![]() ![]() You’re seeing it now in the presidential race. During that same campaign, she described her past relationship with the former Speaker and Mayor as “an albatross hanging around my neck.” 3. In the first run for office to become San Francisco’s District Attorney, Harris deliberately hired a campaign consultant known for working with clients outside the Brown political machine. More-much more-poured in from donors with last names like Fisher, Getty, Buell, Haas, and other noble houses of the Bay Area.īut from the beginning of her political career, Harris has seen her connection with Brown as a liability-a cudgel that opponents can use against her and, at worst, a tired, sexist trope used to question the legitimacy of her ascendant career. When Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney nearly a decade later, her first contribution came from Elaine McKeon, chair of the museum’s board. (Fun fact: a few years later, she dated the talk show host Montel Williams.) ![]() In 1996, a year after Brown became mayor and Harris broke off the relationship, she joined the board of trustees at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Harris’ connection to Brown also helped her make connections across San Francisco high-society and California political elite. “If you were asked to be on a board that regulated medical care, would you say no?” Harris told SFWeekly a few years later. The Speaker gave Harris a couple plum positions on two state regulatory boards-the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. “I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” John Burton, who used to be president pro tem of the state Senate, former chair of the California Democratic Party and a San Francisco political powerhouse in his own right, told Politico recently. The relationship ended after two years, but her connection to Brown, three decades her senior, did have an outsized effect on her career. Clint Eastwood was there, wrote Caen, and he “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” In his column, Caen described Harris, then a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, as “something new in Willie’s love life. In March 1994, San Francisco Chronicle’s legendary columnist Herb Caen described the scene at Brown’s surprise 60th birthday party. The Influence of San Francisco King (and Queen) Maker Willie Brownįormer state Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown has helped accelerate many a successful political career in California (including that of current Gov. In 2003, she unexpectedly won election as San Francisco District Attorney, where she served two terms before her narrow election as state Attorney General in 2010. She earned a political science and economics degree at Howard University in Washington, DC, but returned to California to get her law degree in 1989 at the University of California, Hastings in San Francisco.įresh out of law school, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990, serving there eight years before crossing the bay to San Francisco. Harris spent her teenage years in Montreal, moving there with her sister and mother when Gopalan accepted a university research position there. “She’s a very resourceful person in that she can move in between these worlds.” “It wasn’t a homogenous life,” said Debbie Mesloh, a friend who has also worked for Harris as a communication director and a consultant. Traversing back and forth between different strata of society-black, white and Asian well-off and working-class-is a familiar trope in Harris’ biography. Berkeley being Berkeley, unlike local integration plans across the country, the city had undertaken this one on its own accord. This was 1969, just one year after Berkeley Unified introduced its “two-way” busing program across its elementary schools. Specifically, Harris rode the “red rooster” from Berkeley’s working-class flatlands to Thousand Oaks Elementary School at the base of the affluent north Berkeley hills. For Harris, she said, the issue was “personal.” In the first Democratic presidential debate this year, Harris famously skewered former Vice President Joe Biden for his past opposition to federally-mandated busing to desegregate public schools. The couple split when Harris was seven and Harris and her sister Maya were raised mostly by her mother. Harris’ father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was from India. Both of her parents were immigrants who met while getting their PhDs and protesting for civil rights at UC Berkeley. She spent her childhood in Berkeley during the city’s Free Speech Movement. Harris was born in 1964 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland-a little over a mile from city hall where, more than half a century later, she would announce her bid for the presidency. ![]()
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