As you know, I’m committed to vetting each and every candidate who announces they’re running in the democratic presidential primary. I plan on vetting every single one with an open mind, and with as much research and information as I can get my hands on.
I am not trying to tell anyone who to vote for. My goal is to provide my readers and followers with accurate information with which to make informed decisions, and to hopefully provide a platform (via my Facebook page) for respectful, intellectually honest debate. With that in mind, I will be posting informative (and most importantly, honest) articles as I find them on each candidate.
These blog posts will serve as aggregate depositories for what I find on each candidate, so I will be updating them as more information becomes available.
That said, let’s start with Kamala Harris. I’ve spent a few days (I’m nowhere near done) looking at her record as a prosecutor. I’m focusing on her record as a prosecutor because she was elected to the senate in 2016, in a minority party situation where democrats are up against Trump. I don’t expect any glaring stand-out votes from any democratic senator under these circumstances, and I didn’t find any with her. I am however, looking for signs of true leadership qualities. In other words, I’m looking for instances where a candidate from the senate has led the party in a good direction, rather than simply followed the pack or followed on an issue where popular opinion leads our legislators. Bernie Sanders is a great example of what I mean: he led on Medicare for all in 2016, breaking from literally every member of the senate. Because of this, nearly all of the candidates who have announced so far for 2020 are supporting Medicare for all. By contrast, Hillary might have been the last person in America to support Marriage Equality. I want a politician who will lead on important issues, rather than to join a bandwagon. That’s just an important quality for me.
At any rate, I didn’t really find and stand out leadership instances from Harris’ short tenure in the senate, with the exception of her performance in questioning Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmation hearings. She did a great job in both instances but I expected that she would because this was a time for her prosecutorial chops to shine. I will say that I find people who have emotionally committed to supporting Harris simply because she was mean to Brett Kavanaugh to be pretty childish. Yes, she was mean to a guy who deserved it, but what else? Well, that’s what I’m trying to learn.
I will say that I’m not generally predisposed to getting excited about prosecutors running for higher office because I understand what they have to do in order to earn the ever important “tough on crime” bona fides they must earn to get reelected. So I did start off with that bias. That said, I’m pleasantly surprised by what I’m finding out about Harris’ record.
Her record is very mixed, to the point of being a little ‘split personality disorder’. I’m not going to go into everything because I happened to (this is rare and probably won’t happen with the other candidates) find an article that takes a very deep dive into her record, and makes fair points about the good and the bad. I’d rather spend my time doing more research than typing out my version if a well balanced piece, so please take the time to read that whole article.
I will point out one facet of her record that resonates in a very positive way for me. She ran on an anti-capital punishment platform. In her first year as San Francisco DA, she got thrown a major test of her platform promises: there was a cop killer case. Everyone, including Diane Feinstein (I’m not a fan) had their pitchforks out, loudly demanding the death penalty. Harris stood up to that immense pressure and succeeded in sparing this killer’s life. This is exactly what I was referring to in regard to the leadership qualities that matter to me. Unfortunately, she wasn’t consistent in her anti-death penalty stance (please read that article!) so there is definitely a major mixed bag situation with her. But, she’s been trying to thread a very difficult needle as a prosecutor with aspirations for higher office. Granted, she’s from California so said threading isn’t as tricky as it would be for (say) a democratic prosecutor from Indiana, but it’s still a very difficult tight rope to stay on. My verdict is that she did about as well as one can reasonably expect.
The main thing that I knew about Harris before I started my vetting process is that she failed to prosecute Steve Mnuchin and OneWest bank for their egregious ripoff of California home owners who were unfortunate enough to have done business with them. We do have another mixed bag situation with her in regard to prosecuting the powerful, but it’s mostly not awesome. Harris claims that she didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute OneWest. David Dayen (who is a journalist I respect very much) wrote a piece for The Intercept that provides evidence to the contrary. Again, please read that link! So that was bad. On the flip side, she pulled California out of a nationwide mortgage settlement with the five big banks and got a much better settlement than the rest of the country got. Was it a great deal for CA homeowners? Not remotely. Each homeowner basically got less than $2,000. Could she have gotten a better deal? I don’t know, and neither do you.
I have to digress for a minute to tell you something you probably already know, but I still want to spell it out. I’m a flaming liberal. The older I get, the more liberal I’ve become. I consider myself a democratic socialist. That does not make me a doe eyed little church mouse, who has no idea how politics work. Just the opposite. I’m very pragmatic about the situation we’re in. I’m acutely aware of our current system of government, and how it is institutionally designed to crush the working class and minimize any occurrences of justice. I get that the rich run the country and that there isn’t much leeway for justice in our current system. I also believe that we can change the system. So when Bernie talks about getting money out of politics, I can see that (albeit narrow) path. When someone tells me that it’s possible to slap a big enough fine on a big bank to actually hurt them, I don’t believe them because I can’t see that path. I know it’s counterintuitive, and that the money in politics issue seems like a bigger one to tackle, but it’s not.
Back to Harris’ settlement: I don’t know if she could have gotten more. I haven’t seen anyone else get more, so I’m going to put this in the win column for her. Believe it or not, I tend to be more generous with candidates that I don’t start off loving. So I’m going to choose to give her credit for this one.
Now to the money. She has pledged not to take Super PAC money so she passes my #1 threshold. I will not consider a candidate who doesn’t make this pledge. Super PAC money generally only makes up 30% of the total haul in a presidential race, but it’s something and I’ll take it. You can look at her donors here. It’s not terrible. She’s not funded by police unions, which is what I would expect from a prosecutor so that’s good. Her small dollar donations aren’t remotely close to what Bernie’s are but again, I’m realistic and I don’t necessarily expect everyone contribution data to look as good as his do (although I wish they would).
So the bottom line is that with the information that I’ve gathered so far, she is someone who will be on my “maybe” list.
I will be updating this post with more information as I get it, and reshaping to my social media outlets every time I make an update.
