today known as UC Law San Francisco,

Note that Hastings Law School, now the UC San Francisco Law School, is not the UC Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall). It’s not Stanford Law or Berkeley Law. It’s more like what, say, Loyola is to Chicago area law schools following Chicago and Northwestern: the place where insurance lawyers and public defenders come from, not Big Law corporate attorneys. Hastings is currently ranked 82nd in the country, which isn’t bad.

That Kamala required an affirmative action quota to get into Hastings is, well, embarrassing.

she was not a gifted student in the way her parents were, and was not viewed as “most likely to succeed,” a distinction that fell to her classmate, J. Christopher Stevens, a future U.S. ambassador who was killed by militants in Benghazi, Libya.

In general, Kamala seems like a pleasant-enough lady, but not an interesting, insightful, or intelligent one.

But she became president of the school’s Black Law Students Association and organized a jobs fair on campus for herself and her fellow seniors.

Woo-hoo! She was careerist about using her claim to be black

Straight out of law school in 1989, Ms. Harris became one of a handful of applicants to join the district attorney’s office of Alameda County, an esteemed Oakland group of prosecutors with a storied history: Earl Warren, who as chief justice of the Supreme Court would later write the majority opinion in Brown v. Board of Education establishing racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional, became the county’s district attorney in 1925.

Lotta crime in Oakland.

… Ms. O’Malley could also see that her young prosecutor “was obviously very ambitious’’ as she began to move into San Francisco society and politics. In March 1994, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen noted in print that the California state assembly speaker, Willie Brown, had celebrated his 60th birthday in the company of Clint Eastwood, Barbra Streisand and “the speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris, an Alameda County deputy D.A. who is something new in Willie’s love life.”

Willie Brown was a political genius who managed to serve twice as long (14 years) as speaker of the California Assembly as the runner-up, Jess Unruh, who was the LBJ of the California politics when I was a kid.

If I were to make a list of why Kamala ought to be President, that she was subjected to Willie’s political pillow talk would rank high on her list. But she hasn’t been sleeping with Willie for almost 30 years, which is worrisome.

Mr. Brown went on to appoint Ms. Harris to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board (with an annual salary of $97,088) and then, six months after she resigned, to the California Medical Assistance Commission (which paid $72,000 annually). A year later, Ms. Harris accompanied Mr. Brown — who was 31 years older than her and married, though long estranged from his wife — to the wedding of Nancy Corinne Pelosi, the eldest daughter of the San Francisco congresswoman and future House speaker.

“No question, Willie opened doors for Kamala,” said Art Torres, the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party from 1996 to 2009. “But as soon as she walked through them, you couldn’t help but notice her and say, ‘Who is this future star?’”

Though the two broke up just after Mr. Brown won election as mayor of San Francisco in December 1995,

Willie’s long-suffering wife insisted that she would attend Mayor Brown’s inauguration, not Kamala. Willie agreed that he owed it to her.

Ms. Harris had by then cemented friendships with many of the city’s high-profile Democratic donors, including Vanessa Getty and Susan Swig. She was also given a seat on the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “We wanted to grab her before one of the city’s other cultural institutions did,” said Chuck Collins, an attorney and longtime museum board member.

Kamala appears to have appealed to San Francisco rich people. The 2024 election is thus between the tastes of the NYC and SF rich folks.

In 1998, Ms. Harris said goodbye to the East Bay, relocated to San Francisco and joined its district attorney’s office. The D.A., Terence Hallinan, belonged to one of the city’s dominant political families, along with the Pelosis and the Feinsteins. But Ms. Harris was among Mr. Hallinan’s deputies who found his management style to be chaotic.

Hallinan was a brawling lunatic. I found a website entitled “Terence Hallinan Facts for Kids,” which recounted eight of his fistfights.

She resigned in 2000 and moved over to the city attorney’s office. Three years later she ran against him and won.

Her long-shot victory against Mr. Hallinan

What was so long-shot about the favorite of San Francisco high society defeating an embarrassing violent maniac?

amounted to the first in what would be a series of career risks.

Risk? Did Kamala have something better to do?

The second one came four years later, when Ms. Harris became the first prominent elected Democrat in California to endorse the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, whom she had met at a fund-raiser in San Francisco during his 2004 run for the Senate….

Wow, supporting Barack Obama!

Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008 all but guaranteed Ms. Harris a job in the administration’s Justice Department. Instead, she elected to run for state attorney general, a post that had never been occupied by either a woman or a person of color, much less both.

Her 2010 upset victory by less than a point over Steve Cooley, the Republican district attorney of Los Angeles County, featured elements that foreshadowed her current candidacy: She took on Mr. Cooley’s claim that she was a “radical” by vowing to represent “all the people of California,” and turned in a convincing debate performance aided by her opponent’s unforced errors. Her electoral outcome also took four weeks to confirm.

Someday, California will learn to use computers so it can finish counting votes before Thanksgiving.

Nonetheless, the race established Ms. Harris as a national star. “I was so in awe of the gamble she took, running as a woman of color to be the state’s lead prosecutor,” said Barbara Boxer, at the time a U. S. senator from California. “In those days, political machines wouldn’t take a risk on a woman. She had to build her own machine.”

Barbara Boxer had been Senator from California since 1992, as had Diane Feinstein.

It therefore surprised Ms. Boxer when, only two years into the job, Ms. Harris declared that she was running for president. In daring to fail — which Ms. Harris ultimately did, suspending her presidential campaign in December 2019, six weeks before the first primary votes were cast — the candidate displayed something that Ms. Boxer would later describe as awe-inspiring.

Uh, sure, nothing was more awe-inspiring than Kamala’s run for President in 2019, which didn’t even make it until 2020.

“It was her unflappability,” she said. “She always saw herself this way, as presidential material.”

Boxer’s implication seems to be that she is in awe of Kamala’s inflated self-image of herself as presidential timber.

A Prosecutor’s View

Ms. Harris’s 2019 campaign revealed a person for whom, despite her previous four electoral victories, politics did not come naturally. She struggled to define herself ideologically. She could not convince Democratic donors that she was more electable than the two top candidates in the field, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders.

And, said Mr. Brown, her political mentor, “What she hasn’t ultimately mastered is how to become the most interesting candidate to the media.”

In other words, Kamala is a bore.

Those who have known Ms. Harris from her earlier days in California say that unlike the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, she is not a political junkie.

Taking an interest in politics would seem a pretty low bar for anybody running for President, but Kamala can’t seem to pay the requisite attention to the news.

Kamala seems a little like Michelle Obama in that she’s not all that interested in public affairs. Because Michelle is tall and has her power forward big brother’s broad shoulders, many have assumed she must be ambitious for political office. But Michelle’s actual interests are traditionally womanly: children, home, food, gardening, and entertaining.

Likewise, Kamala, a prettier lady than Michelle, seems like she was best suited to marrying an ambitious man and serving as the popular society hostess in a San Francisco power couple.

But she failed to land a husband until she was 49.

Kamala’s failure to start a family of her own seems like a defining shortcoming of her life. She seems to enjoy having been a stepmother of almost grown children, and she seems to be a doting aunt. She likes cooking.

Why she couldn’t catch a husband until she was too old for children seems like an interesting question but one I’ve not seen written about. My guesses are that she may have been focused on a black man and a high achiever (the only men she is known to be affiliated with during her first quarter century out of college are political legend Willie Brown and TV star Montel Williams), who are in short supply in the Bay Area. (Her eventual husband Doug Emhoff is a white Jewish Century City lawyer, requiring her to move to Brentwood in SoCal).

In contrast, among other San Francisco women politicians, Senator Boxer married at 21 and had two children. Senator Feinstein had three husbands (divorced the first, was widowed by the second, and was married to the third for over 40 years, and one child). Speaker Pelosi, one of the more adept politicians of recent generations (she appears to have been the key figure in forcing Joe Biden’s retirement), had one husband and five children, not winning elective office until her youngest was nearing the end of high school. If you are at the Nancy Pelosi level of political competence, you evidently can have it all.

Kamala’s kind of like Michelle Obama who hasn’t attempted to run for office.

Those who have worked with her as vice president also point out the distinctions between herself and her boss, Mr. Biden.

She is culturally to the left of him, having grown up among the Bay Area’s L.G.B.T.Q. community, and her reflexive support for women’s reproductive freedom is uncomplicated by the traditional Catholic beliefs Mr. Biden holds. At the same time, she lacks his reverence for New Deal-style big government.

I like Biden’s reaction to learning that the world’s most important silicon chip factories are in Taiwan, which official U.S. policy is to be agnostic about what country that is in, so they might get blown up by Beijing: “Can’t we bribe this Taiwanese company to build chip factories in some purple state, like, say, Arizona?”

“Well, sure, but that would be expensive.”

“More expensive than World War III?”

… Ms. Harris often speaks to audiences as she once did to juries, making her case through the stark marshaling of facts.

Huh?

Fittingly for a career prosecutor, the modifier most used by subordinates to describe Ms. Harris is “prepared.”

Huh?

During the nationally televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018 of Brett M. Kavanaugh before the Judiciary Committee, Ms. Harris was the 20th of 21 members to question him. Still, she managed to stump the nominee with one of the hearing’s most memorable lines of inquiry: “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

The Selective Service Act?

… Rarely has Ms. Harris discussed the barriers she and other women have faced, especially those of color.

If Kamala weren’t so discriminated against due to her race and sex, what would she be by now? Galactic Overlord?

Isn’t it more plausible that her career has benefited absurdly by her being a woman and about one-quarter black?

“As a Black woman of multiple backgrounds, she’s in some ways a unicorn in American politics,” said Mr. Collins, the attorney who served with Ms. Harris on the board of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. “And for all of us with diverse backgrounds, particularly from her generation or earlier, we’ve always had an unmitigated focus on excellence, knowing that in order to achieve it, we have to overperform.”

If there’s any word that comes to mind when thinking about Kamala it’s “overperform.”

She solved String Theory in her spare time, didn’t she?

One of Ms. Harris’s earliest efforts in the Senate was to address disparities in maternal health among Black women, who suffer the highest rate of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S.

“The problem is no secret in our community, but it had never gotten serious attention in the federal government,” said Representative Lauren Underwood, a Black Democrat from Illinois who teamed with Ms. Harris and another Black Democrat, Representative Alma Adams of North Carolina, to write the so-called Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act.

“Momnibus” — cringe.

Ms. Harris has often used the vice president’s official residence at the Naval Observatory to stage events that signal her dedication to inclusiveness. In June 2023, she threw a Pride event that included among the roughly 300 attendees Donna Sachet, a San Francisco activist and drag performer whom Ms. Harris knew from her days in the city.

Donna Sachet is a man named Kirk Reeves who pretends to be a woman.

An alternative perspective on Kamala’s fabulous career is that Kamala is instead kind of basic and has only gotten so far in her career due to America's strong favoritism during her lifetime in favor of presentable people who can muster some claim to be African-American, even a claim as tenuous as Kamala's ancestry of half Tamil Brahmin and half from the mixed race Jamaican bourgeois.