OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
While some surrogates for Vice President Kamala Harris blame her historic loss to now-President-elect Donald Trump on President Joe Biden’s late exit from the race, a bevy of former campaign staffers say that thinking is “detached from reality.”
Former San Francisco Democrat Mayor Willie Brown, who dated Harris in the 1990s, says her campaign lost the election because they “read the tea leaves wrong.”
“Not one of them got it right, not one. They did not go back and say, how is it we did not succeed with Hillary is it possible to elect a woman to the presidency in the United States if that answer from all of the processes
say questionable, then you know what you need to do,” Brown whined.
Brown went on to note that Hillary Clinton was “traumatized by her defeat for years,” but thinks Harris will be able to “overcome” this loss and continue in politics.
WATCH:
When Kamala Harris was a young prosecutor, a much older boyfriend treated her to trips to Paris and the Oscars as well as a BMW, which is believed to have been the catalyst for her meteoric rise in California politics.
The current vice president is well-known for having dated Democratic Party powerbroker Willie Brown in 1994 when he was the speaker of the California Assembly and she was 29, the New York Post reported.
“Over the course of the relationship, Brown gave Harris a BMW, she traveled with him to Paris, attended the Academy Awards,” and he even took her on a business trip to Boston, where he was meeting Donald Trump, according to the 2021 book “Kamala’s Way: An American Life” by journalist Dean Morain.
The Los Angeles Times referred to Harris Brown as Brown’s “frequent companion,” while the Chronicle referred to Harris as “the speaker’s new steady.” Their relationship was well-known in San Francisco.
As his term as speaker was coming to an end, Brown appointed Harris, who was then working for the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, to the California Medical Assistance Commission.
The position paid $72,000 annually and required Harris to attend monthly meetings.
“Brown, 90, has also taken credit for helping in Harris’ meteoric political rise. Last week, he joined the chorus of prominent Democratic Party members who have already endorsed her for president before next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” the NY Post reported.
“Yes, we dated,” said Brown, who was also a two-term mayor of San Francisco, in a 2019 opinion piece. “Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco.”
How 29-year-old Kamala Harris began an affair with powerful San Francisco politician Willie Brown, then 60 and married, who appointed her to two lucrative positions only to dump her after he was voted first black mayor of the cityhttps://t.co/e0jgaVk4LN
— Martin Walsh (@MWalshUS) July 31, 2024
This comes as Harris’s allies are blaming her loss to Trump on President Joe Biden’s late exit from the race, a bevy of former campaign staffers say that thinking is “detached from reality.”
Rather, the loss should be blamed on the candidate herself and her inability to appear authentic to and connect with a majority of voters.
“The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” said Andrew Yang, a Harris supporter who sought the 2020 Democratic nomination, according to the Associated Press. “If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”
But, as noted by Newsweek, other critics say that Harris bears the blame herself for the decisions she made on the campaign trail.
Philadelphia Democratic Chair and former congressman Bob Brady said many of Harris’s staffers were “just elitist and went out there, did their own thing and didn’t include Democratic city committee or (ward leaders) or committee people. They just didn’t do it.”
