Kamala Harris and Me
My feature-length 2016 profile of Kamala Harris in City Journal, entitled “The Next Obama,” was written while she was still Attorney General of California, running for the U.S. Senate. That piece has proven to be prescient, although I must give credit to City Journal editor Brian Anderson, who suggested that I write it. City Journal solicited several follow-up pieces, one during the Senate campaign and two after Harris was elected to the Senate, when it was obvious that she was angling to be a Presidential candidate (here and here).
When Harris was selected as Joe Biden’s VP, Mark Levin invited me to appear on Life, Liberty & Levin in August 2020 to discuss the original City Journal profile. Links to the show can be found here, here, and here. This was my network television debut. Having done considerable research on Harris, and particularly her underwhelming record as a prosecutor in California, I was disappointed to see Peggy Noonan praise Harris in an August 2020 Wall Street Journal column. I was disgusted enough by Noonan’s fawning treatment of Harris to comment on the column at the WSJ site (along with thousands of others). I had forgotten the comments until today I read a blog post by Scott Johnson, at the excellent site Power Line. Johnson roasts Noonan in a post entitled “High Noonan,” and quotes my WSJ comment at some length.
Johnson sets it up this way:
The column elicited thousands of critical comments. They almost made the column worth reading. They were certainly more perceptive or more realistic than Noonan’s column. Here are four.
Mark Pulliam:
Thin gruel from Peggy Noonan. If Kamala Harris is so smart, why did the daughter of a Stanford professor, whose parents both got graduate degrees at UC Berkeley, end up at Howard? Hastings is a second-tier law school, well below Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and even USC. Failing the bar exam shows a lack of smarts. No mention of Willie Brown? Sugar coating her controversial tenure in California? WSJ readers interested in “the rest of the story” should check out my profile of Harris [“The next Obama”] in the Winter 2016 issue of City Journal.
Thank you, City Journal. Thank you, Mark Levin. Thank you, Scott Johnson. I wish Harris was still a second-rate state attorney general instead of Vice President, but I saw it coming. Too bad the voters didn’t.
