The Kamala Harris Advantage

How and why can Kamala Harris win when Hillary Clinton did not? I’ve been thinking a lot about that question since Harris became VP. The answer depends a lot on her experience. She was San Francisco’s District Attorney for six years, from 2011 to 2017. Then she was California’s Attorney General for four years, from 2017 to 2021.

That’s a total of eleven years of leadership in law enforcement, including lots of criminal trial work. In short, as Harris has already noted to put the fear of God into our criminal Demagogue, she spent a large part of her career putting criminals like him away.

That work is not just a throw-away campaign line. It reflects a deeply engrained set of experience, skills, and values.

Successful prosecutors acquire an essential skill for politics: speaking to ordinary people. In a criminal court, they’re called “juries.” If you speak down to juries, if you make arguments too complex for their full comprehension, or if you fail to address basic human values, you will lose more cases than you win. Harris’ career speaks for itself: she rose rapidly and stayed in place for eleven years, becoming a master of these basic political skills.

There’s also something about prosecutors that many non-lawyers don’t know. Because they wield the State’s awesome power against individuals—the power to punish—they are subject to a host of strong ethical rules that apply especially to them.

The most important is the “Brady rule,” named for the Brady v. Maryland case in which the Supreme Court established it. It requires prosecutors to disclose to criminal defendants and their attorneys any material exculpatory evidence that they come across. If they don’t, a conviction can be dismissed, for that reason alone, on the defendant’s motion.

Under these and other rules and customs, prosecutors learn to deal with ordinary people straightforwardly, truthfully, fairly and without condescension. In my view, Hillary Clinton failed to do that in her presidential campaign, and that’s why she lost.

I don’t want to re-open old wounds, and of course I did vote for Hillary Clinton myself. But it’s important to understand why she lost, and why Harris has a big, innate advantage, in part by virtue of her career experience.

The biggest error that, in my view, led to Clinton’s defeat (with the help of the outrageous Comey disclosure), was “E-mail Gate.” I don’t believe for a moment that her using her personal e-mail account for official business as Secretary of State created a serious security risk. But it represented a grievous political “tin ear.”

Everyone who works for someone else had and has two e-mail accounts: one for personal messages, and the other for work. In mixing up the two, primarily if not solely for her own personal convenience, Hillary implied that she was better than everyone else and didn’t have to work by the same rules. Then she compounded the error by insisting she had a right to use her personal e-mail account for official business. A seasoned prosecutor like Harris would never have made those mistakes.

Add to that Clinton’s refusal to divulge the contents of her closed-door speeches to Wall Street—in the aftermath of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression—and you have clear evidence of an aristocratic attitude that has no place in American democracy. Many ordinary voters simply didn’t trust Hillary Clinton, and that’s why she lost. A seasoned prosecutor like Harris had to earn ordinary people’s trust every time she stepped before a jury.

In the old days, serving as a prosecutor was a tried and true staircase to political office, especially in times of corruption and scandal like the present. It’s a shame that so few candidates for public office take that path today.

But Harris represents the best of that tried-and-true tradition. We all yearn for a return to the plain-speaking, honest and fair traditions of our past. We yearn for it especially now, when corruption, profit seeking and self-seeking seem to be eroding the foundations of our Republic, especially among Republicans.

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