The New Neo

Commenter “TommyJay” writes:

I must say, Kamala is the emptiest of empty suits. She must be one of the most synthetically, media manufactured politicians ever.

I watched a documentary recently about Lou Pearlman and the rise of the boy bands like NSync and the Back Street Boys. Lots of grist in there, and yes those bands were manufactured after a fashion, but they actually worked pretty hard to bring their musical talents up to some decent level.

Has Kamala ever worked hard at her vocations? I am doubtful.

From the mid-twentieth century on, it’s been unusual for anyone to have arrived at the position of nominee of a major US party for the presidency without having been tested in the crucible of the primaries and had success. But one of Harris’ unique qualities is that the one time she entered the presidential primaries – 2020 – she failed miserably and quit very early. And yet here she is in 2024, the Democrats’ presidential nominee.

That’s one obvious difference between Harris and Obama right there: he won the primary battle in 2008. And although the superdelegates were part of his hard-fought victory over Hillary Clinton, he nevertheless had broad appeal among rank-and-file Democrats. Biden comes closer to having been selected-not-elected as the nominee in 2020, because strong competition from far-left Sanders caused Democrat powers-that-be to convince everyone other than Biden to drop out. But at least there was a contest, however rigged, and Biden won primary votes. Kamala never did, not in 2020 and not in 2024.

However, it struck me quite some time ago that Harris has some remarkable similarities to Obama although there are some strong differences. Here are a few of the similarities:

– Both are of mixed race, although Obama is one-half black and one-half white and Harris is about a quarter black, a quarter white, and half Indian.
– Their black parents are their fathers.
– Their fathers are not African-American, but African (Obama) and Jamaican (Harris).
– Each had two – count em, two – parents with PhDs. [see * below]
– Their mothers were researchers.
– Both mothers died of cancer, although Harris’ mother was 70 and Obama’s mother was 52.
– Their fathers were both professors of economics, described as socialists.
– Both were (and for Harris, are) estranged from their fathers. Obama’s estrangement was more complete, since his father had almost nothing to do with Obama as he was growing up.
– Both lived a large chunk of their formative years in foreign countries – Obama in Indonesia and Harris in Montreal, Canada.
– Both have foreign first names.
– Both had parents who divorced.
– Both had parents who met at a university.
– Both are connected closely to Joe Biden. Biden was Obama’s VP and Harris was Biden’s VP.
– Both were raised in parts of the US that are deep blue.
– Both are lawyers.

As for differences, Obama married at a much younger age – 31 – and had biological children, whereas Harris didn’t marry until she was nearly 50 years old and she has stepchildren. Obama’s political career had been legislative both at the state (Illinois) and federal level up until he became president, whereas Harris worked as a lawyer, DA in San Francisco, and AG in California, before she too became a senator. Obama is tall with a deep sonorous voice whereas Harris is relatively short and her voice is somewhat grating. They project very different personalities: Obama calm and measured and Harris more excited and emotional with a strange laugh.

But one of the most dramatic and least talked-about similarities between the two is the role that mentors played in their political rise. Each got their start in large cities long dominated by Democrat machine politics. And each became (for different reasons) the protege of a powerful black politician at the state level, an experienced older man who promoted them and was responsible for their early prominence at the state level. For Kamala Harris it was Willie Brown, a married man separated from his wife, thirty years her senior, with whom she had an affair in the 1990s that ended in 1995. Brown was speaker of the California State Assembly during that time, a position of power, and later became the mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004. And when I say “position of power,” I mean it:

Brown’s long service in the Assembly and political connections, his strong negotiation skills, and the Assembly’s tenure system for leadership appointments combined to give Brown nearly complete control over the California legislature by the time he became Assembly Speaker. According to The New York Times, Brown became one of the country’s most powerful state legislators. He nicknamed himself the “Ayatollah of the Assembly”.

Brown was also a great fundraiser and had a huge network of deep-pocketed donors on which to draw. More:

Brown had a reputation in the Assembly for his ability to manage people. Republican State Senator Ken Maddy of Fresno noted Brown’s ability to “size up the situation and create, sometimes on the spot, a winning strategy.” According to Hobson, “He was a brilliant daycare operator. … He knew exactly how to hold the hand of his Assembly members. He dominated California politics like no other politician in the history of the state”.

Obviously an extremely talented and savvy politician. Brown was directly responsible for Harris’ ascendance in the political sphere:

Brown’s romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the mid 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris’s 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: “Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work”.

But Brown’s influence didn’t stop there:

As mayor of San Francisco in 2003, Brown was supportive of her district attorney campaign although they were no longer dating. Critics—including her opponents—were bemoaning cronyism at City Hall. …

At the start of the race [for San Francisco DA], Harris did not appear likely to advance to the runoff. In her own campaign’s initial polls, she stood at about 6 percentage points. “She was unknown by a vast majority of voters,” said Mark Leno, a friend of Harris who was then a state assemblyman organizing her campaign. …

[One of her opponents] had thought being a good prosecutor was enough to win the election, calling himself “totally naive” and adding, “Kamala, she had connections to the mayor, which gave her access to a lot of money people up in Pacific Heights.” …

Harris raised money aggressively. She raked in more than $100,000 before December 2002. By the end of the campaign, she had raised and spent money so prolifically that the city’s ethics commission found Harris violated a pledge not to exceed a voluntary $211,000 spending cap. The Harris campaign apologized and said it was a misunderstanding, according to the Chronicle. She used the money to bombard voters with mail touting her progressive credentials.

Yet by Labor Day of 2003, Harris was still polling between 6 percentage points and 8 points.

Then the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her. I have no idea whether Brown was involved with that, but he was the mayor at the time and I have a strong suspicion he had a large hand in the endorsement. Harris then moved up in the polls but remained behind. Later, that same opponent sent mailers accusing her of only getting where she was because of her affair with Brown, and that apparently backfired and she ended up winning the 3-way election. Her later runs for California AG and then senator were helped along by many endorsements from powerful Democrats in the state, where winning the Democratic primary is generally equal to winning the election.

You know the rest – how poorly she did in 2020 on the national stage. And yet, in the end, powerful Democrats chose her as vice president in 2020 despite her failure in the primaries. I can’t think of another totally failed candidate chosen for the post because of identity politics. And that is part of her problem today – her lack of experience in fielding difficult questions and her lack of appeal to a national audience.

Obama’s Illinois mentor was named Emil Jones, and just like Willie Brown he was black and a long-term politician at the state level. Jones became President of the Illinois Senate from 2003 to 2009. Thirty years separated Harris and Brown’s ages, and Obama and Jones were twenty-five years apart. No, he and Obama were not romantically involved, but early on Jones recognized Obama’s potential and used his influence to help him.

I’ve written at length (2015) about the assistance Jones gave to the ambitious Obama when the latter was in the state senate. Here’s an excerpt [unfortunately, some of the links there are now dead]:

If you want to learn a lot about the sort of operator Obama was back in his early political days in Chicago, you’d do well to read this, which also goes into the way that Emil Jones greased the skids for Obama by handing him legislation on a silver platter, and how angry Obama got when anyone suggested he hadn’t accomplished this on his own. And that article I just linked was written by an Obama admirer; I can only imagine what detractors would have written. This information was in the public domain prior to the 2008 election; wonder why so few people have heard of this stuff?

Or how about this, which was also written before the 2008 election and, although something of a puff piece, still contains some clues to Obama’s rise and how he engineered it with Jones’ help and his own cold-blooded ambition. After the Democrats finally won control of the Illinois state legislature after years in the wilderness of Republican domination, Obama went to the newly-minted Majority Leader Emil Jones (whom he had carefully cultivated even before he was elevated to that position) with a proposition:

“…[Obama] went to see Jones with a big idea. By that point the two men had known each other for the better part of 20 years, but theirs had not always been an easy relationship. They had first met in the mid-1980s, when Obama, as a community organizer on the far South Side, had seen Jones as an ‘old ward heeler’…

“Jones, a chain-smoking, gravelly voiced, unvarnished throwback to the era of the old Daley machine, was wary of Obama, a freshly minted agitator from Columbia University. Obama and other community activists ‘were in-your-face types” [said Jones to the reporter]. “I happened to see them out there one day. And I told them, I said, ‘You don’t gotta be outside. Come on in the office.’

“A friendship was born. A decade later, after returning to Chicago with a law degree and the mantle of first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama won his own state-senate seat, taking the place of an incumbent [Alice Palmer] who had decided to run for Congress, placed a distant third in the Democratic primary, changed her mind, and – with Jones’s help – tried to run for her old seat after all. Obama’s team, in a move as bold as it was adroit, challenged her nominating petitions and managed to keep her name off the ballot.”

Let’s pause for a minute to understand what was happening. Obama had met Jones before he even went to Harvard Law, and at first Jones and Obama were mutually distrustful but then struck up a friendship. But during Obama’s first run for office years later, Obama pulled a really nasty but very effective power move on Jones’ favored candidate, Alice Palmer, and won. This (as I read in more detail in another article that unfortunately I can’t seem to locate right now) really impressed Jones and made him realize that Obama was no soft law school prof but one of the more hardened and ruthless pols around, even though he was just beginning in the trade. The Alice Palmer gambit was what I call Obama’s Godfather move, and Jones understood that he was in the presence of a man with certain gifts: the ability to look like a nice guy and yet who had no reluctance to mow people down, even former friends and mentors, when he needed to do so to get ahead.

To continue:

“Obama arrived in Springfield and told Jones, then the minority leader, that he wanted to ‘work hard.’ He promptly became Jones’s point person on a number of tricky issues, including ethics reform. Now, with Jones elevated to the senate presidency, Obama was approaching him with a cold-eyed proposal.

“‘After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later,’ Jones recalled, relishing the tale. ‘And he said to me, he said, You’re the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er.’ Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: ‘And I told Barack, You think I got a lot of pow-er now?, and he said, Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er. And I said, What kind of pow-er do I have? He said, You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!’ Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. ‘I said to Barack, I said, That sounds good! I said, I haven’t even thought of that. I said, Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?, and he said, Yeah. Me.’

“Jones let the words hang for a moment, and then went on. ‘The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, Let me think about this.’ Obama knew that Jones’s support could single-handedly freeze the discretion of other powerful politicians in the state, and put endorsements of possible rivals on ice. ‘We met a little later that day, and I said, That sounds good. Let’s go for it.'”

Jones gave legislation to Obama that other people had worked on for years, and that (as this article I linked previously made clear) frustrated and angered a lot of legislators who had done the actual work on the bills and had to watch as Obama got the glory instead of them. Obama, the freshman, knew exactly how to work Jones, who’d been doing this for years, and Jones knew a fellow master manipulator of power when he saw one.

Todd Purdum, author of this Vanity Fair piece, is an admirer of Obama. But he noticed something important about how Obama got to the top, and how his ability to hide his ruthless nature (Purdum calls it Obama’s “toughness”) behind a mild facade helped him get there and get there fast:

“The rare talent is to wear ambition lightly, and to allow toughness to be taken for granted. Obama’s life and career suggest he has that talent – or at least that gift. He long ago decided that he had a chance to make something extraordinary of himself. With a calculating consistency that may not always have been apparent to others, or even sometimes to himself, he set out to do just that. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a schoolteacher in Hawaii, says simply, ‘He’s a very cool customer.'”

Obama didn’t appear to the public to be ruthless, but I believe he was and still is. He certainly was part of the coup against Joe Biden. And Kamala? How ruthless is she? She is so fake in her presentation that it’s hard to tell much about the real Kamala Harris, including how much of a role she might have played in Biden’s ouster.

* [NOTE: Commenter “Gringo” points out that according to Wiki, Obama’s father “was forced to leave his PhD program at Harvard University in May 1964 because of administrators’ concerns over his finances and personal life, including uncertainty over the number of wives he had, but he received an M.A. in economics from Harvard in 1965.”]