Political charmer with a fierce work ethic who builds unlikely alliances
TO SUCCEED in the cut-throat politics of San Francisco requires two things: a relentless work ethic and incredible schmoozing ability. Kamala Harris has plenty of both, resulting in a spectacular rise one insider described as unmatched since Barack Obama.
“I’ve known her all my life,” says Aaron Peskin, a childhood friend and San Francisco city councillor who went to the same kindergarten and primary school as Ms Harris in the Sixties.
“We don’t always agree, we’ve had profound disagreements, but I do believe that this is a human being who can bridge multiple worlds.”
Such praise is common among the governing classes of San Francisco and its neighbouring cities, where the political spectrum runs from moderate Democrat to radical socialist, and where Ms Harris made her name by carefully weaving between the two.
Most have nothing but good things to say about her – and also describe her as a consummate politician adept at building alliances and charming big money donors.
Yet Ms Harris’s time as a prosecutor, district attorney and later attorney general of California has embittered many on the Left, including leaders of the Black Lives Matter protests that have raged across the state.
For them, she stands accused of about the worst possible charge during this reckoning with America’s ugly history of police racism and brutality: being a “cop”.
Those are cracks that Donald Trump will eagerly try to exploit.
Ms Harris was born in Oakland in 1964, a city with a strong black community widely known as the birthplace of the Black Panthers, and went to school in neighbouring Berkeley, famous for its starring role in the Sixties student movement.
Mr Peskin describes their neighbourhood as a “polyglot, hugely diverse milieu where notions of racism and sexism did not exist” and where families strove for and achieved the American Dream.
But Ms Harris’s childhood was not untouched by America’s divisions. She was ferried to her 95pc white school as part of the US’s controversial “busing” programme, designed to end desegregation. Berkeley was the first city to join voluntarily.
That history provided one of the Democratic primary’s most dramatic moments when she confronted Joe Biden over his historic opposition to the scheme.
It was there, too, that her meteoric career began as a lawyer. She had a vision of how criminal justice had to change even then, according to John Whitehurst, an Oakland-based Democratic political consultant.
“Because she’s so wellconnected, everyone assumes that she was a creature of politics,” he says, “not a political hack that ended up being district attorney. She used politics to achieve her goal in law enforcement.”
In 1990, she became Alameda’s assistant district attorney. When she ran for district attorney in San Francisco in 2003, she was an outsider facing an incumbent whose family had helped run the city for 50 years.
Her platform combined Left-wing ideas (eschewing the death penalty, defending medical marijuana, declining to pursue jail time for marijuana possession offences) with tough rhetoric on violent crime.
The campaign was acrimonious, but she won, becoming the golden city’s first black chief prosecutor.
The victories continued from there: in 2011, she rose to become the attorney general of California, before finally becoming a senator in the national Congress in 2017.
Colleagues from that time describe her as meticulous and detail-oriented.
And as for Ms Harris’s other great skill, schmoozing the rich, she cut her teeth in the historical centre for the old money of America’s West Coast.
“She burst on the scene, and absolutely enchanted an element of San Francisco society that would not otherwise be engaged in something like the district attorney’s race,” says Dale Carlson, a veteran San Francisco PR man and lobbyist.
“The financial support that they have provided to her has been quite exceptional.” (© Daily Telegraph)
‘She burst on to the scene and enchanted San Francisco society’