The Things We Haven't Been Told About Kamala Harris
If there is one thing that Democrats are fairly consistent on, it’s failing up. Bill Clinton had a reputation with women for years but managed to bypass it all to become President. Ask anyone who has been in Washington, D.C., almost as long as Joe Biden, and they will tell you that he was long considered the dumbest member of the Senate. Again, he managed to ascend to the highest office in the land. If you are a Democrat, the worse your actual resume, the closer to the head of the line you go for a promotion. The latest Democrat candidate for the Failing Up Award is Vice President Kamala Harris. When it comes right down to it, other than her relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and her stepkids allegedly calling her “Momala,” we don’t know a lot about her rise through the political ranks.
We know that she is the daughter of two university professors. When her parents divorced, her mother, born in India, took Harris and her sister to Montreal. While there, she traveled the world with her family, and when, still a child, a teacher was surprised that she did not come from the wrong side of the tracks in Oakland, California, she told the teacher that Kamala was a child of privilege. During her formative years in Montreal, Harris was absorbed in her Indian heritage. However, after graduating high school, Harris enrolled at Howard University, a historically black university. She graduated from Howard without honors and applied to and was admitted to the Hastings School of Law at the University of California. Hastings isn’t Harvard or Yale, but if you are someone who is an honors student with a decent LSAT score, you are usually a shoo-in at Hastings. So how did Harris manage to get admitted at Hastings? Well, she apparently learned that it was much more beneficial to be black than Indian.
She applied to Hastings under a program called the Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP). The program was for students from disadvantaged economic and educational backgrounds. Students who applied to the program were encouraged to submit a separate LEOP statement outlining the adversity they had encountered and how it had impacted their academic preparedness for law school. Once Harris was admitted to Hastings under the program, she joined the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), where she was neither economically nor educationally disadvantaged. She did not pass the Bar Exam the first time, despite 80 percent of her classmates passing.
Kamala Harris’s first job out of law school was as a prosecutor in Alameda County, where she specialized in child sex crimes. She was there for approximately eight years, where she tried roughly eight cases that anyone can find a record of. In the two years she worked in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, records indicate that she tried two cases there before quitting to run for Alameda County District Attorney. It was progressive San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan who hired Kamala Harris in 2003, reportedly as a favor to Willie Brown. Once in San Francisco, she became head of the criminal organizations unit.
It was about this time that Harris began dating Mayor Willie Brown, who was married. Brown was one of the heads of the Democrat political machine in San Francisco. If you wanted to win an election, you had to play ball with Willie Brown. Harris and Brown dated for about two years. The relationship was no secret. She began to plot out her political career and made connections with many leaders in San Francisco’s black community. But after being passed over twice for the second heist position in the San Francisco County District Attorney’s office, she quit and headed for the City District Attorney’s office. Being in good with Brown (one way to put it) got her appointed to several commission seats, cushy posts that paid well. Long story short, Kamala Harris has never held a job in the private sector. But even after Kamala and Willie were no longer an item, it benefited him to get Harris elected District Attorney, and that is what he did. Brown got her the financing and the endorsements needed.
Another story that is not getting a lot of traffic is accusations of plagiarism by Kamala Harris that also go back to her days as San Francisco District Attorney. Harris testified in 2007 on Capitol Hill in 2007, a student loan repayment program for state and local prosecutors. Harris gave informed and eloquent testimony about how passage of the bill would draw more top legal talent to her office and others across the nation. The problem was that her informed and eloquent testimony was not exactly her own. It came from testimony given by Winnebago County, Illinois District Attorney Paul Logli, who also supported the bill and testified two months earlier. Harris’s testimony reads exactly like Logli’s, right down to the typos. So far, the Harris campaign has not commented on the accusations. But one thing seems to be clear: when you are associated with Joe Biden, the plagiarism apple does not fall from the tree.
We all know that politics is a dirty business. The horse-trading goes on with both Republicans and Democrats. But it seems that when Democrats do it, they get a wink and a nod from whoever is on the rung of the ladder above them and welcomes them up to that next rung. Now, Kamala Harris is gunning for the ultimate fail-up.