Episode 735: The Real Kamala Harris

In a very detailed conversation about Vice President Kamala Harris’ life, Newt talks with journalist and author, Charlie Spiering. His new book is “Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House.” They discuss Kamala Harris' early life, her upbringing, her education, including her formative teen years in Montreal, and her decision to attend Howard University. They discuss Harris's political career, including her time as District Attorney, her relationship with former Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, and her decision to run for Attorney General. They also describe her U.S. Senate career, her run for the presidency in 2020 – ultimately becoming Vice President, and now the Democrats nominee for president in 2024.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
On this episode of Newts World. Who is the real
Kamala Harris and how did she ascend to the second
highest office in the country despite her limited experience in
national politics and confusing professional history. There hasn't been a
comprehensive examination of Vice President Kamala Harris's journey to the

(00:25):
White House until now. In his new book, Amateur Hour,
Kamala Harris and the White House, author Charlie Spearing delivers
the first ever deep dive into Kamala Harris's incompetent, radical
path to the vice presidency, from her tenure as California

(00:45):
Prosecutor to serving the United States Senate, to her failed
presidential campaign and finally her first year is in an
executive office as Vice President. Amateur Hour was published in
January this year, come a must read for everyone watching
the ascension of Vice President Harris to the Democratic nominee

(01:06):
for president. Here to discuss his new book, I'm really
pleased to welcome my guest, Charlie Speary. He began his
career as a political journalist fifteen years ago as a
reporter for Washington Post columnist Robert Novak. He was a
political writer for The Washington Examiner before moving to bright
Bard News as a White House correspondent covering the Obama

(01:30):
administration and the Trump administration. Charlie, welcome and thank you
for joining me on Newts World.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Thank you for having me, mister speaker. It's a real honor.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
You know, there's been a lot of reporting about various
aspects of Kamala Harris's life and political career since President
Biden announced he was no longer running in twenty twenty
four and she became the presumptive nominee of the Democrats ticket.
But I have to say your book is remarkable because
you tell her story from the very beginning. So let's

(02:14):
talk about Harris's early life. Tell us a little bit
about how she grew up, right.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
I think most people know Kamala Harris's early life through
the lens of her debate moment with then Vice President
Joe Biden during the twenty twenty presidential campaign, when Kamala
Harris famously turned the former Vice president and spoke to
him about how difficult it was to grow up in

(02:41):
relatively liberal enclave of San Francisco and struggling with the
issue of racial segregation and public bussing, and how she
was the benefactor of that, and I think a lot
of people kind of saw that attack as disingenuous as
someone who, you know, as many people in California understood
her story, they didn't really see her painting herself as

(03:03):
a victim as very effective, because, you know, she did
grow up in a well to do neighborhood in San Francisco,
the daughter of two academics. You know, her father was
famously an economic professor for Stanford University and her mother
was a cancer researcher. And ultimately, even though they separated
when Kamala was still young, she still enjoyed sort of

(03:26):
the benefits of living in a very progressive, well to
do environment.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
I'm curious because apparently from the very beginning, her parents
were part of the radical Afro American Association study group
at Berkeley, and in a sense, she was born into
her radicalism right.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
She frequently talks about her parents as being progressive activists
who were out there marching and shouting for justice. But
looking back, it's a little more nuanced than that. They
spent more of their time in an academic set. You know,
her father, Donald Harris, was a pretty prominent voice for
economic studies and he held several Marxist views when it

(04:08):
came to economics. He was part of this study group,
which was pretty radical. It gave the rise to the
Black Panther Party and Black nationalism and the importance of
that movement during the civil rights era. So there was
a lot of intellectual underpinning. It's not just a simple
marching and shouting for justice, as Harris likes to talk about.
She frequently talks about her life, you know, being pushed

(04:31):
around in the stroller by her parents at some of
these protests, and even sort of changing her description of
that example. In her early years, she would talk about
how she used to fall out of her stroller when
her parents were pushing her around at these protests, and
then later in life she kind of changed that to

(04:52):
describe herself as strapped tightly in her stroller, much more
safe position. And then she would also talk about how
the rise of the civil rights movement sort of created
who she was, molded her into who she was. So
that's certainly a narrative she's pushed ever since she got
into national politics.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
But as I understand it, her parents separated at five
and divorced when she was seven, and her mother Shayamala
Gopai Lan actually raised her exactly.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Kalina Harris describes herself as being raised by strong women.
Her single mom definitely raised her two daughters, but she
was also away at work a lot. Kamala talks a
lot about spending a lot of time on her own
or with a neighbor who they described as their second mother.
Her second mother, Regina Shelton, has the heritage of the

(05:45):
Black South, so Kala Harris leans on that an awful
lot when she's talking about black issues because her mother
is an Indian American, so she was described as the
first mother is off at work doing cancer research. Second
mother is raising Kamala and the girls in her spare time,
taking them to a Baptist church, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
She also went to the Shiva Vishnu Temple in Livermore,
which is a totally different experience from going to a
Baptist church.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Right Kamala's mother would talk about raising Harris in the
Hindu community when she was running for office in San Francisco,
which has a pretty prominent Indian community, so she kind
of leaned on both of these experiences. She talked about
going to Black Christian church and she also talked about
going to church at the Hindu temple and performing all
the different ceremonies when she was first inaugurated in her

(06:40):
first office. It was very much a combination of these
two shared life experiences.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
When she's an early teenager, her mother gets a job
at McGill University, teaching in the medical department and researching
cancer at the Jewish General Hospital. So part of her
teenage yeers she spends in Montreal.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
All exactly, and this is why some people sort of
attribute her inability to connect with the basic American experience
on this time that she spent in her formative years
in Montreal. Certainly, Canada is not the United States of America.
It's much different. And she went to a pretty well
off school in a well off neighborhood, and she had

(07:21):
a home and a pretty well off location. So she
experienced this life through much of her formative teenage years,
joining a dance troupe, experiencing high school and in dances,
and not many controversies in her early life as a teenager.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
And of course Montreal was part of the Quebec, which
is a French speaking area, and she actually was sent
to a French School Notre Dame Denis, before she ended
up at Westmount High School, which she graduated from in Canada.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Right, this is not the normal experience of a public
school student in America. That she was attending some of
the more well off elite schools and getting a pretty
solid education.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
So in your judgment, why does she then go to
college at Howard University, which is the oldest of the
historically black universities, founded right after the Civil War by
General Howard. Why do you think she picked Howard is
the place to go to?

Speaker 2 (08:21):
She speaks fondly of this woman mentor that she had,
who she calls Aunt Christine, someone who had also been
to a historic black university and got a job as
a lawyer and moved into law. So Kamala when she's
growing up, she sees that path as a path to success,
something she can do easily shift into the law and

(08:44):
have a professional career that doesn't necessarily require being an
activist her family. She famously talks about her family being
surprised when they found out she was interested in moving
into law and becoming a public prosecutor. She always would
talk about defensive way that perhaps my decision to become
a prosecutor will give me the chance to perform the

(09:07):
system from the inside.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
While she's at Howard, she manages to join the AKA Sorority,
And as I understand it, sororities like that in the
Black community play a much bigger role than they do
in the white community, and therefore, by being invited in,
she actually is in a network that will dramatically help
her over the years.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Exactly. Kama Harris still has a very strong connection to
that sorority, which is not only just a friendship. It's
a very professional relationship with the different sisters of the sorority,
which is why she remains very close with the people
in the sorority. But it also kind of has that
guarded attempt of protecting each other and setting each other

(09:51):
up for financial and professional success. And just recently we
saw Harris deliver a speech to her sorority, choosing instead
to do that rather than attend maybe Netagnahu's speech in Congress.
That's one more example of how she values her sorority
more than most would as a lost aspect from a

(10:14):
college era.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
And apparently she was able to do a telephone conference
call with some forty thousand black women sorority members around
the country. Not just that sorty, but the Divine Nine
came together so that all the major sororities and fraternities
seem to now be unified in their support for her.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Absolutely, it's the kind of close knit professional network, not
very large, but very connected, especially in Washington, DC, as
we saw her as an African American politician move quickly
up the ladders of power and places of influence within
the Senate.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
She graduates from Howard and then goes back across the
country and goes to the University of kal of Hastings
College of the Law, and then she has her first
major roadblock.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
When she finally graduated. She took the bar and failed
the first time she tried, and she writes in her
memoir that she felt really disappointed, but she had only
delivered in what she called a quote half assed performance
in her entire life up to this point, so it

(11:27):
was really a point where she was met with failure
but still had a clerking position in the Almita County
District Attorney's office. They didn't push her out or fire
her because of her failure, and she was able to
retake the bar examine pass the second time.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Well, and technically it's not that unusual for someone to
fail the first time. That's not automatically a gigantic black mark.
It's interesting that she doesn't go into private sector law firms.
She doesn't pursue the big dollars. She goes into the
county district attorney's office. In that process, she's single. She

(12:02):
begins dating Willie Brown, who I think may have been
the smartest person ever to serve as Speaker in California.
Just a remarkable figure. He was Speaker of the House
in California for fifteen years from nineteen eighty to nineteen
ninety five. She's twenty nine, Brown sixty. They have a
close relationship, and Brown appoints her to two positions in

(12:26):
state government that all told paid her more than four
hundred thousand dollars over five years. A pretty good relationship
with giving her a launch right.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
She took a sort of a six month leave of
absence from her Almita County job to join these positions
that Willie Brown appointed her too. While they were having
a relationship. He appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission,
which had two meetings a month for a ninety nine
thousand dollars annual salary, and then later she got another
position which paid another significant salary. So yeah, all told,

(13:01):
more than four hundred thousand dollars, which back in the
nineties you adjust that for inflation, it's nearly a million
dollars and just running these temporary state board positions and
all the while, Willy Brown also gave her the keys
to a BMW to help you drive her around and
conduct her business. So it was really not only a
financial leg up, but also a personal one as she

(13:22):
was dating Willy Brown, and Willie Brown opened the doors
for her to all the you know, the most well connected, powerful,
wealthy people in San Francisco, not just them, but all
the celebrities too, So he really opened the doors and
kicked off her political career just through this one year
relationship that he had with Kamala Harris when he was
running for mayor at the same time.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
And in that period. Once he's mayor, Brown gets mad
at his district attorney, Terrence Helenon, and Harris decides to
run for DA and she wins, taking office in two
thousand and four with the strongest single person in the
city backing her.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Right It's a very interesting story, the story of Hollanan,
because Terrence Hollanan first hired Kamala Harris from Nyaomeda County.
When Brown won the position for mayor, it was widely
seen as a nod to the mayor, like I'm hiring
somebody who's in your orbit to work for me. But
when the Kamala Harris got to the office, she was
famously aggressive and abrasive with the employees there. She tried

(14:25):
to leave a coup against the second of command in
Hollanan's office, and ultimately that failed. She was unable to
push out sort of Holanan's deputy, prompting her to leave
the department entirely, take a job with the city attorney
and plot her revenge. So a few people were surprised
when Kamala Harris announced her decision to tackle Terence Hollanan

(14:47):
for the position of District Attorney in San Francisco. And
the campaign was famously, very very aggressive and very ugly,
as when two Democrats are fighting each other in a
very liberal and progressive town.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
And it gives you some sense of how much Willy
Brown was invested. There's a quote from the San Francisco
neighborhood Newspaper Association. This is Willy Brown now quote that
son of a bit should have been recalled by the
very people who are currently outraged. I'm more disgusted than
you'll ever believe. And Brown then goes on to personally

(15:21):
give five hundred dollars to Harris's campaign and gives a
letter which political consultants use to raise money because Brown
is clearly, having been the longest serving speaker in the
history of California, is now clearly the most powerful single
person in San Francisco, and she basically was running his protege.

(15:42):
I mean, she can't get away from being his proteger.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
It seems to me, right, She've struggled with this question
throughout her campaign, you know, because holland On and his
allies were pointing to Harris as you know, just Willy
Brown's former arm candy and kept saying that not only
was Willy Brown corrupt, but that Kamala Harris could be
corrupted by Willy Brown. Because Willie Brown was a very
powerful politician, but he also moved easily in the halls

(16:09):
of power and didn't let a few just like the
experience with Harris. So it shows you that he didn't
mind a little appearance of political impropriety. He was thoroughly
investigated by the FBI throughout his career, but he's never
charged with anything, showing he was pretty smart at how
he navigated those waters. But yeah, when it came time
for Harris to distance herself from Willie Brown, she ultimately

(16:32):
made the decision late in her campaign to throw Willy
Brown under the bus, working through this profile with San
Francisco Magazine, really the first time she publicly addressed the
Willy Brown problem that people were calling it, and really
just threw him under the bus, saying his career is over,
move on, he's in the past, it's time to move on.
And it was very effective in sort of turning the

(16:56):
California socialites against this sort of Willy Brown acts. And
for Kamala Harris as an independent politician, she.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Is so determined to erase Willie Brown's role in her
career that when she writes her twenty nineteen political memoir,
she doesn't mention him once. I mean, this is the
guy who picked her up, got her two great appointments,
helped her win the DA's job, and she doesn't mention
him one time. Right.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
The Harris campaign famously has not addressed the Willy Brown
questions since this time. Anytime any reporter asks a question
about Willie Brown, her staff point to this magazine article
as the moment that she separated herself from Brown and
refuses to talk about it ever again. She really tried
to push Willy Brown completely out of her orbit, and

(17:45):
anytime that Willy Brown pipes up to talk about Kamala Harris,
it's not received well at all by Kamala Harris and
her team.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
She's now the DA. What kind of a district attorney
was she?

Speaker 2 (18:11):
During the campaign, she famously campaigned against Hollandan as sort
of an ineffective progressive. She would gather on the steps
with people of color, with women and victims of Hollanan's
failure to prosecute and really a campaign on him failing
women and minorities. And so her line on this was,

(18:32):
we don't have to be tough on crime or weak
on crime. We just have to be smart on crime.
That was her campaign message, campaigning a little bit to
the right of Terrence Hollanan. And at the same time,
after she won the office, she immediately shifted a little
more towards the progressive model that Hollanan had already enacted

(18:53):
right away. She was really criticized by the police department
after she failed to pursue the death penalty for a
cop kill her, something that really angered even the more
basic law and order of people in San Francisco. Even
Dianne Feinstein publicly criticized her decision during the funeral for
the police officer where she spoke. And so Harris really

(19:14):
started out of the gate as a very progressive prosecutor,
just like the one she replaced.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
She does something else which is fascinating. She wants to
have a really high conviction rate, and she gets it
by simply not trying cases. So unless it's a slam dunk,
she's not going to take the risk. It seems to
me that the degree to what she was willing to
cut a deal with people who have were engaged in

(19:42):
homicide in order to minimize losing the cases, it's kind
of amazing, right.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
We're kind of familiar with this practice now in the
smartn era of the George Soros funded prosecutors that people
pay attention to so much, but Harris really at this
point is specifically and she was called out in the
newspapers for this very interesting trend of juicing her conviction
rates by prosecuting less. And it was certainly a practice

(20:11):
that was done in the previous administration, but it was
something that she really polished up and used it to
promote her record and run for her future office.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
So she's basically the pioneer of turning criminals back on
the street. While she's able to say, look at my
conviction record because she only tries people she can convict,
but she goes a step further. I was really surprised
by this. This is a tribute to your research that
as early as two thousand and eight she's promoting San

(20:43):
Francisco as a sanctuary city. Can you talk a little
bit about that.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, that's right. I think most California politicians, despite their
basic attempts to portray themselves as smart on crime, they
very much understand the importance of being a sanctuary city.
She and at the time Mayor Gavin Newsom were also
focused on preserving this idea that you know, a sanctuary

(21:08):
city was going to continue in San Francisco. Her record
on immigration is also very interesting because she famously had
this reform program allowing you know, some of these first
time offenders to get into a program that would help
them find a career and move on and reform their
lives instead of going to prison, and to move on

(21:29):
and try to find employment and education. This program famously
had issues because illegal immigrants were being put into this
program and some of these illegals were going on to
commit further crime, So it was also a politically thorny
issue for her program.

Speaker 1 (21:45):
So in a way, though, she's the forerunner of what
will happen under Biden, and she's already doing it.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Herself exactly the Biden policy of just allowing illegal immigrants
and migrants to freely flow the border, and that's already
completely baked in the California politics.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
You know something I don't understand here, Maybe you can
explain California to me. She's soft on murderers because she
wants to have a good cre miction rate, so she
cuts all sorts of deals. And in fact, I think
based on your research, she gets a backlog of seventy
three homicide cases, she cuts a deal for thirty two
of them, and she only convicts fifteen out of seventy three.

(22:28):
So in the one hand, she's being soft she's soft
on the legal immigrants and wants San Francisco to be
a sanctuary city. And then she talks about prosecuting parents
of truant children, threatening them with a twenty five hundred
dollars fine and up to a year in jail. How
do you balance out, I'm going to lock up your

(22:49):
parents if you don't come to school, and by the way,
I'm going to release the murderer down the street. And
I don't mind if there are legal immigrants here because
we're a sanctuary city. That's a pretty complicated message, right.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Harris started pursuing this idea as she's began eyeing statewide
office in California. You famously have to choose your political
alliances just right, so that you're a little to the
right of a radical leftist but a little to the
left of a potential Republican challenger. So this is right
before her decision to run for attorney General, and she

(23:24):
makes this decision, and she notes that it was very
controversial among her staff to make this decision to prosecute
parents for truant children. And the big thing was is
she was out there promoting this as part of her
smart on crime agenda. Using it to sort of appeal
to parents of different political stripes, even though she was

(23:45):
threatening them with the fine. It was all in favor
of this idea that social activism through government to get
more people into schools so that there was less crime.
Noting that true and children were more likely to commit crimes.
The solution, she says, was to sort of terrorized and
frightened parents with the threat of jail time with this

(24:06):
idea that they needed to send their truant children to school,
and there was some moderate decreases of true in children
after this, allowing her to promote this as a major
success for her smart on crime persona.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
In the middle of all this, there's a huge scandal
on her second term as DA which involves the crime lab.
Can you describe what happened and why it was a
big deal.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
During her second term, there was a crime worker who
was convicted and jailed for domestic violence and chronic absences,
and the prosecutors in her department knew her work was
unreliable and sort of flagged their office. And then there
were also reports of this employee skimming cocaine from the

(24:50):
drug lab for her personal use. And so this is
currently going on, and the District Attorney's office is aware
of it, and then suddenly only the city's head public
defender finds out about this and blast Harris's office for
failing to disclose this. Because if you have somebody like this,
then there are an unreliable person witness to participate into

(25:16):
a criminal trial. So when Harris was confronted with this,
she claimed that she had no idea what was going on,
even though her top staff had been emailed this information,
and Harris has thoroughly no record about doing this or
even knowing about it. She claims she knows nothing about it.
This leaves hundreds of cases on the book, these drug cases.

(25:38):
They are suddenly in jeopardy because the District Attorney's office
didn't reveal this unreliable crime lab worker. And as each
case gets resolved, it's over and over and over again
more of these cases are being challenged, and instead of
addressing it directly, Harris famously just dismissed all cases involving

(26:01):
this crime lab worker and just cutting it off quickly
so she could move past the scandal. But at the
same time, police officers who had delivered like these significant
cases against major drug crime criminals suddenly those cases were dismissed,
even some already in prison who had already been convicted.
She suddenly vacates them all and gets thrown out.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
So her in ability to manage leads to a huge
scandal that releases an amazing number of drug dealers. But
now in the middle of all this, while she has
some local problems, she also is being to have a
relationship that will ultimnly really matter, and that's with Barack Obama.

(26:44):
Can you describe how she and Obama related in the
early stages of his presidency.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
Kamala Harris was one of the few California politicians. She
was already seen as a rising star, but she was
already someone who had decided to endorse Barack Obama when
he was first running for office instead of Hillary Clinton,
which most of the California politicians sided with Clinton because

(27:11):
they had a very powerful operation in state, but Harris
famously endorsed Obama instead. She even went to Iowa and
spent time with Obama helping campaign for him. This is
the local district attorney. But Obama rewarded her quite well
because of her loyalty, and when he ended up winning,
Harris really saw this experience as a chance to further

(27:35):
bolster her political career going up in California.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
So in that process she ends up getting invited to
a White House state dinner for the Indian Prime Minister. Right.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
This was in two thousand and nine, so it was
just one more example of how Harris was very good
at networking and leveraging her political alliances to get top
billing as a potential future Democratic star.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
Now she takes a real gamble, it seems to me,
in deciding to run stay wide for Attorney General. I mean,
California is a huge state. To win stay wide is
not a small thing. What's your take on Kamala Harris
as the statewide candidate back.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Then, she substantially positioned herself just enough, not necessarily as
radical as she was when she first started her office,
but she really worked towards being a little more right
of left, I guess we could say as she decided
to challenge Steve Cooley for the position of Attorney General

(28:39):
of California. Steve Cooley is probably the last remaining Republican
in California that actually.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
Had a lot of political clout, So for her to
tackle Cooley was a real difficult race, and it was
a real good year for Democrats because it was a
year that Democrats outperformed for public Wilkins all across the
board in California.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
But her race with Kooley was significantly the margin was
very very slim. In fact, she believed that she lost
her first race for Attorney General when on election day
and even papers had already declared Koley the winner. It
wasn't until three weeks later, when all the votes were
counted and all the ballots were recounted, did they finally

(29:24):
declare Harris the winner, just winning by a very very
slim margin.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
So her gamble paid off. She must have been reasonably
competent just to survive stay wide, even if she survived
by a narrow margin, and it's a hugely complex state.
She then gets re elected, She gets elected to the
US Senate again. How did that work.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
Out at the time when she was looking for her
next political career. Obviously, after she was re elected as
Attorney General and she announced her plans for her political
future shortly after her inauguration, she didn't even spend much
time because there was a unique opportunity and her and
Gavin Newsom at the time were both sort of eyeing

(30:07):
this idea of running for California governor. Many California Democrats
were not happy with this idea because they were two
very popular rising Democrats and the last thing they wanted
was to see this ugly collision as they fought it
out in a potential primary for Democratic governor. At this time,
suddenly Senator Barbara Boxert announces her decision to resign from

(30:28):
her seat and step down. That sort of opens up
a release valve. In this sort of pressurized environment, Kamala
Harris makes it very clear that she wants to run
for the Senate office. She goes out right away and
issues a statement saying that she will run, much to
the relief of Gavin Newsom, who had his own political
ambitions at home. For Harris, it seemed like it was

(30:50):
a bit of a calculation, right, And if I can
run and win a race for Senate, maybe this would
be a better place to pursue my political career rather
than getting boughted down in the governatorial aspects of California
and trying to run for future office as a governor
of California. Maybe I can go the Obama route, right
and pursue higher office through the Senate. She Aarny had

(31:13):
all of the Democratic donors, the top Democratic strategists on
her side, so she was able to run pretty effectively
against another Democrat and easily beat her in the primary.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
And essentially San Francisco Mafiad divided up. One of them
get to be governor, the other one gets to be
the US Senator. And she had a lot of supportment
to her credit, she had a ton of people favoring her,
I mean Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Kirsten gillibrand or all
on her side. I think she clearly has support from

(31:44):
the Obama administration, which had one point asked her if
she wanted to be Attorney General of the United States.
So there's a certain affection there apparently, And in the
end she got to be the senator. But as you reported,
once she's in the Senate, she actually doesn't work as
a senator. She is sort of following the Obama model

(32:05):
of focusing on running for president. You don't need to
be a very good senator if you don't intend to be.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
There, right I think fellow senators saw right away that.
Certainly during her victory speech in California was a time
of great sorrow for the Democratic Party because in twenty sixteen,
Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency, and so
Harris quickly rewrote her victory speech to you know, not
only declare victory, but really position herself for future power.

(32:34):
She famously told Democrats not to lose, hope, to fight,
and that she was going to Washington to continue this
fight against the Trump administration and urged Democrats not to
be sad or fearful, and that she was going to
be the sort of the new superhero of this Democratic
fight to oppose Donald Trump and his agenda. And when
she first arrived in Washington, she was among the very

(32:58):
prominent group of senators, you know, as a newly elected senator.
She was there to participate in the Women's March, declaring
her intention to continue fighting for women and women's issues,
and again, you know, trying to rally the Democratic Party.
So early on, she had this sort of mantra that
she was going to be this sort of the fighting
future of the Democratic Party now that they had lost

(33:20):
Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
And in the same time, she's very close to Bernie Sanders.
She's sort of moving from the left to the further
left in this process.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Exactly at this point, I think Harris and her advisors
are purposely positioning herself to the left, thinking that if
I can just get as far left as Bernie Sanders
without actually being Bernie Sanders, Democrat primary voters will reward
me for this. And you know, it's not necessarily a
problem if you're the Senator of California, because if you

(33:50):
pursue all of these controversial issues, your voter you're back
at home, aren't going to punish you. They're going to
tend to agree with you. At least of a majority
of the voters there will agree with you. So Harris
spends a lot of time in her first years of
the Senate no leftist position is too radical for her
to pick up and run with, really doing everything she
can to sort of endear herself with a sort of

(34:13):
more radical Democratic primary voters.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
I mean, she's not there very long before she turns
right around and on January twenty first, twenty nineteen, she's
on Good Morning America announcing she's running for president. That
lasts not quite a year. What do you think happened?
I mean, she's been a decent candidate in California in boom.
Somehow she melts and she kicks off with like twenty

(34:37):
thousand people in Oakland. So you'd think she's reasonably popular,
she's reasonably good organizer, and then for eleven months she
just keeps decaying what do you think happened? Right?

Speaker 2 (34:48):
I think that Kamala Harris failed to properly lead her
presidential campaign. She didn't necessarily have a deep seated vision
for why she was running. She was just looking for
power for power's sake. She relied too much on her consultants,
who had helped her greatly in California. It properly coached
her up, got her ready for battle, spent significant funds

(35:09):
on TV advertising, which makes a great deal of difference
in California, which is a massive media market, and I
think she tried to use those same strength in a
presidential primary. Well, you know as well as I do.
You can't just go to Iowa and paper the local
television network with ads and talk about how great you
are unless you go to all of these events and

(35:33):
have a personal connection with the voters and speak to
them as if you care about their votes. I think
she ran into what so many senators ran into during
this cycle, and Harris was not the only sort of
senator who thought that they could be the next Obama.
There were a whole host of Democratic senators who went
to Iowa thinking that they could endear themselves to Iowa

(35:54):
voters to become the new figurehead of the Democratic Party.
But so many of them failed, not only because they
were splitting time between their job in the Senate and
their time in Iowa, but really had lost the ability.
I don't know if even Harris had the ability to
really speak to voters in a genuine, authentic way and
connect with them in a way that boosted her support.

(36:16):
She certainly had the support of all the Democratic elite
media people and the Democratic donors. People saw her as
a real threat to the Trump campaign and certainly to
her Democratic colleagues. She ultimately found herself struggling trying to
reboot her campaign on several different occasions, and one of
those attempts was when she famously clashed with Joe Biden

(36:37):
during the primary debate in the summer of twenty nineteen.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Given her role in the elites of San Francisco, I
would think that around the Cora, Iowa, or Sioux City
or whatever would be an interesting experience then probably not
be in her strength. Nonetheless, she doesn't seem to do
all that well in the debates, and money drives up

(37:17):
and she disappears. I'm not sure I thought that that very,
very weak performance in nineteen would lead to becoming the
vice presidential candidate in twenty.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Right, it was shocking that she was once considered among
the top candidates in the twenty nineteen primary and ended
up having to end her campaign before the Iowa caucuses
even began, and a lot of people speculated that she
didn't want to lose by an enormous margin in California,
her home state. There was also reports of infighting staff
furious with the direction of the campaign, different advisors pointing

(37:51):
fingers at other people to blame, and ultimately Harris sort
of ran out of money and just had to call
it quits. So she really finished off her presidential campaign
in a much weaker place. But at the same time,
there was also this simmering issue going forward with the
Black Lives Matter riots and the summer of twenty twenty
that sort of gave her a possible opening when it

(38:13):
came to Biden, the Democratic nominee to choose his running mate.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
It was a rumor that the deal that was offered
by the Democratic whip in South Carolina was it if
Biden would pick Harris, that he would make sure he
won South Carolina. If he won South Carolina, he would
go on to win the nomination.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
I don't think it was necessarily Kamala Harris per se,
but clyburn leaned very heavily on Biden that now was
the time to choose a woman of color to serve
as a running mate as a vice presidential candidate. He
saw that as a perfect opening for Biden. He certainly
got Biden exacted a promise by Biden to appoint a
woman of color to the Supreme Court, and then Biden

(38:55):
ultimately during the primary debates, promised that he would pick
a woman running mate before he was finally nominated in
the primary process.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
Do we have any notion of where Obama was in
this process.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
It's very interesting because when Biden's looking at different candidates,
he obviously vowed to pick a woman as a running mate,
but then there's a lot of pressure from Clyburne and
African American activists to pick a woman of color. Certainly,
the Biden family had long appreciated Harris, but until the
debate moment in the twenty nineteen summer when she famously saying,

(39:31):
I don't believe you're a racist, but you're kind of
a racist for working with segregationist senators and pursuing and
opposing ideas of public blessing, the Biden family was not
a Kammalin Harris fan, even though she was a significant
candidate on the stage as someone who had run for
president had been thoroughly examined. So Biden was considering other

(39:53):
African American candidates, and certainly Nancy Pelosi offered other choices
such as val Demings. Even the Biden family is willing
to consider former National Security advisor for President Obama Susan Rice,
actually on top of Biden's list as they continued on
their search. But certainly Obama had appreciated Kamala Harris from

(40:14):
the past, and he's reports note that he did a
good job advocating for her. For Biden to let go
of the past and select her despite everything between them.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
So when she ends up as a nominee and then
as they win the election, what kind of vice president
is she?

Speaker 2 (40:31):
Initially well, initially they sort of kicked off the idea
of COVID recovery and getting the vaccine distributed, and so
she's very much sort of thrust in this position where
the president wants her to focus on pushing the vaccine
to the black community. And so a big part of

(40:53):
her first few months are acting in this role where
she's a little bit thin skinned and upset that she's
sort of targeted with these issues, you know, the sort
of the women's issues and the issues in that matter
to people of color. But at the same time, she's
trying to work and be a good partner despite everything
that she's experienced. Ultimately, when the Biden administration really needed

(41:15):
her to take tough issues off of his plate, that's
when Harris sort of goes rogue.

Speaker 1 (41:19):
Do they get closer together or further apart in this process?

Speaker 2 (41:23):
Further apart? I think in the beginning, Joe Biden felt
like he wanted a body vice president, someone who could
really work hand in hand and work together on his issues,
But he soon discovered that Harris was not interested in
helping him or take the lead on his issues. She
had a very survival instinct, working to protect her political

(41:45):
brand from that of Biden's political brand so famously this
sort of took root, or first revealed itself during the
entire conversation over the migrant crisis, which you know, had
already reached its peak. Well maybe not its peak, but
it had already reached a significant problem in the first

(42:06):
few months of their administration.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Part of what seems to be going on is just
share chaos. I mean, she had something like a nine
turnover rated staff in her first three years. Isn't that
sort of extraordinary?

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Right in Washington, people are willing to put up with
a certain amount of abuse if your boss is rising
and actually doing well, and you can certainly make an
argument for why you should stick in the position if
you want to build up your political profile. But in
this case, Harris was so difficult to work for. You know,
there were reports of her being famously demanding. She would

(42:43):
ridicule and bully the staff. There were instances where she
failed to do the proper preparations for an event or
a speech, and then would rate her staff when she
made mistakes. So that prompted what we see now as
ninety two percent of staff to leave her office. And
even just in the first eighteen months, there was already

(43:05):
a significant staff turnover, and that really led a lot
of people in Washington to sort of write her off
as someone who is a political novice and wasn't ready
for the job.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
She also had this strange laugh, which I think became
a liability because it made her seem like she was
a lightweight.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
I talk to people about the laugh a lot because
it's defining part of Kamala Harris, and certainly her critics
sort of to ride her for her cackle. But it's
not unusual for a politician to have an annoying laugh
or a laugh that isn't appreciated by the wide spectrum
of the American people. But it's how you use that laugh,
and in Harris's situation, she frequently used her laugh to

(43:46):
sort of laugh off tough questions. And there are multiple
incidentss of her in her vice president and she's approached
by reporters or when she was doing a real interview
with television anchors, when they would ask her some of
these tough questions, she would usually laugh and shrug her
shoulders in a way to try to disarm these questions.
But it really came off as kind of as if

(44:08):
she wasn't taking the issue seriously. So it's a very
bad look for a politician who's trying to make a
name for themselves.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
It made her look like a lightweight. And then you
get into this strange question of was she the borders are?
Not the borders are? What did it mean to take
the lead on diplomatic work with Mexico, out Salvador, watermelon hunters,
and now of Quesse. You have the news media desperately

(44:37):
trying to backtrack and literally in some cases eliminating their archives.
I've never seen anything quite like it to go back
and take out the article use the term borders are
because they were trying to prove she wasn't the borders are.
As you looked at all that material during the period
it was happening, what did you think.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
Yeah, it was during the first few months of the
Biden presidency. There was this issue of the unaccompanied migrants
and the migrants flooding across the border, and it was
a major issue, and the Biden administration initially tried to
say it wasn't a crisis, it wasn't a problem until
it got so bad that was very clearly a crisis
and that they needed to sort of appoint point person

(45:20):
on this, and you know, being in Washington, you can
at some point an administration has to take action and
pretend like they have heard the complaints and have seen
the leadership void and are now prepared to act to
fix a problem. And in this case, Team Biden immediately
thinks of Kamala Harris as the solution and look, she's

(45:42):
had time living in a border state. Maybe she can
go and take the lead on this, just like Vice
President Joe Biden did for Barack Obama. Famously, Obama appointed
him to also take the lead on immigration to work
on solving some of these root causes. And the term
borders are is not an official position, and usually when

(46:02):
you're seen as a czar right, this is sort of
a media title given to the point person of an
administration who's going to take the issue seriously. And it's
happened throughout our history where you know this person is
there to take the issue off the president's plate so
he can continue without the political difficulties.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
Just based on what you saw in the period that
this was going on, is it fair to say that
she had been appointed borders are right?

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Because the Biden administration pushed her forward to take the
lead on the issue, primarily by sending her to Guatemala,
where she delivered the Biden administration's message to the migrants there,
do not come. Do not come. I believe that if
you will become, you will be turned away. That's what
she said during the press conference. Well, the migrants obviously
didn't see that as an authentic message, coming over even quicker,

(46:51):
and so the Biden administration put her in these positions,
certainly to do an interview with Lester Holt of NBC
to make the case that the Biden mission was taking
the issues seriously. She famously said, yes, I haven't been
to the border, but I haven't been to Europe either,
and sort of laughed off that question.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
Did that strike you as weird?

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yes? Democrats also found this unbelievable because Republicans have been
asking this question for months and she wasn't even prepared
to answer the simplest stuff questions during the interview.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
I didn't mind the first half of the answer. No,
I'm not done. But to have this pivot and I
haven't been to Europe, you have to wonder what was
the synaptic process in her brain.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
Staffers had prepared her for a completely different answer, but
this was one she came off on the fly. Experienced
politicians in Washington were not impressed by that performance.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
We're trying to figure out a language to describe one
aspect of her that's really, I think, different than any
vice president I can remember, and that is the degree
to which at times she's just unpresidential. I mean, you
can't quite imagine a serious person doing this. The first
thing I want to race. I think this is all weird. Charlie.

(48:04):
She gets off on ven diagrams, and listen to her
describe the depth of her love of Venn diagrams.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
I love ven diagrams.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
I really do.

Speaker 4 (48:16):
I love ven diagrams. It's just something about those three
circles and the analysis about where there is the intersection. Right.
Remember Van diagrams, those three circles, right, and then let's
just see where they overlap. You will not be surprised
because I have constructed a Venn diagram on this. Remember
those three circles, how they overlap. I love ven diagrams,

(48:36):
So I just do whenever you're dealing with conflict, pull
out a Van diagram, right, and so you know the
three circles and so I so I asked my jam right,
the fifty cans. Right, he sees the Venn diagram of
it all. He sees that there are those circles, and
maybe people seem that they're a little different. They live
in different parts of the country. They may be different

(48:57):
age or different race, but that area in the overlap.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
No, I ask you what did that mean? What is
going on in her brain at that point?

Speaker 2 (49:06):
She has sort of these crutches that she will lean on,
and she often refers to these things during a panel
discussion or when there isn't a scripted teleprompter speech, but
she's having a discussion panel and one of her crutches
was talking about ven diagrams, because if you can visualize
a ven diagram, then she could put three different issues

(49:28):
and try to combine them in a way that would
make sense to her audience. But it became such a
big crutch people started noticing and started pulling out the
different times she kept leaning on this idea of trying
to publicly draw a Venn diagram in front of an audience.
That's a very monumental rhetorical task. Certainly, Harris started to

(49:50):
do it a little more less as it became more
and more laughable.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
During a White House reception for Women's History Month in
March or twenty twenty three, she goes on over the place.
Listen to her for a second.

Speaker 4 (50:02):
So during Women's History Month, we celebrate and we honor
the women who made history throughout history, who saw what
could be, unburdened by what had been. We see the suffragists,
the riveters, the marchers, the mothers and sisters and aunts

(50:24):
and grandmothers and daughters, all the giants upon whose broad
shoulders we stand. For generations, women have continued to make
incredible progress in the classroom and the workplace, in the
halls of government, and we are all here evidence of

(50:45):
that progress.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
I mean. She has this tendency to use words repetitively,
as if repeating them somehow gives them meaning.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Right, that's exactly right. How she gets caught up in
these kinds of what's described as word salads by people
who sort of monitor her public speeches. And in this
she continues to offer more and more independent clauses on
her sentences to try to emphasize her point. But the
more she drops more and more dependent clauses, then her

(51:17):
sentence becomes very burdened down with all of her different
words in spite of her constantly repeating herself. This is
what ends her up with this reputation of if she's
speaking off the cough, it tends to spiral into word
silence and it's not a good look.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
Well, my favorite, I think, just because it could almost
be a scene from a comedy, is Harris trying to
explain artificial intelligence. This is this for a second to
the Vice President's explanation of artificial intelligence.

Speaker 4 (51:48):
And I think the first part of this issue that
should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing.
It's for Swell's two letters. It means artificial intelligence.

Speaker 5 (51:58):
But ultimately what it is is it's about machine learning, and.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
So the machine is taught.

Speaker 5 (52:07):
And part of the issue here is what information is
going into the machine that will then determine and we
can predict then if we think about what information is.

Speaker 4 (52:20):
Going in, what then will be produced in terms of
decisions and opinions that may be made through that process.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
How do you explain this?

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Yeah, it's really hard. It's a scene where she's speaking
to experts in the AI scene, but somehow feels like
it's necessary for her to define each word as if
these industry leaders in AI don't necessarily understand what they're
there for. So it's one case of not understanding your audience.
In public speaking, right, there's always this option like how

(52:54):
do I make an impact on my public speech by
defining each term individually? And this is kind of what
happens to lawyers and prosecutors who moved into politics. They
tend to focus too much time trying to define the
words that they're using, rather than using the words in
a very passionate and approachable way.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Let me ask you, in terms of the current events,
were you surprised when Biden stepped down and endorsed Tyris
to take on the nomination.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Yes. We published this book in January, and so we
had the idea that this was a possibility, and even
in our introduction we wrote sort of what it would
look like when Biden and his advisers realized it was
time to go, and the fears that would be in
their minds as they were realizing that Kala Harris was
going to take his place. We successfully predicted that. I

(53:44):
don't think I was ever prepared for it to happen
so quickly before the election, and so rapidly to have
Biden endorse her in the same breath, And.

Speaker 1 (53:54):
Were you surprised at how rapidly the left hand the
Democratic Party closed ranks.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
I was, which suggests that there was a little bit
of work behind the scenes, certainly not by Harris herself,
but by the party apparatus at large. I believe that
they were sort of encouraged to get behind Harris, and
that there was definitely a right of succession that they
preferred rather than a messy nomination process. I think Democrats
are known for wanting to keep things neat and tidy

(54:22):
without it devolving into a populist mess.

Speaker 1 (54:25):
You've studied Kamala Harris as Canaida for the district Attorney Canada,
for Attorney General Canada, for the Senate candidate for president.
Do you think that we are likely to see the
Kamala Harris who couldn't survive the first year of being
a candidate for president? Or do you think she has
between what she's learned over the last four years plus

(54:46):
the sheer quality of the Obama team which is now
going to come in and help her, do you think
she becomes dramatically more formidable than her past record would imply.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
It's difficult because in this modern era, one of the
most powerful aspects of your candidacy is the ability to
be authentic, and Kamala Harris doesn't have that ability to
be authentic. She's very risk averse, and she's been very
focused on staying on script. Just in the past couple
of years, gone are the word salad's gone to these
moments of approachability or her attempt to reach out and

(55:21):
connect with voters. It's completely gone. So effectively, you have
the Biden campaign running their basement strategy, right keep him
in the basement, get him on camera as infrequently as possible,
keep him from making mistakes. She's effectively running that same
basement campaign when she has no reason to do so.
So I really think that she's going to struggle with authenticity,

(55:42):
even though she will become more risk averse, more scripted
as she moves forward into the presidential campaign.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
Let me risk showing my partisan bias. I have a
hunch that she's very authentic. She is authentically what we
see Ben that that will be unavoidable. You can't run
ninety four days in the age of television and the
level of scrutiny at the presidential level. In the end,

(56:10):
you are who you are.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
That's correct. And she is a long time establishment politician
who has successfully been the puppet of business interests and
politicians and donors on her behalf. And she has successfully
leveraged her entire career onto the Democratic stage demanding these
positions of power and receiving them. And that ultimately, now

(56:33):
that she's positioned for the top job without ever winning
a vote from Democratic voters for her to be the nominee,
she will be revealed as the person she is. I
think you're absolutely right.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Well, listen, I want to thank you for joining me.
I think given her role now in American politics and history,
your book Amateur Hour, Kamala Harris and the White House.
It's available now on Amazon in bookstores everywhere. I think
anyone who wants to get an in depth look at
who Kamala Harris really is is going to find this

(57:05):
as a must read. You've done a great job. Your
timing is as good as any author I've ever seen,
and I wish you really well for having written this.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
Thank you to my guest Charlie Spearing. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Amateur hour Kamala
Harris in the White House on our show page at
neutsworld dot com. News World is produced by Gangwish three
sixty in iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was

(57:39):
created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at
Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying newts World, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
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can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
neut World consigner for my three free weekly columns at
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(58:03):
is neut World Man