Even after Kamala Harris’s high-profile primary run and almost a full term as vice-president, many Americans are only just getting to know her. But Harris has been a fixture in California politics for decades, and Dan Morain, a veteran Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee reporter, had a front-row seat to her ascent. In his unauthorized 2021 biography Kamala’s Way, he explored her path from promising young lawyer to the White House, including stops at several powerful perches along the way. With Harris already having all but clinched the Democratic nomination, I spoke with Morain about what defines her as a politician, why she stumbled in 2020, and her opacity as a person.
As somebody who’s been following Kamala Harris for about 30 years, is there a particular through-line you’ve detected with her — a guiding philosophy or anything like that? Or is it more just that she is an adept politician who is good at reading particular moments?
She’s certainly a skilled politician, and she’s ambitious. But then, what politician isn’t ambitious? To me, one thing that is true about Kamala Harris is that she’s underestimated. She came out of pretty much nowhere to become district attorney. She had built a bit of a profile in San Francisco, but when she ran for D.A., she had very little name ID. And she was running against an incumbent who had quite a name in San Francisco. The Hallinan family was and is quite famous there. Nobody knew who Kamala Harris was.
And when she ran for attorney general in 2010, she was certainly the underdog against Republican Steve Cooley, who had been the district attorney in Los Angeles for three terms — and L.A. of course is the main population center of California. He was the front-runner and should have won.
2010 is the year of the tea party, a year when Republicans all around the country won legislative seats. There was this committee called the Republican State Leadership Committee. The organization raised $30 million that year, I think, and spent a million of it trying to block Harris from winning. And the reason was that they could tell that if she won in 2010, she’d be a significant player for years to come. In fact, in Kamala’s Way, I quote Cooley’s campaign manager Kevin Spillane telling his boss that this race is really not about attorney general; it’s about the vice-presidency. Kevin could see in 2010 that Kamala Harris might be a logical vice presidential pick.
Prescient!
One of the things that is interesting about her, and I think it’s relevant today, is that she’s really adept at clearing the field. When she ran for AG in 2010, she was one of half a dozen Democrats seeking the nomination. Jackie Speier, a member of Congress at the time, was contemplating entering the race, and Harris announced that she had $2.2 million in the bank. That dissuaded Jackie from getting in, or at least helped dissuade her.
When Harris runs for reelection as district attorney, she runs unopposed. And this is San Francisco. San Francisco politics is a real bloodsport. That she had cleared the field was pretty extraordinary, I think. Especially since she had had a bit of a rocky go there as DA over the death penalty. And she runs for attorney general the second time unopposed, practically. And then when she announces for U.S. Senate, there were serious candidates out there, like Antonio Villaraigosa, who had been L.A. mayor and Speaker of the State Assembly. He thought better of it. Xavier Becerra was a prominent member of the House then, and he thought better of it. There was a member of Congress, Loretta Sanchez, who did run, but Loretta was not going to beat Kamala Harris.
Well, we’ve certainly seen her clear the field writ large in the last couple days.
Yeah, that’s right.
One time she wasn’t able to do that was the 2020 primary campaign — she was seen as a really promising candidate, and was maybe even the front-runner for a few weeks. Then her campaign devolved into chaos. A big reason for that was campaign organization. There were all these postmortems about how Maya Harris, her sister, had run things poorly, but of course some of the blame went to the candidate herself. Did any of this sound familiar to you? It seems like you’re saying her previous campaigns were quite a bit smoother.
They were. I wrote about the debacle that was her campaign in 2019, but I didn’t cover it in the way I had paid attention to her run for attorney general and her run for Senate. But what struck me about it was that she was not being true to who she was, which was understandable at the time. This is a career prosecutor who sort of ran away from being a career prosecutor.
Because the party had moved left, but she misread where things were going a bit.
Yeah, absolutely. She was being attacked from the left, so she inched her way to the left, which I don’t think is — she’s certainly liberal, but —
Not San Francisco liberal. More like San Francisco moderate.
When the Chronicle endorsed her run for district attorney in 2003, the headline was “Harris, for Law and Order.” She promised to prosecute corner drug dealers. So — left? Absolutely. As far left as many in California? No.
Going back to her problems in the 2020 primary: Has Harris had so much sway in her other campaigns, or was that a more recent phenomenon?
I have never met Maya Harris, or at least I don’t think I’ve met her. She was very influential in California politics, though. She was with the ACLU and helped lead the effort against Proposition Eight in 2008 to ban same-sex marriage. From everything I have been told, Maya and Kamala Harris are very, very close. So I’m sure that Maya had a significant influence on her runs for Senate and attorney general. I know that Maya helped a lot in her first run for district attorney. But I don’t have firsthand knowledge about it. All I know is what I’ve been told.
Harris was always against the death penalty, as you said. Would you say criminal-justice issues are the ones she cares most about?
Yeah, writ large, sure. But human trafficking is a huge issue, and the sex trade, particularly crimes against children. One thing that she talks about as being quite formative is that her mom moved her and Maya up to Montreal and took a job at McGill University. So Kamala is there as a high-school kid, and she’s doing what high-school kids do. She’s having fun; she’s in a dance troupe. One of her friends, a classmate named Wanda Kagan, confides that she’s been abused by her stepfather. And so the Harris clan brings Wanda into their home. Harris’s mom insists that she get counseling — they really bring her into the family. When Harris is district attorney in San Francisco, Harris is interviewed by Oprah, and Wanda Kagan reaches out to her to reconnect and they rekindle their friendship.
Fast-forward to 2020, and the New York Times writes a piece about this episode. And then Kamala Harris does an ad. You can find it on YouTube — it’s really a striking ad. And she’s talking about this episode in her childhood where she meets this kid who’s been abused, and how that is so formative, and that’s the reason she cites for becoming a prosecutor.
I should say, as an aside, that Elaina Plott Calabro wrote a terrific piece on Vice-President Harris in October 2023. And she writes in that piece that three years into the administration, the White House is still discovering things about her. And they bring to her this episode about this kid, the explanation for the motivation for Harris becoming a prosecutor. Isn’t that interesting that the White House wouldn’t know about something that had appeared in the New York Times, she had done an ad about, and was in the one biography that’s been written about her? They didn’t understand the asset they had.
I’m not too surprised somehow after reading about this dynamic over the years.
I thought that that was extraordinary. It’s the reason why this daughter of two lefties, immigrant Berkeley intellectuals, becomes a prosecutor. I think it surprised her family that she became a prosecutor. But this helps explain something about her.
So when you say criminal justice, yeah — but it’s really crimes against women, crimes against children. She did a lot of that when she was with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. And then she went to work for the San Francisco City Attorney before she ran for district attorney. And she oversaw a family-law section of the office where she interacted a lot with abused children.
I didn’t realize that.
Yeah. She did interesting things as attorney general. I think the most interesting one, though, was overseeing the prosecution of Backpage.com.
And if you remember that case — Backpage, as she described it, was an online bordello, but it was worse than that. There were minors who were being trafficked, at least according to the charges. She oversaw the prosecution of Backpage, and the deputy attorney general, Maggy Krell, was given free rein to go after that case. And that, again, was over human trafficking.
So there’s that through-line.
Yeah. There’s another interesting case that I think a lot of the national presses may not be aware of. Harris endorsed legislation directing crisis pregnancy centers that are run by anti-abortion people had to put a statement in their waiting rooms that order to get reproductive health care, you could go elsewhere. So it was forcing these centers to post something they fundamentally oppose. This goes up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court concludes that it’s a violation of the First Amendment. You can’t force somebody to say something.
And the anti-abortion activists who brought that case do what happens in civil-rights cases: they collect a lot of attorney’s fees from the state of California. And then the money from that case is used to attack reproductive health. So I suppose there’s some irony there. Had she thought it through, she might not have sponsored that law, or had it written somewhat differently. It kind of backfired on her.
I was watching another interview you did since Biden dropped out, and you said, of Harris, that “There are fundamental things we don’t know about her as a human being.” And that piqued my interest.
It’s true.
Do you attribute that close-to-the-vestness just to her personality? How much of it has to do with being a Black woman in politics and being a little guarded for that reason?
I don’t know the answer to “Why is she so guarded?” But she is so guarded. In fact, I ran my notion about how weird it was that the Biden White House didn’t know about Wanda Kagan by somebody who knows Harris really well. And I asked him for a reality check, what to make of this. And he told me, “Well, you would be working with Kamala Harris and going over a speech, rewriting a speech, and then maybe in the tenth draft, she would reveal something about herself.” So even people who work really closely with her discover new things about her. She doesn’t hold forth.
I’m trying to figure out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for a presidential candidate. I guess it could go both ways.
Well, it’s going to be challenging. Look at the photos from Inauguration Day. Her sister is there, Maya. Her sister’s daughter, Meena, is there, and her sister’s daughter’s husband, Nick Ajagu, is on the stage with the Bidens. Nick and Meena’s children are there. Where’s her dad? Her dad is still alive, as far as I know, and maybe he was at the inauguration. I wasn’t. So I don’t know. But where are the photos? Where is he?
They had a strange relationship, as I recall, although I can’t remember the details.
Yeah. That’s because nobody knows the details. When I was writing the book, there were basic things I wanted to ask her. She was a young prosecutor in Alameda County in 1991. That was the year Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas before the Judiciary Committee chaired by Joe Biden. What did she think of that? I have no idea. She had to have thought something about it — I can’t imagine a young woman attorney didn’t have opinion.
There are a bunch of questions like that, fundamental questions that if I could sit down with her for ten minutes — the first three questions would be about her father, but then they’d veer off into other things. I mean, maybe we’ll find out in the presidential campaign, but she’s not an open book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
