Kamala Harris had each proper to be irritated with me.
In 2010, she was district lawyer of San Francisco and embroiled in her first marketing campaign for statewide workplace in California, the place she was operating for lawyer basic. I used to be the editorial web page editor of the Los Angeles Occasions, the state’s largest paper and, on the time, its most influential.
It was a really shut race and never a simple name for the editorial board. “They are both worthy candidates, and closely matched. Either Steve Cooley, a Republican, or Kamala Harris, a Democrat, would do a fine job,” we wrote. However the backside line was sure to annoy her. “After serious deliberation,” the board concluded, “The Times endorses Cooley.”
So I used to be slightly stunned a yr later, when, having gained that marketing campaign, Harris accepted an invite from my mother and father to affix me at a guide get together to have a good time the discharge of my biography of President Dwight Eisenhower. She arrived with little fanfare, and quietly made an enduring impression on everybody who attended.
Harris didn’t wow the company that afternoon by taking up the occasion or clamoring for consideration. On the contrary. Harris created slightly stir when she arrived, however she rapidly settled in. Harris requested questions, sounding out company about historical past or California. Relatively than holding forth or announcing, she listened.
Harris was charming and gregarious with out being overbearing. One visitor introduced their toddler granddaughter, and Harris snuggled the infant, cooing and admiring little Isabella.
Quickly after that, we met for lunch in San Francisco, and I used to be struck once more at her genuineness, her participation in a dialog slightly than her use of 1 to ship a message or to shore up help. (That and subsequent conversations have been off the document, and despite the fact that many passed off greater than a decade in the past, I regard that promise as binding and gained’t repeat the small print right here.)
We talked concerning the altering nature of crime within the metropolis and the broader state, about traits in violence but additionally about books we’d not too long ago learn and historical past we appreciated. If she held a grudge over the Cooley endorsement, she by no means let on.
I advised her a barely off-color story a couple of sheriff’s deputy I’d identified for a while. She laughed. Sure, that chuckle. It burst from her. Heads turned.
However I didn’t discover it grating or offensive — it struck me as welcome and heartwarming. A lot of the laughter that I hear from political figures is, like a lot else about them, affected. It’s the mushy, noncommittal chuckle of the candidate who desires to attach however to not concede that anybody else might need one thing to say. Or it’s the joke at another person’s expense, meant to bind the listener and teller in a typical disdain.
Harris was — and is — totally different. She laughs with vigor and enthusiasm, slightly than calculation. In truth, it’s the best way some sources described Eisenhower’s chuckle — deep and real, not parsing or imply.
It’s the alternative, in fact, of Trump’s mean-spirited smirk, the calculated glee he takes in imagining others in misery or ache. To not like Harris’s chuckle is to think about that we’re higher off being led by dour, vengeful officers slightly than those that discover pleasure of their work.
To mock her for it’s to ridicule authenticity.
I spend numerous time with folks in politics. I’ve interviewed 1000’s of officeholders and candidates through the years. I’ve written books on a chief justice of the USA, Earl Warren, and a president of the USA, Eisenhower, each Republicans — in addition to on the longest-serving governor in California historical past, Democrat Jerry Brown. I collaborated on a memoir with a former CIA director and secretary of protection, Leon Panetta, who began out as a Republican and ended up a Democrat. So I’ve seen a good bit of historical past and politics from each side of the aisle; hardly ever has a politician impressed me greater than Harris did, beginning some 15 years in the past.
After one in every of our early conversations, I referred to as dwelling and advised my spouse — herself no stranger to politics and candidates — that I might think about Harris being president sometime.
Within the years since, we’ve spoken many occasions. She was within the life and work of Warren, whose first statewide workplace additionally was as California lawyer basic. We talked about his achievements, in addition to these of Eisenhower. She launched me to her sister, one other impressively shiny and targeted individual.
Via these conferences, formal and casual, Harris by no means got here throughout as significantly ideological, actually not in the best way she’s portrayed by her opponent.
My conversations with Harris have been typically round legal justice and regulation enforcement and, if something, she was extra conservative than many others in California on these topics. She speaks and thinks like a prosecutor, not an apologist for crime or criminals.
Once I interviewed her in 2015 for the primary difficulty of Blueprintthe journal I based at UCLA, we talked about recidivism, the demise penalty and the necessity for the state to be accountable for its work on crime and punishment. The headline recognized her as California’s “Top Cop.” In all our conversations, she has displayed a pointy command of state and nationwide politics. She sizes up candidates skillfully and understands the methods they reverberate off voters.
Harris was — and is — principled with out being naïve.
I don’t know whether or not she will probably be elected, but when she is, America will get a refreshingly actual individual as its subsequent president, a frontrunner who has spent a long time contemplating the right way to make Individuals protected, a reliable individual to whom you possibly can hand over your child with out fear, and a joyful conversationalist who can chuckle at a comic story.
In all these respects, she’s nothing like Trump. She jogs my memory extra of Ike.
