A Few Things To Know About Kamala Harris - From 2019 - And Now...

The point of view of this article cited here is that of the progressive faction of the Democratic Party

Above: Mosaic of Kamala Harris, made out of the images of the black men she kept in prison beyond their sentences to use as free labor for the State of California.

“Everyone knows that Joe Biden—with his long history of serving corporate interests, is an establishment candidate. There are others like New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who, because of large contributions from people like Mark Zuckerberg is also known as the “Senator from Silicon Valley.” He votes with his Valley and Big Pharma funders. Kamala Harris is less well known as an establishment candidate. Her true colors can be illustrated by her personal political history, by the staff she has assembled to run her campaign, by the funding and favorable media attention that she receives from the powers that be and by the numerous identity rather than class politics policy proposals she is putting forward.

Kamala Harris’s Political History

Much of Harris’s early political history is obscure, but we do know that she was an unknown 29 year-old lawyer in the early 1990s when her career was kick-started through a romantic relationship with master politico Willie Brown (Los Angeles Times January 21, 2019; San Francisco Chronicle January 26, 2019). Brown was not only the Speaker of the Californian State Assembly; he was also a central figure in the San Francisco Bay Area Democratic Party political machine. Brown likely saw both Harris’s beauty and identity politics potential, a rare combination of female, African-American and Asian-American. Bright, well-educated and ambitious, Harris and her family came from the professional class that usually serves and aspires to join the rich and powerful. Her maternal grandfather was an Indian diplomat, her Jamaican born father was a Stanford economics professor, and her mother was a cancer scientist. Power broker Brown appointed Harris to two state boards–the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission–that paid well for very little work. Brown also introduced her to other key members of the Bay Area Democratic political machine–people like Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi–and some of the machine’s wealthy backers, all of whom could help her with fundraising, endorsements and staffing for electoral campaigns. This gave Harris the opening she needed to use her smarts and talent to successfully run for San Francisco City Attorney (served 2004-2011), State Attorney General (served 2011-2017), and the U.S. Senate (beginning in 2017), all after ending the relationship with Brown. Once in office, Harris became known for her lavish personal lifestyle, using campaign and other funds for first-class air travel and upscale hotels which routinely cost $800 to $1000 a night, topping out in one instance at $1,722.59 for one nights’ stay. One former aide commented that “Kamala demands a life of luxury.”

Once in office as a prosecutor, Harris clearly failed to pursue social and economic justice for the broader public which should be the true aim of anyone in the people’s service, including law enforcement. Instead, she favored corporate criminals like Steven Mnuchin (now Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury), who raked in millions as the CEO of OneWest Bank from 2009-2015. Investigations of home foreclosures by prosecutors in Harris’s own office of the California State Attorney General in 2013 found that OneWest had illegally backdated massive numbers of key documents, violated notice and waiting periods, as well as gamed foreclosure auctions to deprive tens of thousands of California’s homeowners of their property. All this to the benefit of Mnuchin and OneWest. The violations were in the thousands, summed up as “widespread misconduct” by leaders of the Attorney General’s own Consumer Law Section. They recommended a civil enforcement action against the bank, even writing up a sample legal complaint, but, despite their urgings, Harris refused to prosecute the case. Mnuchin and billionaire George Soros, an investor in OneWest, both evidentially appreciated what Harris did: each of them made a generous campaign contribution to Harris’s 2016 Senate campaign.

In sharp contrast to the kid-glove treatment of corporations and the rich, Kamala Harris was harsh and unrelenting toward rank-and-file people accused of crimes even when there was clearly false testimony and evidence tampering used to convict. The story is a long one, studied and recounted in depth by San Francisco School of Law Professor Lara Bazelon and published January 17, 2019 in The New York Times. Bazelon concluded that Kamala Harris was not a “progressive prosecutor,” writing that “time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or remained silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.” Harris even refused to investigate officer-involved shootings when called upon by the California State Legislature and appealed a ruling by a federal judge in Orange County that the death penalty was unconstitutional, bizarrely arguing that the ruling undermined defendant protections!

She also promoted and succeeded in getting a law criminalizing parental conduct when their children were truant from school. Some parents were in fact prosecuted. The real reasons for truancy – poverty, drug use, survival issues for parents, lack of community support – were ignored in this law which disproportionately affected low-income people of color.

Staffing for a Presidential Run

Kamala Harris’s earlier campaigns and cross-endorsements (candidates agree to endorse each other) allowed her to build up the key staff needed for a presidential campaign. Here members of her family became central, together with a reliance on an informal alliance with Hillary Clinton. Clinton and Harris endorsed each other in 2016, Harris was an enthusiastic supporter of Clinton and has recruited a number of Hillary Clinton’s staff for her own campaign. These two themes come together in the person of Harris’s sister and presidential campaign chair Maya Harris. Maya Harris, formally an official with the Ford Foundation, is currently a commentator for the MSNBC, one of the three key cable news outlets (with Fox and CNN) covering the presidential campaign. Positive news coverage for media favored candidates is a key feature of presidential campaigns in the U.S., and having a connection to possibly receive this kind of advantage is central to a successful campaign. Maya Harris also has other important ties to key political networks. In 2015 Hillary Clinton appointed her to lead a small team of policy advisers to develop the agenda for Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Then she became a senior policy adviser for Clinton in 2016. Maya Harris also brings to the table membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, “Wall Street’s Think Tank” with the numerous connections and favorable treatment that membership in this 5000-plus member capitalist class think tank brings. The Council (CFR) is the world’s most powerful private organization, the ultimate networking, socializing, strategic planning, and consensus-forming institution of the dominant U.S. plutocratic billionaire class, the think tank of monopoly-finance capital. Its connections extend deeply into key American corporations, leading media, top universities, powerful non-profits, foundations, other think tanks and international organizations, as well as meetings groups like the Bilderberg group, Trilateral Commission, and Davos (see Laurence H. Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics 1976-2019, Monthly Review Press).

Just to cite one concrete example of corporate and CFR connections, Maya’s employer, MSNBC, was founded in 1996 as a partnership of General Electric’s NBC unit and Microsoft. Microsoft has since divested its interest, leaving GE/NBC in charge. GE has many CFR connections and Council members in leading roles in MSNBC include Brian Williams, Mica Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough, and Andrea Mitchell (who is also Council member Alan Greenspan’s wife). The CFR’s broad network also includes key print media, resulting in favorable coverage for some candidates. For example, the Financial Times (FT), a “world business newspaper” has a special relationship with the Council, the FT often has CFR leaders, staff, and active members writing opinion pieces for it, and the Council often invites key FT staff to speak at one of their two headquarters. The FT had a long favorable article on Kamala in their weekend edition June 22-23, 2019 ending by quoting a political strategist who concluded that Kamala “obviously has great political talent” (Financial Times June 22/23, 2019 Life and Arts: 18-19). Another FT opinion writer stated that if you are looking for someone “…who could beat Donald Trump next year, the answer without a shadow of a doubt is Californian Senator Kamala Harris” (Financial Times June 29/30, 2019:9). Having a CFR member as her sister and campaign chair means that a Kamala Harris administration would very likely bring many Council on Foreign Relations members into government and into leading roles in the policy formation process. Having the FT on your side means that wealthy campaign donors and other media outlets will take you seriously.

Kamala’s family’s corporate ruling class connections do not end with her sister, because Maya’s husband is Tony West, a leading corporate lawyer whose father was an IBM executive. West is politically close to Kamala, he co-chaired her 2016 Senate campaign, and recently stated that he is with her 100% (San Francisco Chronicle July 14, 2019). West was chief counsel for Pepsi Cola, a giant multinational corporation prior to taking his current job. He is now the highly paid chief counsel for Uber. Uber’s business model relies on maintaining that their working class drivers are not employees and so not subject to regulations on wages and benefits. This means that West is a central figure defending the interests of the company’s owners against the claims of their exploited drivers. Many Uber drivers want the status of employees so they can gain minimum wages, paid holidays, healthcare and other benefits. Australia’s workplace regulator ruled that Uber drivers are not employees, but a U.K. court ruled they are. Uber’s legal team, led by Tony West as chief counsel, has now appealed this ruling to the U.K. Supreme Court.

Kamala Harris’s other staff members represent a combination of people connected to the Bay Area Democratic Party political machine, former Barack Obama operatives, and former Hillary Clinton staff members. The connection with Clinton appears especially close. Besides Maya Harris at least four other top staff members for Kamala played similar roles in Clinton’s 2016 campaign. General counsel Mark Elias was general counsel for Clinton in 2016; communications director Lily Adams was Iowa communications director for Clinton in 2016; media consultant Jim Margolis served in the same role for Clinton in 2016; and advance director Joyce Kazadi served in an identical role for Hillary in 2016.” https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/06/kamala-harris-another-establishment-candidate/

Now things appear to have changed a bit, we’ll see how far this goes…

“Like it or not, if Joe Biden does decide to step down, or is somehow forced out of office, there’s only one person who can possibly replace him:  VP Kamala Harris.  Thanks to the Democrats’ abject refusal to pressure Biden to step aside last year, and to Biden’s own Mexican-style kibosh on the idea of a genuinely competitive primary, other possible replacements aren’t well known enough to stand in Biden’s place.  Sure, there are some highly competent governors out there, with solid track records – among them Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer or Maryland’s Wes Moore – but they have no real standing with the voters.  California’s Gavin Newsom is the best known of the bunch:  he’s handsome, smooth and articulate and has even made some foreign trips – including one high-profile visit to China – to suggest a familiarity with global issues. But his popularity at home has cratered; it’s doubtful that he could make a credible claim that his track record in California thus far has qualified him for the presidency.

The fact is, even if the party thought any of these state executives could be quickly catapulted into the limelight in the space of just four months, and passed off as presidential timber, Democrats would still face an enormous credibility gap with their hardest core base voters, namely Black women, who adore Harris, and are insistent that she be considered as Biden’s only legitimate heir apparent.

Black women feel this way for good reason. They are, and have been for some time, the moral conscience of the party as well as its primary mobilizing support network, especially in key election battlegrounds like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan, which they helped deliver to Biden in 2020.  Black women, unlike Black men, who have begun drifting increasingly toward the GOP under Trump, are dyed in the wool Democrats, voting more than 95% for the party’s standard-bearer, year after year, almost regardless of the candidate and his complexion, White or Black.

Many Black women in the party are aware – as are Democrats generally – that Harris hasn’t always acquitted herself well in her current VP role, but they feel that Biden hasn’t utilized her properly – assigning her one token high-level portfolio after another and preferring to use her as scapegoat or lightning rod for his own failed policies – for example, on the border,  Some even accuse the president and his team – which has often been at odds with Harris’ senior staff – or setting her up to fail.

So can Harris now be rehabilitated in the eyes of swing voters including many Democrats, who have quietly written her off as a viable replacement for Biden?  I think she can – and indeed, the party may have no choice.

In fact, Harris’ approval numbers have climbed steadily in recent months, largely because for the first time she has assumed a public role for which she seems better suited – advocacy on behalf of reproductive rights.  She’s also become a fervid advocate for a tougher stance toward Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, denouncing the killings and explicitly calling for a ceasefire.  While Biden has awkwardly tried to straddle support for Israel with greater humanitarian concern over Gaza war victims – and has publicly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for his intransigence on peace and a crease-fire – Harris has sought to counter-balance that stance with a more explicit tilt toward the Palestinians – a position closer to that of younger voters and minority voters increasingly disaffected from Biden.

Is this really just a version of good-cop bad-cop – allowing Biden to seem less pro-Israel than he really is?  Perhap, but it’s also given Harris a much more credible political role – not as a campaign prop or figleaf, or worse, a widely ridiculed stooge for Biden’s failures, but as an active participant in shaping not only administration policy but also its presentation to key voter groups and to the world at large. It’s made her the kind of VP that people were hoping for all along.

Some of the latest approval numbers for Harris are indeed striking, given where she once stood.  Last year, Harris had sunk to a woeful 34% in a New York Times/ Siena poll, considerably lower than Biden’s rating at 42%. But she’s been slowly climbing back up ever since – and is starting to look even better than her boss.  A just-released pre-debate Data for Progress poll finds Trump and Biden with net negative approval ratings of -10 and -11, respectively.  These are actually some of Biden’s best numbers relative to Trump.  Other polls have both men with lower ratings, but Biden trailing the former president by as much as 4 points

But Harris has a slightly lower net negative approval rating than either Trump or Biden.  She stands at just -7,  which is a breakthrough.  Even more striking, perhaps, Harris only trails Trump by 3 points in the poll’s head-to-head contest, 45% to 48% – the same close margin as Biden, and within the poll’s margin of error.  And in a must-released CNN poll, conducted post-debate, she still trails Trump by just 3, but Biden has fallen to 6 behind – a deepening sign of her potential electability advantage over the current president.

Compare these results to where Harris was back in 2022.  In a Harvard-CAPS poll that March, she trailed Trump by double-digits, 49%-38%.  A McLaughlin & Associates poll as recently as this January had her at 42%, compared to 50% for Trump, a slight improvement, but still trailing significantly.  But all of these polls were conducted prior to her latest emergence in the public limelight alongside Biden, when she’s been acting and speaking out independently on abortion and the war in Gaza.” https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/05/can-the-democrats-rehabilitate-kamala-harris-they-may-have-no-choice/