The Home Front

She was always reachable, available, and very gracious with her time. Never dodged me. I think she was that way with most reporters. She took a lot after her mother. Her mother was gracious and very kind. I thought Harris was a good district attorney. She had some problems—she was district attorney when the crime lab scandal happened. That’s the only negative I remember during her tenure. 

I interviewed her several times at her home. Her mother was there at the time, and even invited me for dinner. I said “That’s fine,” because I was on a deadline, but I thought, Boy, Kamala takes a lot after her mom. She was very close to her, and had a wonderful family. Just from first glance, it was a very warm greeting and experience I had. I felt just a really good vibe about her. 

It was during her early career when she was maturing. Perhaps she’s a different person now. Having covered politics, people do change. They become more defensive when they ascend to more difficult, higher positions, where they have a reason to be more cautious with reporters. But, you know, that was when Kamala was younger, entering politics. She was a tough district attorney.

She is not impolite, she is not impenetrable, but she is guarded. And as much as her prosecutorial past is something that comes up, it’s also how she handles the media. When you’re a prosecutor, you don’t say more than you should say. There’s an old Yiddish saying which is, “A wise man knows what he says, and a fool says what he knows.” She knows what she says. That can be frustrating because Kamala Harris is someone who is very hard to know. She’s not ungenuine and she’s not phony, but she is difficult to know. She can keep the media at an arm’s length. 

Kamala had a reputation of being a spectacular courtroom lawyer and, as you would think, it is a transferable skill to be able to convince a jury to see things your way and to convince voters to see things your way. The old phrase from New York Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez is I’d rather be lucky than good. And Harris is plenty good as a politician goes, but she’s also lucky. She’s won against a lot of subpar opponents or opponents that made inexplicably bad strategic mistakes. It always helps, when you’re a candidate, when your opponent self-immolates.

Kamala Harris’s record has really not been her major selling point. There’s not been a lot of legislation and, here in San Francisco, it wasn’t her sparkling record as a DA so much that got everybody worked up. So if you’re trying to parse the policy issues, that is worth doing, but it’s not going to be predictive of how things will go on Election Day. Looking at her accomplishments is separate and apart from looking at her ability to campaign. We can argue about how effective Kamala Harris is at governing, but that is a different argument than politics.

There was a lot of enmity with the San Francisco Police Department because of her refusal to apply the death penalty to the murder of police officer Isaac Espinoza, even though she ran on that as a campaign promise. This is one of the rare times that someone is excoriated for actually living up to their campaign promise. People are still upset about that. It was a tremendous deal locally that Dianne Feinstein called for the death penalty at the officer’s memorial in the church, and everyone stood up and roared. Harris was there. How mortifying is that?

When I interviewed her, it was not an unpleasant interview. She is a pleasant person to speak with. She’s not a robot, like so many politicians. She laughs a lot. But I do recall asking some personality questions, and she’s just like, Well, I like cooking. It was kind of rote, but that’s not to say that she’s not a real person and doesn’t open up with people she opens up with. I understand that not everybody wants to shoot the breeze with the media where a quote out of context can have permanent ramifications.

I always found her to be very available. She had controversy, of course, from the beginning days of her tenure as a San Francisco DA—issues like the death penalty, a crime lab scandal, there were some rocky moments for Kamala Harris—but we never had problems accessing her. I remember covering her in the snows of Iowa when she became one of the first people in California and, I think, one of the first elected women nationwide to endorse Barack Obama in his campaign. She let me go door-to-door with her in Iowa and tramp through the snow. She met voters there. She was a regular in San Francisco, with the pride parade and other big community events. As DA in San Francisco, we didn’t have much trouble accessing her—even as attorney general. 

When we saw a difference was in the presidential run. I remember thinking the change was happening because I never before had to wait outside a hotel for her. Now we had to figure out, Okay, how are we going to catch her on the way out? She was much more careful. She was much more calculated. It was much more of a finger-in-the-wind kind of approach during a presidential race. The pressure that she was under, that first presidential race happening on a crowded national stage. We could see the definite difference in the way she approached the media. She had her West Coast consultants out here, Ace Smith and Sean Clegg, who are well known to us San Francisco political reporters, as advisers, and then her sister Maya on the East Coast, who also had a team of people. There was conflict involved, and that made her a much more cautious and less accessible candidate. She was much more concerned about the impacts of any statement she made. That had an impact on her race as a whole because, as you know, it didn’t last.

She can be guarded in certain ways, depending on the issue. Even when you’re asking her even really tough questions. Here is the other thing about Kamala Harris: She’s not afraid to come back at you if she thinks you’ve been unfair in some way. Or if she wants to sidestep the question, as many good politicians do, she knows how to do that as well. She’s an experienced public figure. But on family issues, I think that’s sort of out of bounds.

Those of us who covered her know this—that growing up with a single mom, she had a friend in Montreal, where they lived, who had been sexually abused and was living at her house. She cites that as being one of the reasons why she became really interested in tackling and addressing that issue and making a difference. She came to Alameda County, in Oakland, and worked at the courthouse. That was her first real job in law enforcement as a prosecutor, where she took up sexual abuse cases, child abuse cases. It was a pretty tough place, and she was handling some very tough cases here in the early 2000s. She learned a lot of things from the ground up, in terms of the effects of those kinds of cases. I know that had an impact on her. 

There wasn’t any moment where she just took out after me—like where Donald Trump calls you nasty or with Nancy Pelosi, where she yelled at you for doing a story. That’s never happened with Kamala Harris.

I found her to be really responsive when I needed her for a quote or for some context. My impression of her, as a reporter watching her be a DA, was: she was pretty tough. I dealt with her on social services reporting back when she was in office in the early 2000s. I did one story in particular, on a service center for people suffering from trauma—for crime trauma victims—and the funding got yanked. We had a pretty long conversation about how important a trauma recovery center, as it was called, was, and she really understood it. She understood the awful things that happen to victims psychologically after a crime, and she was pretty outraged that the funding was going away for this center here in San Francisco. I thought that was pretty sensitive of her; she also leaned in heavily on prosecuting cases. As much as the right wing likes to disparage San Francisco as a bunch of granola-eating nuts—radical left wing and all that—she was not a radical left-wing district attorney by any stretch of the imagination.

She was definitely involved in the community. Clearly, she felt a responsibility to respond to people like me when I called. It’s not every official in government who is going to call you back, especially these days. She picked up the phone.

I don’t blame her for being private. I know that the people who know her here are protective of her. The attacks about her supposedly sleeping her way to the top—it’s really offensive, and it’s offensive to the people who know her back here.

From my perspective—from editorial board meetings, a couple of one-on-one interviews, and just going to press conferences and stuff—she has a personality of a lot of Black women in their fifties and sixties who were in the public eye. She can be very guarded of her messaging and her image. She likes to project what she wants to; she wants people to see her a certain way. Inevitably, as journalists, we try to see the full picture. There’s been a few times when I’ve heard of colleagues who have written columns about her—stories about her that are not quite what she wanted to convey—and her team has called back and been very dissatisfied. It always seems a little overbearing, but I took away from that that she just wanted to really craft her image and that was the only image that she wanted out there. 

But to talk to her one-on-one—I mean, she’s extremely open and engaging and she has a great sense of humor. She’s obviously extremely intelligent, very talented. She’s very charismatic and she’s very nice, but I think that—this is my own speculation, conjecture, interpretation of years—she just likes to be seen the way she likes to be seen. I don’t know if that’s a reflection of the fact that as a woman of color and power, you’re going to be subject to all of these, like, taxes. It’s better to define your narrative before somebody defines it for you.

I think there’s just two sides to her. To some extent, a lot of the criticism that’s been out there about her being not authentic or not genuine, particularly when she ran for president in 2020, comes from that duality of her team trying very hard to define what her narrative is going to be as a candidate, who she was, and then the natural course of just running a campaign and being surrounded by journalists, voters, and other people constantly picking at that narrative and being like, Oh, what about this? Or what about that? It comes out as muddled. 

She has spent so many years as attorney general, and previously in San Francisco as prosecutor, defining herself somewhere in the middle, willing to prosecute people. Then, because it was 2020, the tough-on-crime conversation shifted and suddenly she was on the wrong side. During the campaign, she tried to adjust to the politics on the ground, with people calling for criminal justice reform where she had always had this history of not necessarily going that way. She was trying to square the two. Politically, there were things that were very obvious, that most Californians would support, but she would just refuse to take an opinion on one way or the other. One of them was legalization of cannabis for adult use. California legalized cannabis for medical use in ’95, but she didn’t want to take a stand on whether it should be legal for adult use. There’s a series of policies like that where for anybody else, it wouldn’t even be considered “left” for California, it would just be normal. She was just overly, overly cautious, and the expectation was that she was going to run for higher office, and she didn’t want to be tied one way or another to a policy that may not be popular in five, six, seven years.

The reality is the more she trusts people, the more she’s willing to open up. I’m not saying that I’ve interviewed her enough to break that down, but I do know of reporters who have, where she’ll share recipes or other things. I don’t think that she’s not willing to talk about herself. She’s not going to talk about herself to everybody.

I think that most Americans have never had a Black woman boss. They may not even know that many Black women beyond characters they see on TV. They may not even know anybody who’s from California, either. In some ways, she’s defining this territory. People are glomming expectations onto her, rightly or wrongly, based on their own experience. That’s something that complicates this whole conversation. But the thing about it is, when I talk to her, when I have interacted with her, she’s exceedingly normal.

One of the points that I make in the book is that she doesn’t take a lot of stances. When she was attorney general, there were really consequential measures related to the criminal justice system. California had this really harsh three-strikes law, where you could basically shoplift and, if it was your third strike, you could be sentenced to twenty-five years to life. There were actual people who had stolen the pizza who were doing twenty-five to life. When she was attorney general, there was a ballot measure to soften those edges. I figured the attorney general is going to take a stance on this, and she didn’t. You could ask her ten different ways what her stance was on that, and she would just say, I’m not taking a stance. She’s very good at not answering the question.

An attorney general, theoretically, they’re supposed to do their talking in court and not in public. There’s also a political element to that, which is that every time you take a position, you annoy somebody on the other side of that position. If you don’t take a position, then you win by not losing. She has done that. When she was in the US Senate, she’s freer, right? If you look at the bills she introduced in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, you can see that she takes a lot of different positions that she wouldn’t necessarily have taken when she was the head of the California Department of Justice.

 Throughout her tenure in Sacramento as attorney general, she was very supportive of the Affordable Care Act. She was out front on abortion rights, women’s issues, and gun safety was a huge, big issue. Those really hot-button issues, you knew exactly where she stood. She made that clear, sponsoring legislation in that area. So occasionally, coming over to Sacramento to testify before a legislative committee, if you caught up with her, she would talk with you. But she is just not a press hound.

I had sixty days to report and write Kamala’s Way. As soon as I signed the deal, I sent an email to Harris’s press person: I’m working on this book, could I talk with Kamala? The answer was no. Throughout the very intense two months that I was working on it, I would send her press person notes saying “I’ve got this question. Can you give me an answer?” The answer came back no. She’s not an open book. People who are covering her will have these holes. 

I feel like I’ve read every major piece on her. I did write a book on her. And there are things about her that I don’t think anybody knows publicly. I don’t think there’s anything bad there; I don’t think it’s scandalous. One thing I’m pretty sure about Kamala Harris is that you can look pretty hard and you’re not going to find any quid pro quo. Believe me, I’ve looked for that. I read the main opposition research on Kamala Harris when I was doing the book, and I know what her opposition knew about her back then. She takes public positions. But, you know, it’s not as if you’re going to find an instance where somebody gives her money and then she takes a position or doesn’t take a position based on that donor’s influence or interest. I can see that there are some personal things that she did feel, like, That’s personal, it’s none of your business. That’s how she views it. Fair enough. She talks about her mom. She talks some about her sister. Didn’t talk much about her dad. These are some of the things that we don’t know about her, but it’s not as if she’s hiding some deep, dark, nefarious secret.

We’re nosy. We want to know. It’s in our nature. They don’t have to tell us unless it affects public policy, and this is not stuff that affects public policy.

When I was her communications director, it was very hard to drum up much interest for Kamala Harris unless we were making some big announcement. I recall one time calling around, trying to get her into the press and being turned down. I bet those folks would regret it now, because they could have told their children and grandchildren that they knew her when.

Kamala Harris had been through the wringer of San Francisco politics, which are notoriously brutal, rough and tumble. She had had her fair share of good press building her up and a fair share of bad press tearing her down. As she rose up through the levels, she became a bit more aware, especially in the social media age, of how one wrong sentence or one slightly inaccurate statement can lead to a lot of negativity. She had some anxiety about making a mistake, and it made her a bit anxious, in terms of being happy to plunge into interviews.

She always wanted to make her values clear, and for those values to come through and to really learn the details of what her beliefs were. She’s been falsely portrayed as somebody who’s hard to pin down or doesn’t have set principles, but she actually does. She’s a child of the civil rights movement. Her parents met in the movement. The key for Kamala is to try to articulate how someone who comes from that progressive background ends up as a prosecutor and tries to balance these two things. In order to get higher levels of power, you can’t play all your cards at a lower level. She struggled with the way to articulate that in a way that builds trust and doesn’t make people think that Oh, she’s on one side or the other.

One of the big pressures she’s always faced is that there’s so much expectation and hope projected on her. She has to find a way to deliver on that promise. If people don’t project that onto her, then she won’t get a chance to make a change. I think she became a district attorney—that’s a hands-on job—because she wanted to be directly involved in these problems on a very granular level in society. That’s still in there. As you move up, you do become more of a politician, a figure, a symbol. But you bring along the people who will do the work and who will advise you on policy—those people very much reflect your values. One thing that impressed me about the attorney general’s office, it was the smartest group of people I’d ever been around. If she makes it, we will have some very smart people giving her advice in the White House. 

There’ll continue to be some tension with the press, but I think that the campaign is going to try to go straight to the people through social media as much as possible. And probably feed narratives and stories to reporters in terms of what the campaign is doing and have a bit of limited availability. There will be some interviews—they’ll have to be in play.