Kamala's Way Read online

  On December 3, three hours and six minutes after his first scoop, Cadelago reported another big story: “Kamala Harris is ending her presidential campaign after months of failing to lift her candidacy from the bottom of the field—a premature departure for a California senator once heralded as a top-tier contender for the nomination.”

  Brokaw and Newman were stunned. They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. She could not be dropping out, not yet anyway. But she was. Brokaw called Delaney to relay the news and promised to try to get her money back. He did retrieve most of it.

  Harris pulled out of the race after conferring with her team and realizing she had no money. By dropping out early, she could save herself the embarrassment of losing big in the Iowa caucuses and, worse, in her home state. Her name would not appear on California’s March 3 primary ballot. That was for the best. Polls showed she was going to lose California. An embarrassing loss would have raised questions about her viability as a candidate in years to come.

  But soon another opportunity would present itself.

  34 Dancing in the Rain

  With her presidential aspirations put aside, Kamala Harris returned to the work for which she was elected: representing California in the U.S. Senate. After a bare-knuckled and exhausting run, her work in the Senate was intended to rehabilitate her with voters back home and, maybe, with Joe Biden.

  The House of Representatives had presented the articles of impeachment of President Donald Trump to the Senate on January 16, 2020. With Senate leader Mitch McConnell in charge of the proceeding, the outcome of the Senate trial was never in doubt. When he rejected Democrats’ requests to call witnesses, Harris had no opportunity to claim the national spotlight, as she had when she questioned Attorney General Sessions and Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh.

  Between the end of the impeachment trial in February and August, when she stepped back onto the national stage, Harris introduced thirty-three bills and resolutions. Some were partisan, like the resolution that condemned Trump adviser Stephen Miller “for his trafficking in bigotry, hatred, and divisive political rhetoric.” The resolution urged that Miller resign. He didn’t.

  The bills got little or no press attention. Some sought to address issues unique to California: restoring and enhancing access to public lands, including the South Fork Trinity River–Mad River in Northern California, and cleaning up pollution in the Tijuana River to the far south at the California-Mexico border.

  Other measures reflected issues she had raised on the campaign trail. There were environmental justice bills to protect people living in poor communities from the impact of pollution from industrial developments and to fund research into safe alternatives to chemicals in consumer products including cosmetics. The latter was intended to protect women working in salons, not the sort of issue old men in the Senate would see a need to address in their legislative packages.

  One of her bills sought to fund research into uterine fibroids. Another, the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2020, urged the Department of Health and Human Services to address high maternal and infant mortality rates among Black women and to require that the Federal Bureau of Prisons award grants to prisons and jails to improve maternal health among pregnant women behind bars.

  Harris was quick to address the COVID-19 pandemic, introducing legislation in March to increase financial aid to individuals thrown out of work as states were issuing lockdown orders. As the pandemic spread, she introduced legislation to protect renters against eviction, provide funding for small businesses, require that the president appoint a special envoy focused on pandemic preparedness, increase funding to states for voting by mail, and study racial and ethnic disparities among minorities who contracted COVID-19. Another bill sought to provide aid so that small- and mid-sized restaurants could partner with governments including Indian tribes to provide food to people in need.

  Harris was a Democrat in a Republican-controlled Senate in an election year in which she had sought to be a presidential nominee. All that meant that she had zero chance of winning passage of any of her bills. But each bill was a statement about the sort of issue she would address, once she got the opportunity.

  * * *

  During the Democratic presidential candidate debate on March 15, 2020, Joe Biden, heading toward the Democratic nomination, announced that he would pick a woman to be his running mate. Harris’s friends wanted to help.

  One was Michael Tubbs. Tubbs was elected mayor of Stockton, the city where he grew up, in 2016 at age twenty-six, after serving a four-year term on the city council. He had won that seat while finishing up at Stanford University, sixty-one miles and another world away. Tubbs, the son of a single mom who was a teenager when she had him and a father who was in prison, had been an intern in the Obama administration White House. As mayor, Tubbs had his work cut out for him. The city of three hundred thousand was emerging from bankruptcy, and his predecessor had pleaded guilty to misappropriating public funds and, separately, to furnishing alcohol to a minor, after initially being accused of secretly recording teen camp counselors in a game of strip poker.

  “I decided it would be cowardly for me to continue to do research and write essays about all of Stockton’s problems and not try to do something about them,” Tubbs told Sacramento Bee reporter Cynthia Hubert in 2017, explaining why he came home.

  As Mayor Tubbs worked to revive his city, Senator Harris would call to check in, dispensing advice and seeing if there was anything she could do from Washington. On her birthday in 2019, as she was running for president, Harris called Tubbs to congratulate him on the birth the day before of Michael Malakai Tubbs Jr., his and his wife’s firstborn.

  “Tell him Auntie Kamala can’t wait to meet him,” she told the mayor.

  Tubbs phoned California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, asking about mounting a lobbying campaign for Harris. Kounalakis told Harris that she would be willing to start one on Harris’s behalf. But Harris declined. She wanted to be Biden’s running mate, but figured Biden knew where she was and how to find her. In the end, events would compel Biden to think harder about choosing Harris.

  On May 25, George Floyd died, pinned under the knee of a Minneapolis cop for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, after police were called about him buying a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Two months earlier, police in Louisville, Kentucky, thinking they were searching the home of drug dealers, shot and killed Breonna Taylor, an unarmed twenty-six-year-old emergency room technician who was in her bed. Harris put on a mask to protect against COVID-19 and walked to the White House to join a protest on May 30.

  Some vice presidential candidates aggressively campaigned for the job. Harris wanted it, but her campaign was more subtle. She knew she was on the short list of potential appointees. Rohini Kosoglu, who had been Harris’s chief of staff in the Senate and later on the presidential campaign, made sure Biden aides vetting Harris had everything they needed. Kosoglu also made sure Biden knew that Harris’s messaging on her long-held views on race and criminal justice issues would not conflict with his stands. If there were conflicts, Biden’s views would control. Of the Black women under consideration, Harris was the only one who had won major statewide contests and had run in a national campaign.

  There was damage control to be done. It was well known that Joe Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, had called Harris’s attack over race on her husband during the June 27 debate “a punch to the gut.” Appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in June, Harris attempted an explanation about why she had challenged Biden over race: “It was a debate. The whole reason—literally, it was a debate. It was called a debate.” On the prospect of being picked as Biden’s running mate, she said, “I’d be honored, if asked, and I’m honored to be a part of the conversation. Honestly, let me just tell you something. I will do everything in my power, wherever I am, to help Joe Biden win.”

  In July and August, other candidates emerged and gained traction, notably Congr
esswoman Karen Bass, a Los Angeles Democrat and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Her allies included some politicians who had national aspirations and realized that Harris would be the immediate front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination after Biden served four or eight years. Bass seemed like a less likely presidential contender. Most concerning, Harris’s supporters in California believed the men advising Biden, including former senator Christopher Dodd and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, were buying into a narrative that Harris was disliked and losing support among Democrats in California and that Bass would be a solid alternative. Certainly, Harris had made her share of enemies among Democrats. But she also had a core of support. Bass had never been fully vetted on a national stage, and negative stories appeared, including that she had heaped words of praise on Fidel Castro, not something that would play well in Florida, and that she had offered kind words about Scientology in a speech that was easily found online.

  Lt. Gov. Kounalakis became engaged.

  “I didn’t ask for permission,” Kounalakis said.

  In the small world of San Francisco politics, Mark Buell, Harris’s first campaign finance chair, introduced then district attorney Harris and Kounalakis. Kounalakis’s father is Angelo Tsakopoulos, who arrived in the United States at age fifteen, penniless from Greece, in 1958, worked his way through Sacramento State College, and became the Sacramento region’s largest developer. He also held the fund-raiser where Buell’s future wife, Susie Tompkins, met Bill Clinton and became involved in politics. Harris and Kounalakis started having lunch together and bonded. (Harris calls her on her birthday and sings her “Happy Birthday.”) Before running for lieutenant governor in 2018, Kounalakis had been a major campaign donor who had supported Hillary Clinton in 2008 and 2016 and became the Obama administration’s first ambassador to Hungary. Kounalakis lives in the same San Francisco apartment building as Buell, with the same 360-degree view of the Bay Area. She and Mark and Susie Buell often coordinate their fund-raising efforts, with donors stopping at her apartment for wine or cocktails and then riding the elevator up a few floors for dinner at the Buells. When Kounalakis decided to run for lieutenant governor, Harris called to say, “I am going to endorse you and you are going to win.”

  On July 31, 2020, Kounalakis called the Biden campaign requesting a Zoom meeting. That call happened three days later. Kounalakis lined up an impressive list of Harris’s backers: San Francisco mayor London Breed, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, Long Beach mayor Robert Garcia, California treasurer Fiona Ma, California secretary of state Alex Padilla, Mayor Tubbs, and former governor Gray Davis. Each person was allotted two minutes to tell why Harris was the right choice. Some of the people had professional stories. Others were personal. Garcia of Long Beach said Harris was the first person who called offering condolences after his mother died of COVID-19 on July 26.

  Tubbs pointed out that Harris had run three times statewide, had run for president, and was “battle-tested and vetted.” “Kamala Harris is singular,” Tubbs said.

  Kounalakis argued she was a “transformational woman” in American politics. “There is no stereotype for Kamala Harris.”

  * * *

  On August 11, a Tuesday, Biden called Harris via Zoom.

  “You ready to go to work?”

  Biden had kept his final decision a closely held secret. On the Saturday before the Tuesday when he made his choice public, Harris and her closest advisers had no clue that she would be his pick.

  “Oh my God. I’m so ready to go to work,” Harris answered.

  The opinion of Biden’s son Beau about Harris, forged when the state attorneys general challenged the banks in 2011 and 2012, weighed heavily on his decision.

  “There is no one’s opinion I valued more than Beau’s and I’m proud to have Kamala standing with me on this campaign,” Biden said after the selection.

  Being vice president was not the outcome Harris envisioned when she launched her presidential campaign in 2019. She had entered the presidential race to win, and she did not intend to be anyone’s vice president. From Biden’s perspective, the choice made sense. She rose in the rough-and-tough politics of San Francisco and had been vetted by investigative journalists and some of the best opposition researchers from both parties. She had run hard races and won and lost. Her good and not-so-good traits were known to Biden’s team. She would match well in a debate with Vice President Mike Pence and didn’t have a habit of making mistakes on the trail. She also would bring excitement and maybe even some dance moves to a ticket led by a man who would be the oldest person ever elected president. As politicians say, she was operational.

  She also had a story to tell, a story that is unique and also very American.

  After Biden selected Harris, she reached out to Wanda Kagan, her high school friend in Montreal, wondering if she would allow Harris to share her story. Kagan did not hesitate. In a video tweeted on September 23, 2020, Harris told the story without mentioning Kagan’s name, recalling that a best friend in high school “would come to school and just be sad and there were times when she just didn’t seem to want to go home.” When the friend confided that she was being abused, Harris told her, “You have to come stay with us.” Her friend’s pain was one reason Harris wanted to become a prosecutor, she said on the video.

  Two days before the election on November 3, 2020, Kagan thought back to her days in high school and what had become of the girl who helped her through the toughest of times.

  “The U.S. is getting the best of the person, like that’s who she is. That’s who she always was,” Kagan said.

  * * *

  On October 19, 2020, Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was at a campaign rally in Jacksonville, Florida. It was raining. Harris was wearing her Chuck Taylors, and the speakers were blasting her walk-off music, Mary J. Blige’s “Work That.”

  Just because the length of your hair ain’t long

  And they often criticize you for your skin tone

  Wanna hold your head high…

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Girl be yourself.

  Harris tipped her umbrella back and moved with the beat, smiling wide, laughing, reveling in where she found herself, and maybe where she had come from.

  Ronald Reagan’s presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan tsked in a Wall Street Journal column four days later that “it was embarrassing” to see the vice presidential candidate dancing and that Harris was coming off as frivolous.

  The Recount posted a fifteen-second clip of Harris dancing in Jacksonville. It got 2.3 million views and counting.

  * * *

  Beth Foster Gayle had just gotten up and was making coffee at her D.C. home on the morning of October 25, bracing herself for the day ahead. It was the second anniversary of the death of her husband, Tyrone Gayle, Harris’s first Senate press secretary.

  Such days bring with them hard, happy, sad memories. Her phone buzzed with a text. It was from the Democratic vice presidential nominee, from somewhere on the campaign trail. Kamala Harris wanted to pass along what she had seen at the rally in Jacksonville, Tyrone’s hometown. Someone held a sign that read: DO IT FOR TYRONE. In other words, the person holding the sign wanted Harris to win the election for the young man who died too soon. Harris wanted Beth to know that someone else was remembering Tyrone.

  The gesture brightened the start of the rough anniversary, and it reflected a facet of Kamala Harris that few people would ever see. She could be tough, often too tough, with those around her. In her climb, she had left people behind feeling used, and she left work undone as she moved fast from one important job to the next. But she also took time to show she cared and to display that all-too-rare quality, empathy. On this day, she knew one person would be feeling pain, and she wanted to let that person know someone was thinking of her.

  It was Kamala Harris’s way.

  Acknowledgments

  For understandable reasons, Kamala Harris and her family did
not grant interviews or provide help in the reporting of Kamala’s Way. Harris was focused on running a national campaign during September and October when I was writing this book.

  I relied on dozens of sources who had firsthand knowledge of the events to which they spoke. Many of them are identified in these pages; others had good reasons to remain anonymous. My sincere thanks to each of them for helping inform me and readers of Kamala’s Way.

  Josh Meyer, my friend from our days at the Los Angeles Times, deserves a special acknowledgment. This book could not have been written without his reporting and insights about Washington. Josh’s hard-edged reporting is second to none. In this project, he used his decades of experience in the ways of Washington to provide invaluable help in reporting and writing chapters on Harris’s very busy time in the Senate and on her efforts to win Biden’s selection as his running mate. Josh turned all of this around on a tight deadline, which makes me even more appreciative.

  Andy Furillo, my dear friend and the best courthouse reporter I know, helped immensely with reporting, insights, and descriptions of Harris’s time at the San Francisco Hall of Justice.

  Sasha Hupka provided invaluable help reaching important people in this book and researching Harris’s time in Berkeley and Oakland. Sasha is a meticulous reporter and fine writer and has a great future in journalism. Thanks also to Yumi Wilson, who teaches the next generation of journalists at UC Berkeley, for recommending Sasha.

  Kristina Rebelo was a most amazing fact-checker and line editor. Karina Robinson is an incredible historical researcher, genealogist, and fact-checker who helped with my understanding of Harris’s roots. Thanks to California State Librarian Greg Lucas and his great staff. The California State Library is one of California’s true gems.