Good Republicans may see a day like this coming — and tried mightily to forestall it — again in 2010.
That was the yr Kamala Harris, a shiny, younger, charismatic prosecutor from San Francisco, ran her first statewide marketing campaign, for California lawyer common, and in the end received. The race presaged the politics of 2020 and presumably 2024.
Republicans couldn’t have predicted 14 years in the past that Harris would turn out to be the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in 2024. However they might be sure that if she prevailed then, the state’s prime regulation enforcement job wouldn’t be her final cease.
In California and different states, in spite of everything, the workplace is a stepping stone: AG stands not just for lawyer common but additionally for aspiring governor. So many Republicans figured it might be simpler to cease Harris’ rise earlier than it started.
As Harris opens her presidential marketing campaign, most polls present her trailing Republican nominee Donald Trump. It’s a well-recognized place for her.
Harris was the underdog when she ran for San Francisco district lawyer in opposition to a widely known incumbent, Terrance Hallinan, in 2003. She received that race partly by working to Hallinan’s proper. The San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her below the headline: “Harris, for Legislation and Order.”
However she couldn’t diverge too removed from San Francisco’s liberal orthodoxy, and he or she additionally made a pricey promise to not search the demise penalty if elected.
Three months after she took workplace, a person shot and killed a younger San Francisco police officer, husband and father, Isaac Espinoza. True to her phrase, the brand new district lawyer introduced that she wouldn’t search the final word punishment. The response was swift and brutal.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein spoke on the officer’s funeral and, with Harris seated in a pew on the entrance of the cathedral, mentioned the cop killer ought to have been charged with a capital crime. The officers who stuffed the cavernous cathedral stood and applauded. Harris didn’t.
Prosecutors received a second-degree homicide conviction and a life sentence. However Harris’ resolution to not search a demise sentence reemerged within the 2010 marketing campaign, and it most likely will in 2024.
Harris was the underdog once more in 2010, when she ran in opposition to Republican Steve Cooley, a three-term Los Angeles County district lawyer who had spent most of 4 a long time as a prosecutor. Some Democratic Occasion elders publicly predicted Harris would lose to Cooley — not not like the Democratic pundits who’ve extra lately questioned Harris’ potential to wage a nationwide marketing campaign.
Cooley was a prosecutor straight out of central casting, as Trump would possibly put it, gray-haired and a bit rumpled, who seemed like having witnessed greater than his share of crime victims’ ache. He was recognized for bringing profitable circumstances in opposition to corrupt politicians and convicted killers alike.
The tea celebration motion helped Republicans seize management of the U.S. Home and state legislatures throughout the nation in 2010. They’d reputable hopes of constructing good points in California too, and the lawyer common’s workplace was a major goal. A nationwide political motion committee spent greater than $1 million attacking Harris’ dealing with of Officer Espinoza’s killing — hoping to cease her ascent earlier than it began.
“If that could be a byproduct of defeating her, we’re completely pleased with that,” a spokesman for the PAC advised me a couple of weeks earlier than the election, which I used to be overlaying for the Sacramento Bee.
The Republican major had additionally foreshadowed what was to come back. Cooley confronted a problem from the proper within the individual of John Eastman, the previous Chapman College regulation college dean who went on to play a key function in Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Eastman’s donors included Federalist Society chief Leonard Leo, who could be instrumental in Trump’s nomination of the Supreme Court docket justices who helped finish federal abortion rights. That call is central to the 2024 election, maybe much more so given Harris’ seemingly nomination.
Though Eastman’s major marketing campaign failed, it didn’t go away the eventual nominee unscathed. Eastman had raised the prospect that if elected, Cooley would take his pension from Los Angeles County on prime of his wage as lawyer common, for a mixed annual pay of roughly $425,000. Throughout Cooley’s solely debate with Harris, which I moderated, the Los Angeles Instances’ Jack Leonard requested the Republican whether or not he would certainly take his pension alongside along with his wage. Cooley answered that he had earned the pension and would take it “to complement the very low — extremely low — wage that’s paid to the state lawyer common.”
Harris noticed the reply for what it was — a little bit too sincere — and let it stand. “Go for it, Steve,” she mentioned. “You’ve earned it; there’s no query.” The trade turned fodder for a pointed Harris marketing campaign advert.
In the long run, the Republican wave of 2010 stopped on the japanese slope of the Sierra. Harris received by about 74,000 votes out of 9.6 million solid, the narrowest statewide margin that yr.
A decade later, Eastman wrote a column questioning Harris’ {qualifications} for the vice presidency on the grounds that her mother and father weren’t naturalized residents when she was born. A fringe concept, sure, however it caught Trump’s eye and is already being raised anew.
Within the coming weeks, Harris will face every kind of assaults. Just a few is perhaps substantial, however my guess is that almost all will border on ridiculous. Are you able to think about? The candidate laughs. And he or she dances!
Throughout Harris’ runs for California lawyer common and U.S. Senate, I noticed firsthand what sort of candidate she will be: powerful, formidable, disciplined. Certainly, Republicans ought to want that they had stopped her after they had their finest probability.
Dan Morain is a former reporter for The Instances and the creator of “Kamala’s Method: An American Life.”
