"Voters in California delivered a stark warning to the Democratic Party on Tuesday about the potency of law and order as a political message in 2022..."

"... as a Republican-turned-Democrat campaigning as a crime-fighter vaulted into a runoff in the mayoral primary in Los Angeles and a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco was recalled in a landslide. The two results made vivid the depths of voter frustration over rising crime and rampant homelessness in even the most progressive corners of the country — and are the latest signs of a restless Democratic electorate that was promised a return to normalcy under President Biden and yet remains unsatisfied with the nation’s state of affairs. 'People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood,' said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist. 'It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.'"

From "California Sends Democrats and the Nation a Message on Crime/The recall of a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco and the strong showing by a former Republican in the mayor’s race in Los Angeles showed the shifting winds on criminal justice" (NYT).

"For Democrats, the issue of crime and disorder threatens to drive a wedge between some of the party’s core constituencies, as some voters demand action on racial and systemic disparities while others are focused on their own sense of safety in their homes and neighborhoods. 'People walking the streets, in many cases, feel themselves in danger, and that’s got to be dealt with,' said Willie Brown, a Democrat who is the former mayor of San Francisco. But Mr. Brown said too many Democrats do not want to talk about 'what cops do' for fear of crossing the party’s activist class and offending 'A.O.S. or A.O.C. or whatever that woman’s name is,' he said dismissively of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the influential progressive."

Or whatever that woman’s name is.... Are Democrats going to overdo their sloughing off of their own extreme left?

Why is Willie Brown saying Kamala Harris shouldn't accept an offer to be Joe Biden's running mate?

I can't get past the paywall at the San Francisco Chronicle, but here's a Newser article about Brown's column, "Kamala Harris should say no to vice presidency":

Brown is a fan of Harris, and he acknowledges that if Joe Biden wins the election, she'd have a place in history as the first-ever female VP. However, "the glory would be short-lived," he writes in the San Francisco Chronicle. The vice presidency is often "a dead end" to a person's political career, and while the veep is in office, the situation is not much better—he or she "has no real power and little chance to accomplish anything independent of the president."

First impression: That's weird. Is Brown forgetting that Joe Biden is so old and infirm that we're expecting the VP to become the president? Even if Biden were to win the election and serve a full term, he's not going to run for reelection and the VP will be obvious front-runner for the nomination in 2024. How, under these circumstances, could you possibly fall back on the standard notion that the vice presidency is often a "dead end"? You even used the word "dead"! I hope Joe lives a long long time, but come on, man, the Joe Biden VP will have the greatest inside track on the presidency anybody ever had.

So I wasn't going to blog that, but then it occurred to me. Brown knows all this. He has an ulterior motive. I'm just going to guess that he has reason to know or believe that Biden isn't offering the vice presidential nomination to Harris. So Brown's motivation is to give her cover: She didn't want it anyway. That person who's getting the nomination has lower stature than she does. She's too big for the vice presidency. That's the PR Brown is sketching out for his friend.

"She began dating Mr. Brown, now 85, around 1994, when she was working in Alameda County and he was speaker of the California Assembly."

"He appointed her to two well-compensated state posts. He gave her a BMW. He introduced her to people worth knowing.... Ms. Harris’s allies have bristled at any suggestion that Mr. Brown powered her ascent, dismissing the charge as sexist and making clear that she was plenty capable of impressing on her own... Ms. Harris told SF Weekly in 2003 that she was so independent of Mr. Brown that he 'would probably right now express some fright about the fact that he cannot control me.' 'His career is over,' she said, as Mr. Brown’s second mayoral term wound down. 'I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years.' But Ms. Harris also promoted Mr. Brown’s support on her fliers. And his barely hidden hand helped goose her precedent-busting fund-raising. 'He was instrumental behind the scenes,' said Mark Buell, a major Democratic donor who served as Ms. Harris’s finance chairman. 'Willie Brown told me — and I didn’t want to believe him — you have to raise $1 million to win this race. And we did.' Mr. Brown, who now writes political columns, cheekily declined to be interviewed, on the grounds that he could not assist a rival publication... Asked if Mr. Brown was a factor in the [2003] race — either as a boogeyman deployed by her rivals or as a sitting mayor with an interest in the outcome — Ms. Harris said: 'Um, I’d — you know. You can ask the pundits. I — yeah.'"

From "Kamala Harris Was Ready to Brawl From the Beginning/In her first race, she defied her old boss, a fund-raising pledge — and the implication that she owed her career to her ex-boyfriend" (NYT).

I did the math so you don't have to: In 2003, Brown was 69 and Harris was 38. And 69 divided by 2 plus 7 is 41.5.

Whatever you want to say about how Harris ascended in politics in California, you know very well what she's been doing as a presidential candidate in the past year. She's a terrible candidate. As I wrote after the last debate: "I don't understand why she's there and I don't believe she understands." Has anyone ever asked her the "Ted Kennedy" question, "Why do you want to be President of the United States?"

Kamala cautiously takes on the criticism "She’s very cautious."

So David Axelrod had disparaged Kamala Harris on at least 2 occasions:

1. “She is an incredibly compelling personality; a very bright and accomplished person... But she’s very cautious — and that caution was pretty apparent in a lot of her answers.”

2. “She’s a brilliant person, there’s no doubt about that... But what we’ve learned so far is that she’s great at asking questions but timid at answering them. She’s going to have to correct that to navigate this process.”

And it's not as though KH noticed and decided to push him right back (which is the sort of thing Trump does (he always hits back)). Politico put her on the spot and asked. You can't be very cautious and sound timid when asked whether you're too cautious and timid, can you?

Asked by POLITICO about Axelrod’s concerns — part of a line of criticism that Harris aides and allies broadly believe is tinged with sexism and not applied in the same way to the men running for president — Harris paused for a few seconds before saying, “I don’t know what to tell you."

Wow. Politico had to try to cushion the effect of the embarrassing confirmation of Axelrod's take. Look at that ridiculous extra material inserted in between the dashes. That's not what KH said when asked, and it's such mushy stuff — "broadly believe," "tinged."

“Axelrod was on the road with Barack a decade ago,” she added. “I’ve invited him to come on the road with me ... (and he’d see) “contrary to what he thinks is happening.”

She won't defend herself in words. Can that work in politics? I can imagine the most wonderful person in the world responding to attacks by murmuring "If you really knew me, you wouldn't say that." But would you choose that person as your champion, to do battle for you against bold adversaries?

As for whether the critiques of her are grounded in sexism, Harris said some of those making the charges about her “should do a better job of performing themselves.”

Again, she confirms Axelrod's take. She won't be direct. She exhibits nice modesty. I think it is better for female candidates to refrain from characterizing criticism as sexist, but you still need an answer, and her failure to answer is more evidence that Axelrod is right.

Incredibly, Politico's article ends with a quote from Willie Brown: "I would have said, ‘What did he say? I didn’t read it... Axel-who?'"

That forces me to go looking for what, exactly, is the connection between Kamala Harris and Willie Brown? I only remember the crude joking that continually turns up in the comments. Here's a piece published yesterday in The Washington Examiner: "Kamala Harris’ first significant political role was an appointment by her powerful then-boyfriend Willie Brown, three decades her senior, to a California medical board that has been criticized as a landing spot for patronage jobs and kickbacks. Then 30, Harris was dating 60-year-old Willie Brown, at the time the Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly, when he placed her on the California Medical Assistance Commission [which met twice a month]. The position paid over $70,000 per year...."

"The familiar public narratives about black women don’t fit Kamala Harris. She’s not a jezebel, a mammy or an Omarosa."

"She’s also the first viable woman running for president who has had an entire adult dating life. Elizabeth Warren got married (the first time) at 19, Michele Bachmann at 22, Carly Fiorina 23, Hillary 28 and even 2020 candidate Kristen Gillibrand got married at 35. Harris, who married her husband at the age of 49 was living her best life into her 30s and 40s. So yes, we were bound to hear about Willie Brown and yes, at some point, it will come out that she dated talk show host Montel Williams too. She was an attractive high profile single black woman in California, what else was she supposed to be doing when she wasn’t prosecuting people?"

From "Sen. Kamala Harris Is a 54-Year-Old Black Woman, and Yes, She Dated Willie Brown. So What?" by Jason Johnson at The Root. With this video:



I like that phrase "living her best life." Here are "10 Tips on How to Live Your Best Life" from the editors at the Deepak Chopra website. ("Set Intentions... Visualize... Meditate... Journal... Travel... Invest in Your Health... Practice Daily Self-Love...") And here's the Cardi B song, "Best Life," which begins "I'm livin' my best life, yeah, yeah."

Anyway, Johnson seems annoyed to have to address the sex life of Kamala Harris: "I have to write about her dating past because her ex-bae, 84-year-old former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown decided to have a Quincy Jones moment and spill tea on their relationship."

MSM's ham-handed protectiveness toward Kamala Harris: "The unique harm we cause when we dissect a powerful woman’s love life."

Oh, it's just exquisite, the harm we inflict on the delicate female candidate! It's unique! It hurts their tender feelings, so shush now, and allow this fine woman to become President, where we can continue to feel responsible for protecting her.

Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. I want a President who will protect us. So your protectiveness toward Kamala Harris completely backfires.

I'm reading Monica Hesse in WaPo. The quote in the post title is the headline for her column. She's fielding the news that former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown has confirmed that years ago he dated Kamala Harris and he appointed her to 2 commissions, which — as Brown put it — "may have influenced her career." At the time, Brown was 60 years old and 30 years older than Harris. He was the speaker of the state assembly, and she was an assistant district attorney.

Why aren't we supposed to talk about that? There are at least some questions. In the #MeToo era, we have to wonder about whether the man sought sexual favors. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, we've heard from women who say he pressured them to give sex in exchange for career advancement, and that implies that there were women who said yes and received the advancement that was denied to the women who said no. That is a system of discrimination that matters a lot, even if we're disinclined to condemn the women who went along with it. But it's one thing to refrain from condemning them and quite something else to say these are the women we want to trust with the heaviest responsibilities.

If Kamala Harris is fit to represent the United States in confrontations with the greatest thugs in the world — Putin, et al. — she doesn't need kid-gloves treatment, and saying she does and impugning us for not getting in line makes me much more suspicious of this old love/"love" affair than I would have been if MSM weren't bending over backwards to protect her.

A little of Hesse's verbiage:

Plenty of us have... spent an awful lot of time discussing Bill Clinton’s willie and Anthony Weiner’s wiener: it’s not that we don’t talk about the sexual predilections of male candidates. But we do talk about them in a different way. We talk about men abusing power. We talk about women not even deserving power. The distinction matters, because the conversation isn’t really about sex, it’s about legitimacy. It’s about who we think has earned the right to be successful, and what criteria we’ll invent, and who we’ll apply it to.

“Maybe we should stop accusing women of ‘sleeping their way’ to the top,” Erin Gloria Ryan wrote in the Daily Beast in 2017. “Maybe because men have been the ones sleeping women to the middle and bottom.”

It takes two to "sleep." Both the man and the woman are trying to get something, and whether the woman gets as much as she wants — whether she gets to "the top" or only "the middle" — is no more interesting than whether the man got really great sex out of the arrangement or not. If, later on, we the people are judging a candidate, we look at what that candidate has done — whether it's the one that wanted to get sex or the one who traded sex for something else — and we judge them on the individual details. Why would sex be off limits just because women are more likely to be the ones in a position to give sex in exchange for something else, and the men tend to be the ones who want the sex so much they dole out non-sex favors to get it? Yes, it's different for men than for women, but so what? We the voters are the ones in the down position, stuck needing to vote for one of these fallible human beings. Don't tell me what not to talk about!

Does it help your career, to date someone powerful? I’d assume so. Does it also help to play golf with someone powerful, or smoke cigars with someone powerful, or belong to Skull and Bones? I’d assume that, too. But for decades we’ve accepted those relationships — many of which benefited only men — as standard procedure for how executives and politicians get ahead.

No, actually we haven't accepted it. Feminists have been denouncing the "old boy network" for as long as I've been listening to feminists, which is about half a century. The "standard procedure" has been under attack and deserves to be under attack.

We're supposed to throw feminism out the window now in order to help the fragile flower Kamala Harris? Ridiculous!