Kamala, California’s Andy Dufresne
We got this, America. California is sending you the best possible person to weather whatever the next three-plus months hold.
Let’s be honest about Kamala Harris. We’re not giving you our most charismatic public speaker. Her sentences can be as awkward as Joe Biden’s.
We’re not giving you our most disciplined politician. She’ll crack an ill-considered joke, or make a mistake in a meeting that requires clean-up.
What we are giving you is someone who can emerge improbably triumphant from losing situations. Someone who will take more crap than anyone possibly could.
The best explanation of Kamala Harris came from a San Francisco political consultant, who compared her to Andy Dufresne, the main character of the 1994 film “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Dufresne was a falsely convicted banker who escapes Shawshank Prison through a 500-yard-long sewage pipe. “Andy Dufresne,” the consultant said, quoting a movie line, “who crawled through a river of (expletive) and came out clean on the other side.”
Because Americans don’t know Harris this way, they are underestimating her. Just like they underestimate California.
Contrary to the stereotypes, 21st century California is not soft or easy. It’s a crowded, competitive place where everything — even finding an affordable place to live — is a struggle.
The real California made Harris tough. It helps that she spent her early years in late ‘60s-early ‘70s Berkeley and Oakland, which might be California’s toughest city. As a mixed-race kid, Harris had to learn how to fit in, at a newly integrated elementary school, and at both Hindu Temple and the 23rd Avenue Church of God. After the divorce of her immigrant parents, she and her sister were raised almost entirely by their mother, who moved them to Montreal.
Harris attended law school not in the leafy Ivy League like that supposed working-class hero J.D. Vance but at the UC Hastings, in the middle of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhood, the Tenderloin. And she worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and then San Francisco, on the sorts of cases — sex crimes and child abuse — that can harden people.
She launched her political career in the hyper-competitive political culture of San Francisco, which forged many of our state’s toughest pols — Willie Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Phil and John Burton. Her first election, for San Francisco district attorney, was one she should have lost, because it was the trickiest challenge in politics — beating an incumbent who was also her boss. Somehow, she escaped with victory in a three-way race when she’d started in third.
Then Harris, still little known, ran statewide, for California attorney general — against a popular Los Angeles Republican named Steve Cooley who had the state’s law enforcement community behind him. On election night, she appeared to have lost. But when all the votes were counted three weeks later, she had squeaked through.
When a U.S. Senate seat opened in 2016, Harris was hardly the most popular Democrat in the state. But she jumped into the race early, and managed to scare off other contenders and win the seat over another Democrat.
Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was a disaster. She started strong in debates but didn’t make it to the Iowa caucuses, alienating both progressives and moderates. But even after that embarrassing campaign, she found a way through, convincing Biden to make her vice president.
Media and public reviews of her vice presidency have been dicey. She had too much staff turnover. Biden gave her impossible issues to manage, mainly immigration. For the first three years, her approval ratings and polling were lower than the president’s. She was cited as the reason he couldn’t retire after one term. But all those things turned. Her performance improved. And now Biden has bowed out and endorsed her for president because she looks like the stronger candidate.
She doesn’t have the nomination yet of course. She may have to go through a contested convention. And if she earns the nod, she’ll face a former president who is ready to attack.
Democrats are worried. Because Donald Trump is a constant font of lies and accusations. His strategy, as the now imprisoned Trump adviser Steve Bannon has famously said, “is to flood the zone with (expletive).”
But this time, his opponent is Kamala Harris. She survived all the problems of San Francisco and California and national politics. She’s heard every disgusting sexist insult. She sloughed off slurs against two different races.
She’s about to be submerged in it all again. Because American politics is a river of challenges.
Which is why this is her moment. Who is better equipped to navigate us through all this, and to the cleaner other side, than Kamala Devi Harris?