By Steve Woodward
The ascension into public life and political power by Kamala Harris makes Barack Obama’s improbable rise seem noble and inspiring by comparison. That’s quite a statement considering Obama’s sordid path to the White House.
He was “the least experienced politician in at least one hundred years to obtain a major party nomination for President of the United States,” wrote David Freddoso in his 2008 book, “The Case Against Barack Obama”. “He (was) the product of a marriage between two of the least attractive parts of Democratic politics – the hard-core radicalism of the 1960s era and Chicago’s Machine politics.”
While Obama was artfully positioning himself to become a U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2003, Harris was navigating her way through the San Francisco political scene after earning a degree from the University of California’s Hastings School of Law and working for several district attorneys. Her mentor was also her periodic romantic interest, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (photo nearby), a married man who had been opening doors for Harris for the better part of a decade.
An attorney who often crossed paths with Harris was Harmeet Dhillon, who arrived in the Bay Area as Harris was becoming more politically connected. In the ensuing years, Dhillon, an active member of the San Francisco Republican Party (who knew it existed?) marveled at Harris’ ability to move from one job to another while accomplishing very little and working minimal hours.
During a fascinating 110-minute interview by Tucker Carlson on his streaming Tucker Carlson Network (home of many such in-depth interviews, and, as of October 10, 2024, James O’Keefe’s intense documentary exposing the extreme crisis ongoing along the U.S.-Mexico border), Dhillon describes in detail what The Wall Street Journal aptly described as “the lightness of being Kamala Harris”. These are among the most revealing of Dhillon’s memories:
“(Harris) really has been kind of a shapeshifter throughout her entire career and existence,” Dhillon tells Carlson.
“One of the interesting things that I found when looking at her background is the first time she registered to vote was at age 29. … So, many years after coming to the United States (Harris lived in Montreal with her divorced mother, a professor, from age 12 through 18), and during the year that she dated … former mayor and (California state house) speaker Willie Brown is the year that she registered to vote (1993). … Well after she became an attorney, well after she became a prosecutor, she hadn’t registered to vote.”
Dhillon marvels at the flimsiness of Harris’ record as a prosecutor during those early years, first in Alameda County’s D.A. office, then San Francisco’s more visible D.A. office.
“In Alameda County she specialized in child sex crimes, an important job,” Dhillon said. “According to research that was done by some of her opposition when she ran for (San Francisco) district attorney in 2003, she tried something like eight cases that they can prove there, during her eight years as a prosecutor.”
Eight cases in eight years.
Two years in the San Francisco D.A.’s office failed to deliver the high-profile positions she wanted. Harris (photo nearby) abruptly quit and went to the city attorney’s office, a lateral move. During that time, Willie Brown appointed Harris to a pair of “patronage jobs” that required little work but helped Harris earn more than $400,000 during a five-year period on top of her prosecutor’s salary.
“She was marked out as privileged in her 20s and 30s, very early on,” said Dhillon, who recalls that Brown also provided Harris with a free car, a BMW no less.
Brown’s ultimate leveraging of his influence came with a dual objective. He was anxious to rid the city of a D.A. (Terrance Hallinan) who was launching too many investigations into corruption involving Brown’s cronies. And, he prioritized the D.A. job as Harris’s next move up the political ladder. Harris, despite an unremarkable career to date, was inaugurated as the city D.A. in 2004.
But the next move, the one that would facilitate the fast tracking of Harris to Vice President of the United States, remained on the horizon – Attorney General of California.
Dhillon well remembers that Harris sought to position herself as being against runaway spending on political campaigns when she launched her run for AG.
“If you agreed to cap your fund-raising and spending at $211,000 in 2003, you got a statement published in the voter guide that was mailed to all the almost half a million voters in San Francisco, registered voters, saying that you had voluntarily agreed to confine yourself to that spending cap. So it’s like (agreeing to) a level playing field and it’s a little bit of a gold star that you’re agreeing not to engage in corruption and wasteful spending and cronyism by raising money from all kinds of unknown sources. So she agreed to that. She filed a piece of paper. She signed it under penalty of perjury, saying I, Kamala Harris, agree to this voluntary spending limit.
“Most of the candidates running for office in California and San Francisco … agreed to that spending limit.”
In a three-way race for AG Harris trailed, a distant third, right out of the blocks and was gaining no ground. Willie Brown took note. This was to be the seminal moment when Harris demonstrated that she was a corrupt member of the San Francisco machine, even as a novice politician. It has defined Harris ever since and is the bedrock of her unlikely campaign for President of the United States in 2024.
“She realized,” Dhillon told Carlson, “she was going to have to really supercharge her spending. Willie Brown helped her with this. Willie Brown also helped raise money for independent expenditures to support her as well. One of her campaign themes was that she was going to be tough on drugs, tough on marijuana. In 2003, the recreational use of marijuana was not legal in California. She was very tough on pot.
“So apparently some pot activists who didn’t like this … were pouring over the campaign finance records. And it’s a pot activist who realized that Kamala Harris had raised over $300,000 and had spent over $300,000. So this person … let the other campaigns know; they filed an ethics complaint against her. And at the end of the election, she had spent over $600,000, so triple the amount that she was allowed.
“But thanks to hiring a good lawyer and making the excuse that, the form changed, I didn’t really understand the meaning of this, so please lift the cap, she got the San Francisco Ethics Commission (to look the other way). And by the way, many of those people on the Ethics Commission owed their positions to Willie Brown.
“It’s a crime, by the way. She could have been prosecuted for a misdemeanor had she been properly held accountable for this significant campaign finance violation and anybody else would have. But the Ethics Commission simply lifted the cap, which is not in the statute. So instead of disqualifying her, which would have been the normal punishment and prosecuting her, she simply got away with it. So in her first race for elected office, she ignored the campaign finance limits. She used corrupt patronage from her former lover to raise the money.”
Against this backdrop, Harris would run for U.S. Senate and win on her first try in 2016. She was selected by a two-term vice president, Joe Biden, to be his “person of color” running mate for VP when he ran and was installed in 2021.
And here we are. To fully contemplate what an unqualified, unethical and unbearable individual Harris is as a U.S. vice president and would-be president, contrast her story and record with that of our nation’s first vice president, John Adams.
He was a farmer who would become a scholar, a political philosopher and a consequential foreign diplomat at a time in U.S. history when the nation’s viability depended on loans from bankers in Amsterdam. Adams secured them. Before that, he authored the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the oldest written constitution (emphasis added) in the world still in effect.
In David Rubenstein’s magnificent collection of interviews with master historians of our time, “The American Story”, he engages legendary historian David McCullough in a conversation about Adams, about whom McCullough published the quintessential biography in 2001 (“John Adams”, Simon & Schuster).
McCullough points to a clause in the Massachusetts Constitution, which Adams wrote in 1780. He “wrote the whole (constitution),” McCullough says. “It’s a clause that was never in any constitution up till then and is still not in any other constitution except New Hampshire’s.”
Imagine a San Francisco machine politician or one of its mutations, contemplating, let alone writing:
“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among (all), it shall be the duty of the legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them in public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions … to inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.”
Today, Democrats like Harris reflexively tune out after the opening words, wisdom and knowledge. How very quaint. How very irrelevant.