Vice President Kamala Harris’s ex-lover has a bright idea.
Why wait for 2024? Kamala should be president – right now!
Former San Francisco mayor and notorious playboy, Willie Brown, 90, who is 31 years Harris’s senior and dated her in the 1990s, summoned local reporters for an impromptu news conference on Sunday.
Speaking outside John’s Grill, where he holds court with the city’s political elite, just moments after President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement that he’d suspended his campaign, Brown told journalists that the president shouldn’t just cede the Democratic nomination to Kamala, but he should make her commander-in-chief immediately.
Kamala Harris’ career has been dogged by controversies with critics claiming she was given a boost by her relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s
‘[Harris’s] chances go up if [Biden] would at this moment say not only am I no longer the candidate, I’m no longer the president — she is,’ Brown said.
Sounding more like a doting teacher than a past lover, he heaped praise on Harris, telling The San Francisco Chronicle: ‘In all the jobs she’s had… she’s always been outstanding.’
It’s a sharp change of tune from Brown, who advised Harris in 2020 to turn down Biden’s invitation to be his running mate, telling her the second seat was a ‘dead end’.
But his about-face is in line with a general shift that’s now underway in the Democratic party – as left-wing political operators and a sympathetic media desperately rush to rehabilitate Harris’s image in the hope that she can take on and beat former President Donald Trump.
In April, talk-show host Drew Barrymore heaped praise on our Vice President, cringingly christening her ‘Momala’ and saying, ‘I’ve been thinking that we all need a tremendous hug in the world now, but in our country, we need you to be Momala of the country.’
The big question now is if Democrats can paint Harris, who has a dismal favorability rating to match Biden’s (39 percent), as a competent, inspiring and principled leader.
A closer look behind Harris’s career – dogged by allegations of hypocrisy and dishonesty – suggests that such a rebrand may be an insurmountable task.
Even her earliest days in politics were tarnished by scandal.
In 1994, Harris was a 29-year-old rising star in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office when she struck up a relationship with Brown – the then 60-year-old speaker of the state Assembly and one of the most powerful men in California.
Harris has long been accused of hypocrisy and dishonesty, which has turned many, even in her own party, against her
But in recent months public opinion has been shifting as the Vice President morphs into a safe, friendly persona dubbed ‘Momala’ by Drew Barrymore in April
Brown – who was once dubbed the ‘Real Slick Willy’ by former president and serial-philander Bill Clinton – was still legally married to his wife Blanche Vitero at the time, but they had separated years prior.
He was notorious for his love of sports cars, flashy designer suits and for being named one of the world’s ten sexiest men by Playgirl magazine.
‘The measure of his flamboyance is he’ll go to a party with his wife on one arm and his girlfriend on the other,’ James Richardson, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, told People Magazine in 1996.
The vice president has repeatedly denied that her relationship with Brown – which ended in 1995 before he was elected mayor of San Francisco – was a defining step in her political career.
In 2003, Harris described her relationship with Brown as ‘an albatross hanging around my neck.’ And Brown hasn’t been much help to Harris in dispelling the dirty rumors.
In an embarassing 2019 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle, he wrote: ‘Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?’
In it, he conceded that he ‘certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco,’ but claimed he also assisted other prominent California Democrats.
After winning that 2003 DA campaign, Harris’s political star began to rise in earnest, as she asserted herself as the stony face of ‘law and order’ – a far cry from her latest, softer ‘Momala’ iteration.
As San Fran’s district attorney, her office introduced a controversial anti-truancy program that targeted parents of children who skipped school, threatening them with prosecution and fines.
Under the program, in 2013, local mom Cheree Peoples was arrested and handcuffed over her daughter’s school attendance record. It later emerged that her child had been missing school because she had a serious genetic condition that required frequent hospitalization.
Harris’s office also fought to keep inmates in jail even after the US Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons had become so serious it amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
Many of her views have now shifted dramatically over the years from hardliner to socially liberal and reform-focused.
The best example is her ‘evolving’ stance on marijuana.
As San Francisco’s district attorney, her prosecutors convicted more than 1,900 people for weed violations, but snap forward to this March and Harris couldn’t go further in the other direction, repeatedly stating: ‘Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.’
Perhaps, the most striking example of Harris’ political opportunism came when she attacked Biden on the Democratic primary debate in 2019.
Harris reportedly blindsided Biden over his work with former segregationist Senators and for his one-time opposition to a federal busing program that aimed to integrate minority school children into high-performing majority-white schools.
‘There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,’ Harris told Biden, ‘That little girl was me.’
Insiders told DailyMail.com earlier this year, that Jill Biden held a grudge against Harris since the 2019 debate debacle, after which she privately fumed that Harris should ‘Go f— yourself.’
‘[Jill] doesn’t let things go and she has never forgiven Kamala for comments that some took to be allegations of racism,’ the source said, ‘Jill was trying to stop Kamala joining the Biden ticket in 2020.’
Harris’s competence has also become a target for critics.
Once in the White House, in March 2021, Biden placed Harris in charge of addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration into the US, with the aim of ‘stemming the migration to our southern border.’
Her role led to one of the most widely derided moments of Harris’ career, an NBC interview where she admitted, despite her role, she had never actually visited the border.
When asked why she hadn’t been, she appeared to discount the question, saying, ‘I haven’t been to Europe. I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making.’
Insiders told DailyMail.com earlier this year, that Jill Biden had hated Harris and held a grudge against her since the 2019 debate debacle, where Harris slammed Biden over his track record on race issues
Jill reportedly privately fumed that Harris should ‘Go f— yourself’ after the debate and the feud was reportedly part of the reason Jill didn’t want her husband to step aside as candidate, because she couldn’t bear the thought of Harris taking his place
The illegal immigration issue subsequently exploded into an abject crisis – with Democrats now rowing back their border plans and even reinstituting policies enacted by the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, White House staff have left Harris’ office in droves with 13 staffers quitting in just a few months between 2021 and 2022.
The mass departures fueled claims that Harris is an office ‘bully’ with a ‘soul-destroying’ management style.
More than anything else, Harris’ communication style has attracted the most negative attention.
She has become known for her sputtering ‘word salad’ public appearance during which she deploys jumbled and repetitive phrases to convey seemingly simple ideas.
In August last year, she emphasized to reporters that ‘community banks are in the community’ and that investing in them is therefore good for ‘the community.’
Her career since – first as San Francisco district attorney, then from 2011 as California’s attorney general, and from 2017 as a US senator for California – has been filled with contradictions and controversies that have turned many on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party against her
During a visit to a children’s hospital in May, Harris said: ‘We all believe that when we talk about the children of the community, they are children of the community.’
Then there was her most well-known soundbite, which she may never live down, made during a White House event last year.
Quoting her mother, Harris said: ‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’
Fans and critics alike shared the clip, poking fun at the seemingly nonsensical turn of phrase.
Whatever the intended meaning of her coconut quote was, one part of it is true: Harris does exist in the context of what came before her, and while she and her allies may attempt a rebrand now, she may find her past is not so easily left behind.
