The Bulwark Podcast - Robert Draper: The Prosecutor

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Kamala Harris sees the world as divided between those who follow the rules and those who break them—and that injustice requires action, not whining. And behind the story of a child of two high-achieving immigrants is a woman who remains loyal, reveres law and order, shows up prepared, and approaches challenges with a 'just the facts' linear style of thinking. Yet, she also maintains a level of inscrutability. Robert Draper joins Tim Miller. show notes: Draper's profile of Kamala

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Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com. Hey, everybody. Quick scheduling note for you. We have a live stream for Bullwork Plus members tonight at 7 p.m. We're going to be doing a pregame of Kamala Harris' speech

on the ellipse, what to look for, what the implications are, what the closing argument should be. So come on, hang out with the gang, go to thebullwork.com slash subscribe to become a member as good a time as any, especially for the 200,000 some out of you that unsubscribed from the Washington Post. Whatever you think about the endorsement decision, not really a great business decision

for Jeff Bezos there, it doesn't look like. I will be at this pregame, kind of. I'll be in the backseat of a cab or an Uber because I decided to stay in New York for one more day. Steve Bannon, who as many of the long-time listeners know, I've interviewed several times and we have a long adversarial-ish relationship. He's out of jail this morning as we're taping this. He's gotten out of jail

and he is going to be holding a press conference here in New York City. So, I kicked my flight back 24 hours. I will be there for the Bannon press conference. I do not expect him to be, I don't know, reformed. I don't think that he's going to come out and say that he's really learned that he should follow the law and the rule of law and that he expects to be a better and more upstanding citizen. I don't expect that to be what he has to say. I expect incitement and vigor and hopefully I'll get a chance to ask him a couple of questions. We'll be posting on YouTube on our various platforms, my little videos from there if

you want to monitor that. So we've got Bannon this afternoon, we've got Kamala's closing argument on the ellipse, the spot where Donald Trump gave the insurrectionist speech on January 6th. It is a big day, one week out for election day. And it's the perfect day to be here with my friend Robert Draper, New York Times reporter who has written, I think, the most detailed, deeply reported piece on Kamala Harris's background or ideology or point of view.

And so we're going to talk to him about that next. Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I am here with Robert Draper. He reports on politics for the New York Times. He's author of several books, including the seminal, To Start a War, How the Bush Administration Took America to Iraq. He has a new story, The World According to Kamala Harris.

And I want to spend most of the time today on the vice president, but I just, Robert, I just can't help but want to get in your brain on Trump a little bit first, if that's okay. I mean, sure, do's you must. Do we have to? We have to. This is it. I guess this is part of why I want to get in there.

I mean, you were on the plane in 2015, back in the heyday. It's just Hope Hicks, the golf caddy, Stabby Ize Lewandowski, the children, and Draper. Here we are, Madison Square Garden event two days ago. I just want an open-ended thought from you on the trajectory and how depressed are you that we're here? What are the observations that are here? How much has it been normalized? Open floor. Yeah.

Tim, one thing that the Trump family was trying to sell, no one was terribly interested in taking it back in late 2015 and early 2016, was this idea that Trump had a great life and he was giving it all up to come down the golden escalators and save America. And the truth is during March, April, and most of May, when I was one-on-one with Trump on his airplanes, Trump was having the time of his life. He was basically ridiculing Republicans. The press seemed to enjoy him doing so. In the hours and hours that I spent with him, not for a second, did I think that this was a man who had a sense of what it took to be chief executive of America.

But he certainly knew how to rib Republicans who had pretenses of doing so. Then he gets elected, obviously, and seems in awe of the fact that he had done so, in awe of the White House, and over a period of a year or two that wears off as do his relationships with the more established people that he brought in to help him run the ship. So, flash forward to now, basically what I'm describing, Tim, is kind of a natural human evolution even though we're talking about Donald Trump of someone who was unsure for all of his bluster of how to do what he had claimed that he wanted to do to save America.

And now he has his own view of how to do so, not to put in place experts, but to put in place loyalists, because after all, only one expert is needed, and that's Donald Trump. This is, by the way, something that we've been hearing from the outset, even when Trump brought in people like Mattis and Tillerson and others who knew the ropes of governance better than Trump did, that really Trump is smarter than everybody else. And now, I suspect that what will come to pass with a Trump presidency is that he will not only flush out the deep state, but also the intelligence community and replace them with people who are loyalists so that it will be entirely his show so that the US government will be a family-run business. Yeah, I thought that was interesting, Madison Square Garden.

J.D. Vance, the vice president, was like the seventh opener, you know? And the family were the final three. And Elon, right? It's like the inner, inner circle is is that right? It is former Democrats. There's Radicals and the family. It's like a third world oligarchy in some ways that is similar to 2015 I don't know. I guess my only other question for you on this is like Sure, there's a question of like how Trump has evolved over that time

I mean, he's still the same Trump like I was his thinking about all this has evolved. But to me, I think the most dispiriting part of the last couple days was like how we have, how the country has adapted around it, right? And you're on this plane initially, as you mentioned, like some of the press was laughing him up. Like there was a period of time where he was comic relief. People were either laughing at him, some people were laughing with him. Then that evolved into a period of time where people were outraged, concerned, right? Then he gets in there, mass protests.

You know, it's January 6th, people are scared. We fast forward to now and it just feels like it is all dulled. I mean, like there is this sort of outrage about the Puerto Rican joke, but it almost feels kind of like the tone of that level of outrage feels similar to, I don't know, the outrage of Mitt Romney's car elevator or something. Like it's kind of dulled back to normal, see. And like, to me, that was like the thing that was, I don't know, about the Madison Square Garden event. It's a great point, Tim, although it's of a piece in a way what we saw and heard in

Madison Square Garden with the remarks that Trump made on June the 16th, 2015 when he announced his candidacy and talked about Mexicans as rapists and killers. A lot of people thought, well, there's a candidacy that's been strangled in its crib. Right. And that wasn't included, by the way. Yeah, yeah. And then outrageous comments about John McCain and others. And what we came to find was that there was a high tolerance in the electorate for that.

And I think that the media has, after a while, been, I don't want to say worn down, but there are only so many times you can say or scream at the top of your lungs, this is not normal, this is not normal. Now, I, you know, I'm trying my best on this podcast. You are, you are. And, but you know, it's, I mean, at the Madison Square Garden rally, I have seen in the morning press some hopeful intimations by some that this is going to blow back fatally against the Trump campaign. Any of us who've covered Trump over the last few years have to eye that prognostication

with real skepticism. These kinds of things have not stopped them in the past. Yeah. Hopefully, it hurts on the margins of Puerto Ricans. I don't know. I was doing the rounds yesterday and people were like, it's funny to hear them kind of try to back away from the joke. You know, like how like Mark Caputo wrote in the Bullwork, how like they actually vetoed

a joke calling Kamala the C word. So it's not like they didn't know. My point, like making people is like the joke that Puerto Rico is an island of garbage in the ocean is literally is no different than the serious statement that Donald Trump has made over and over again that America is a trash can, is the world's garbage can. It's the same thing. And so there's nothing to walk away from. And I think that that speaks to your point about how it's hard to see why that would

shake things up when that's been his core message. That's not like the curtain has suddenly been pulled back. Yeah. We're suddenly for the first time seeing who Donald Trump is. I mean, the shithole country's comment was one that he made. Six years ago. Yeah. And that was in reference to the query placed by Trump. How come we're not getting Scandinavians to come to our country? Why instead are we getting people from Niger or Sierra Leone or other shithole countries?

So it's- I don't think that he would pronounce it Niger, but- Maybe not. Or Sierra Leone. Your point is taken. I want to play one more clip from Madison Square Garden because I think it transitions nicely into your story about Kamala Harris. Here is Tucker Carlson talking about the vice president.

It's going to be pretty tough for them 10 days from now to look in the eye to America with a straight face. It's going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, you know what, Kamala Harris, she's just, she got 85 million votes because she's just so impressive as the first Samoan Malaysian Samoan Malaysian low IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. Yeah. So you run with us kind of like how she is this human Venn diagram, she's mixed race, she's dealt with all of these kind of smears before, this is on the highest stage. And so I'd like to just kind of start with your take on that and then we'll kind of go backwards to her life.

Yeah. I mean, look, you know, Tucker Carlson, it's Tucker Carlson, but he's saying what he's saying, once again, recognizing there's an audience for this. There is a view certainly held by a lot of Republicans, including, you know, sort of K Street Republicans in Washington. The Kamala Harris is a low IQ, unserious person. I think that it didn't take but a few days in the Bay Area while interviewing,

ultimately, what came to be about a hundred people for the story I did on Harris, to find that no one viewed her that way back then, including people who weren't exactly in love with her. People from the police union, people from the public defender's office when she was DA of San Francisco County, that no one could claim that Kamala Harris, whether you agreed with her initiatives or not, that she introduced a profusion of reforms, both as San Francisco County DA and later as state attorney general, when it would have been politically a lot easier to get by with a minimum, but she never did so.

And yet, what clearly Carlson is trying to push is a narrative that took hold, I think, when Harris became vice president, that this is a fundamentally unserious, incompetent person. And though I think that represents a kind of opportunity for Harris because it's a matter of clearing a low bar and showing that she has plenty of ideas, showing that she is plenty competent. And nonetheless, it's a real narrative. Which, by the way, should Kamala Harris win in November, will invite the belief amongst Trump's followers that this election had to be stolen, because who

in the world would vote for her? The same kind of narrative that who would vote for sleepy Joe Biden who spent the entire 2020 campaign in a basement. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's sort of this that one line from Tucker is this triumvirate of election fraud and then kind of the Fox narrative about how she's stupid and just kind of the racial attacks that she faced her whole life, you know, racism that you face as somebody that's mixed race and kind of dealing with that identity question your whole life. So I'm just curious for you, to me, and we were texting about this, no shortage to your

work as a wonderful journalist that revealed many great anecdotes I want to go through. Even after reading it, even after seeing three months of the campaign and the convention and you interviewing 100 people, she's still kind of inscrutable to me, like a little bit. Like there are elements of her that seem private, right? I feel like Donald Trump's an open book. George Bush flaws and strengths was very easy to understand, right? I think that she remains like a little bit of a mystery to people.

And so I'm wondering what your response is to that and what were the things that you found throughout the reporting that were maybe new that you found interesting? Yeah, as I texted back to you during our exchange, I think that she's comprehensible if she is inscrutable, comprehensible in the sense that she does have a worldview that's a bit ideologically elusive in so far. It is not Bernie Sanders. It is not, you know, Joe Manchin. It's a sort of center-left California, but also that of a prosecutor who is a rule follower who does believe in law

and order. But when it comes to the actual inscrutability of her persona, sure, I think there is awareness to her. There's little doubt in my mind about that. I mean, she has tons of friends with him. She's very close and she's reflexively empathic towards lots of people and she's very loyal to her friends and vice versa. But when we're asking ourselves, how could this black woman on a national political stage be so wary? All we really need to do is turn to the example in 2008 when the Obama presidential campaign had to hire a professional consultant Stephanie Cutter to deal with the pervasive perception of Michelle Obama as an angry black woman. Friends of hers said to me over and over again, you have to understand that she recognizes

that anything she says, anything that she does will be looked at through the prism of her being a black woman. And she's not gonna let that get to her. She's not gonna emote about it, but she's gonna withhold somewhat. And if that's not the entirety of it, and there may be other things, a kind of vulnerability that comes

from a childhood of divorced parents, there may be some of that as well. But I think principally what we're talking about vulnerability that comes from a childhood of divorced parents. There may be some of that as well. But I think principally, what we're talking about is the first black woman to get as far as Kamala Harris has, very, very cognizant of how she's going to be judged. I was doing my hotel room tradition last night of suffering through 30 minutes of Fox because I can't watch it in the home without getting a divorce. And Jesse Wander's was calling Michelle Obama an angry black woman literally last night on

Fox 16 years later after that consultant. You can see that. I felt that way when I had a chance to talk to the vice president when she was just vice president. At this time, it was during the Biden campaign where Biden was struggling, I think, to deliver a contrast, a strong contrast to Trump. And one of the open-ended questions I asked her was just like, you know, shouldn't that be your role, right?

Like, shouldn't you go out there and be the prosecutor and be the attack dog? And you could feel, and I asked people around her about that, and you could feel there was a hesitancy that's based in exactly what you're talking about, right? And I think that she's actually done a pretty impressive job since she's taken over the campaign of being able to take the contrast to Trump while maintaining a very positive, even almost well-humored Mien.

I don't know, but to you, does that feel like that's something that they're very conscious of, right? No, I think you're right on all that, Tim. I also think that there are, what some people would view as missed opportunities on the part of the Harris campaign that actually are in themselves testimonials to who Kamala

Harris is. One of those is that she never separated herself from Biden. And she didn't do it because she's a loyalist. She was never backbiting during her low moments, her nadir in the Biden administration when she was getting lousy press and her favorables were even lower than those of Biden. There was never stuff seeping out about how, oh, Biden is doing terrible things to Kamala Harris.

The other thing is that she never presented herself as a populist and that she hasn't tried to go for the sort of populist wing that in some cases that remains uncommitted. It's because she isn't. She's an institutionalist. She believes that there is profound inequality in our system and that that's best addressed by getting inside the system and fixing it. And so there's a kind of integrity to those viewpoints.

I don't think that they helped her terribly well and I I, you know, electorally, we'll see, but they speak to who she is. And again, I think they're comprehensible. The other thing I'll say, Tim, is, you know, she's not a natural politician. I mean, like, you know, Gavin Newsom is a politics junkie, you know, stares at data and all this. This has never been Harris's thing. She doesn't relish the horse race. And I think we're seeing some of that too. It feels like Doug likes that more than her. Yeah, I think that's right. I think, yeah, I think that Doug,

he seems to enjoy the give and take a great deal more, not only flesh pressing, but also going after Republicans. I don't think she has much of an appetite for that. But again, what we're seeing once again is what could be missed opportunities or perceived as such are really just basic to who she is. Y'all, I don't know if there's anything I've heard more in the last few days as we get to a week before this election, then I think I might need to take a gummy to go to bed.

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You are going to need it. I want to go through both of those, call them potential missed opportunities maybe on the Biden thing. I think Biden did kind of hang her up to dry, actually. I think if you guys can look at it, and this is something that I've just come around on in the last few months. We interviewed Elena Platt-Collabor over at The Atlantic on this, and she did a big hair story about just when she was VP, not nominee. And she went to the Biden team several times for like, give us some anecdotes of the time she's

been in the room and helpful or give it, you know, give us, give me color, give me color, you know, it's for the story. And they couldn't, they wouldn't, they didn't. And you write in your story about kind of the two, like they give her these two assignments that are preposterous, like the root causes of the immigration crisis, like good luck. And that to me feels weird, especially given how Biden himself felt snubbed. So anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, if it is a missed opportunity, I kind of blame him more than her. Now, look, I think what you're describing

is one of the more surprising things that I encountered in my reporting, Tim, which was that she did a great deal more than she was given credit for. It certainly is evident now looking over our shoulder that the Biden administration recognized here is this octogenarian president, Sleepy Joe, and it's really, really important to his brand that we show his work, we show his

successes and that for all of these landmark bits of legislation, he'd get the total credit. He deserves some credit for it, as does Nancy Pelosi. But Harris was there too. She was actually calling senators during infrastructure and dealing with the Congressional Progressive Caucus on a procedural vote relating to Build Back Better. Elements of the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the American Rescue Plan came directly from her tenure in the Senate. She was in charge of implementing the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the big gun bill that was passed in 2022.

She oversaw the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and under that nexus began to turn the screws on how exactly that bill would be implemented. And finally, it wasn't just that she was one voice after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court. She was the dominant voice. But it's interesting in my reporting, I learned that she was hesitant to take that role on because she thought she'd be a figurehead.

And she thought she'd be a figurehead because she knew that she had already been kind of marginalized in previous efforts. And she was not convinced that Joe Biden, who was culturally a conservative Catholic when it came to abortion, would be all in. She was afraid that whatever she would say would be undercut by a half-heartedness on the part of President Biden. And she had to receive assurances from Chief of Staff Ryan Klain that that would not be

the case. So there's actually a great deal that she did. Again, she was never a whiner about this. And people in the Biden administration said to me, look, you know, that's the nature of the job. I mean, as vice president, you never get credit for things. There is a difference though. When Biden was vice president, Biden would hold these off the records with journalists such as myself to explain what Obama was up to, what Obama's thinking was. And in the course of this, Vice President Biden would take the opportunity to describe his thinking and his influence. So we got a very crystal clear impression of Biden's contributions to the Obama administration.

Harris didn't do that. It wasn't her nature. And so her contributions were much more opaque. So you kind of alluded to this about her, the fact that she, she kind of hasn't taken the populist turn. And you talk a little bit about the ideology overall and the ways that it's different than Biden, this kind of evidence of what you're just talking about and how she seems to be

much more comfortable with the cultural left issues such as abortion, but really isn't. It's a funny thing, my Wall Street Journal Republican friends are like, she's going to be a socialist. And it's like her brother- my Wall Street Journal Republican friends are like, she's going to be a socialist. And it's like her brother-in-law is an Uber executive, right? And in a lot of ways, one difference between her and Biden is that Biden is more comfortable with kind of like this labor FDR side of the left, where she kind of comes out of more of the technocratic, again, center left, like that, not, you know, she's not Paul Ryan, but, you know, but more of

the kind of technocratic Obama era on economic policy. I assume you agree with that, but maybe kind of expand. You're right. And I raise this in the story that Biden's model of liberalism was Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and, you know, these big government, well-funded government initiatives. That's never been hers. I think to the extent that she views the world through a liberal lens, it is having people at the table who are ordinarily not at the table, having representation from folks in underserved communities and people of color.

She's reflexively inclusive in the way that one might expect of a California progressive. But her solutions, I mean, again, when she was district attorney and then state attorney general being sort of pro consumer protection, dealing with recidivism while at the same time going after transnational gangs. I mean, this is not, you know, a sort of a boilerplate representation of what a lefty is. And that's why, you know, in an adjacent story or a story that I did just before this one, I wrote about her father because there had been all these attacks from the right that

her father was this Marxist professor, which turned out to be unsurprisingly completely untrue that he had done some teachings that examine Marxian theory, but basically he was one of the main shapers of Jamaica's post-colonial economy, which is an export economy that in no way resembles anything Marxist. Yeah, the other thing I think that some, back to the inscrutability, that some people worry about with her is like, I wrote on Friday about my assessment of kind of what the risk, the level of risk is with the two roads ahead of us. If you are the type of person that's maybe skeptical of both candidates and how the Trump

risk is like off the charts, tail risk is like never before. We've never had a candidate where it's as likely that we experience something in an unthinkable tail risk situation. With Harris, it's a little harder to see. I think reading your story, to me, it reinforced this idea that she's really going to try to find consensus and try to be in the middle of democratic thinking in a lot of ways. Sometimes caution leads to risk in other ways, but to me, that seems to be more her MO. And so I'm just wondering how you think about that based on your reporting. No, I think that's right.

The first office that she ran for Tim, which was for district attorney of San Francisco, she ran basically on the platform of I'll be more efficient. The current DA who was a true lefty, Terrence Hallinan, and one of the big political families in San Francisco, was a guy who was very pro-legalization of marijuana and very anti-death penalty, but his office was chaos with rapid turnover. She sold the electorate on the view that things would be more stable. In fact, there were. There was no exodus of people from her DA's office.

It was much better organized. Same with the State Attorney General's office. She brought in lots of good people. And the US Senate, more or less the same thing. I mean, she certainly was not regarded as any kind of rabble rouser, except when she would interrogate witnesses on the judiciary and intelligence committees,

and those people would get upset because she was interrupting them. The idea that somehow she would at least pose a risk in terms of introducing chaos or introducing some kind of ideological zaniness just is without basis. Now I say all that saying that it's really hard. It's one of the great mysteries in voting for a president and imagining how that person will be as president. For Donald Trump, the belief was held by many that, well, the guy's a transactionalist,

he's a deal maker. He'll get everybody in the room and he'll cut a deal. Then the first deal he had to cut was on replacing Obamacare and he failed to do so. And then came infrastructure week or rather it never did come. And it's hard to see what a Harris administration would be like, what its actual platforms would be. She hasn't effectively answered the question like, what would your first initiatives be?

Then again, that's a gotcha Washington question. We don't know what the first initiatives will be because we don't know what January, 2025 will be. But there has been a basic steadiness and the only real time in which there was not was her first year, year and a half in the office of vice president when there was a very, very high turnover. Occasionally- What was with that?

I've never been able to get a good answer. Yeah. Why did she have so much staff turnover? Largely the people were not hers. I think she brought in like two people from her presidential campaign, but this was delivered on the part of the Biden administration. They thought that her campaign for president had been a crappy one, which it was. And so they certainly didn't want any of that in there.

They didn't want family members in there. They had their own holdovers that they put in the office of vice president. And by and large, it wasn't a terribly successful marriage of vice president and the staff that was assigned to her. I also think that Harris herself struggled and though, you know, marriage of vice president and the staff that was assigned to her. I also think that Harris herself struggled and though, you know, it, again, it wasn't marked by leaks and Machiavellian antics. She wasn't her own boss for the first time in a very long time. And, uh, she didn't have the influence that she had in her previous capacities.

And I think that that manifested itself in some frustration and made it difficult for staff and staff left in part because of that too. One of the kind of nagging thing I've been thinking about with that group is that she doesn't really have a long-term political advisor. There's somebody like a rove or like somebody that's been with her, you know, like the axle rod for Obama. And sometimes that's a red flag as somebody who's been on some presidential campaigns with people that never didn't have long-term advisors.

Usually it was a sign that there was a personality issue. And so I was interested to hear you say at the beginning that she does have like a ton of long-time friends. I'm just like wondering like what those relationships are like, like why you think that she hasn't had a long-time political advisor. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the two are separate. I mean, she has friends that she's had going back to childhood who remain in her circle

today, people who, when she was just coming up as Alameda County line prosecutor in Oakland, then later in San Francisco and onward. And those people have been, they volunteer for her campaigns and all that, but they're not entrusted with heavy duty political advice and they seem to be fine with that. She has run through political advisors for sure. Yeah, but she's calling them to get out of her bubble. I don't know.

I guess I don't want to sell anybody out, but I had some politicians that I worked for when I would sit with them in the car and it was deeply concerning to me that they never seem to call a pal. I'm like, that's a bad sign. That's a bad trait actually in a politician because it's important that you have, even if it's not, you're not looking for somebody for a sounding board on a serious political decision, just kind of hearing from somebody you can trust and be honest with. It sounds like that she has, and some of those folks talk to you, I guess.

Yes. And I do think actually that was one of the problems that she had in her 2019 run and for that matter during the first couple of years as vice president that to the extent that there was complaining, it was from this circle of friends who believed that she was being ill served and they would complain a lot to the press. But you raise an interesting point regarding consultants. She's never had a David Axelrod or a Plouffe. I mean, now she's got Plouffe, but Plouffe is a hired gunslinger for just 100 days or so. And she had like a circle of three who ran her DA campaign.

This guy, Brian Brokaw, who ran for state attorney general and then a Smith for Senate. And each of them were basically, they split the sheets. It's very hard to tell in talking to some of these guys, how much of this was her just kind of giving them the high hat and moving on to someone who she thought was better, or if they were honest disagreements and tactics, I really don't know. It's fair to wonder whether that constitutes a kind of red flag, because you're right. There is no common thread throughout where Biden has had, you know, much of the same people for 25 to 30 years. Yeah, you can see the problems with that model too, you know, there's no perfect model. We saw it in, you know, the month after his

abysmal debate performance when none of them were saying, you know, sir, you know, it's time to get out. For that matter, you know, when there were these rolling conversations, if you can call them that about whether or not Biden should run for a second term, no one is in our circle. And I know this because they told me ever brought up to him the possibility of not running. So there was a group think you're right. And you can make an argument about the inadvisability of that model as well. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask, at work, in social settings, around your family?

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I want to just go back to her childhood. You know, like a couple of interesting things. She's told us so much about her mother. I do feel like that kind of relationship with her sister and her mother and going up in Berkeley and how that impacted her, I feel like I have a good feel for. The two areas that like she doesn't really talk about't really talk about, and maybe it's because it's not politically suitable, I don't know, but she goes to Montreal for a big chunk of her childhood before deciding to then go to Howard, which is, again, an interesting choice. Somebody like her mother is Indian, and she's deciding to go to an HBCU, her father's divorced, and then they're estranged.

Anyway, I'm curious about those two steps and what you learned about her time and what maybe impact it had on her being in Montreal and then deciding to go to Howard. Her going to Montreal was a result of her mother having been discriminated against it. UC Berkeley, she lost her job as a researcher over conflict with a male colleague and she got a better offer than McGill University. So she packed up her two daughters and they moved to Quebec. That was a lonely time for Kamala. I mean, she did fine in school. She learned some French, she learned some musical instruments, but it was an overwhelmingly white background.

Does she still know French? I can't imagine her in my mind saying French, but maybe. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, she's been over to France, and there are some instances of her throwing out a phrase. But whether or not this is something that came naturally to her or was written on an index card, I don't know. But I think she was homesick a lot

in this overwhelmingly white environment after growing up in such a diverse environment and would come home every summer and spend time at Berkeley. By the way, I think that she has misstated the McDonald's experience. I don't think that's when she was spending summers from Howard University. I'm pretty sure that's when she was spending summers

in high school, which be that as it may. Uh-oh, you're gonna start getting some calls from Jesse Waters, from Jesse Waters' prime time, if there are any discrepancies on the McDonald's story. That's right, because it's the most important for sure. So that's interesting though. So who would be home? So she'd leave on track, the whole family would go back or she'd go stay with like a family friend? Well, she would stay with family friends. There was a family, the Shelton family, with whom she was extremely close. And so she would stay with them,

but also her mother would come back frequently as well. And they had tons of extended family in the area so there's no real mystery about that. Her decision to go to Howard, as best as I can tell, was first of all she actually applied to what was then called University of California at Hayward, which now has some other name about the Bay Area. She was accepted to that, but a lot of her friends were going to HBCUs. I think the reflex, Tim, was that she so missed the Bay Area that she was anxious to go back

to college there, only to find out that all of her friends in the neighborhood were all going to HBCUs. She had always had some interest in Howard Howard and they tend to move a little more slowly than the UC system in the applications process. So she ultimately decided to go there. She didn't have any friends there, but she called friends immediately upon going there and was very, very excited again to go in this campus of black intellectual ferment, especially after having been in Quebec for in this very wide environment

and had herself a great time, became a debate nerd like me. Yeah, same. I guess in the black intellectual ferment, I also went past another kind of interesting little anecdote from the story. It was just about how, I guess this is obvious when you think of it, I hadn't spent time being in Berkeley and having her mother teaching there, she did have exposure at an early age to a lot of the intellectual heavyweights of black culture in like the 70s. Yeah. Growing up in Berkeley, I mean, Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panthers,

was a common sight in the neighborhood, this this cultural arts center, down the way that she and her younger sister and her mom would go to, I believe, every Thursday. Nina Simone and Baldwin and other literary and artistic greats were commonly seen there. Later, by the way, when she went to UC Hastings for law school, the commencement speaker was Jesse Jackson. When Harris, in her convention speech, tried to fuse herself with the center of the electorate by saying the middle class is where I'm from, that is factually speaking a truism, but it was a really, really remarkable middle class full of these high academic achievers, civil rights

activists. And she grew up through direct proximity with both of her parents with a very high premium of achievement placed on her, but also environmentally, in a larger sense, recognizing all of these possibilities through which to achieve. And so even though she was not the resident genius in any of the schools that she was in, as best as I could tell, it was always understood that she was going places. The father, it is such an interesting situation, you know, because again, and this whole thing

is interesting because this is unlike any other presidential campaign, right? Like that we're doing all this, the story runs 10 days before the election. Usually you would write this kind of story back in February, like anybody, like the media, like we're kind of in the inner circle and then the public starts to like learn more and more about these people that want to be president. And it's just happening in such an expedited timeline with her. And so I really didn't spend that much time looking into the father until the Marxist accusations that you mentioned came up. And so you learned that that's not true. Obviously, he was very much capitalist in Jamaica.

But then the lingering tensions, right? Like he was upset at her about talking about how Jamaicans like to smoke pot back in 2019. He lives like not that far away, but they don't see each other. So I don't know. Anyway, I'm just curious what you learned about the relationship and what influence you might have. Yeah, I learned a lot because there was a lot to learn because so little had been revealed.

In fact, just to fast forward, I mean, I heard a lot from people who know her very well, people who've worked with her, people who are friends of hers, offering thanks for that story because it's something she never talks about. And they'd always been dying of curiosity to learn more. Donald Harris was this very prominent economist who'd come over from Jamaica in his early

20s to go to University of California at Berkeley. He later went on to be the first black tenured professor of economics at Stanford. And then, as I said, to go back and help build the modern Jamaican economy for which he won the Order of Merit, the distinction in Jamaica that I think only 15 living individuals can possess. But he left the marriage when Kamala was five and it was deeply wounding to her mother. Again, as I said, she's a loyalist and she felt a particular loyalty towards her mother. And so it became a kind of binary choice, I think, very early on, even as the father

still attempted to have a kind of relationship with them. When Shama, the mother, Harris died in 2009, he didn't go to the funeral in 2014. When she married, he didn't go to the wedding, but instead, about a year and a half later or two years later, I think, had dinner to meet his new son-in-law. And, yeah, so what you're alluding has felt somehow given the cold shoulder by Harris, for example, getting an invitation to the inaugural of 2021, but the invitation not coming directly from her, but rather through a proxy. And so he decided not to attend as a result of that.

He's a very prideful guy, and by the way, so is she. And a number of his friends have insisted that their commonalities probably contribute to the estrangement from them, and yet to what you were saying, Tim. I mean, he lives 2.2 miles away from the naval observatory The official vice president's residence and yet they almost never talk. That makes me sad. I Want to like hang out with them. It's like it's okay We can do this their movies about this their books and movies about this or like we can do it Anyway, well, and I think you know that a lot of people read that story and were really drawn, I mean, this ridiculous readership and I think it's because it's a dysfunctional family.

Finally, for some people who've had difficulty finding anything relatable about Kamala Harris, here's a screwed up family to which they can relate. Joe Rogan, apparently the Keras campaign said that she would do it for an hour if he came to her and he's saying that he doesn't want to do that. He's only going to do it if she flew to Austin, blah, blah, blah. I don't really care about the negotiations there. I'm just curious on your thoughts because it ties in the very first question about her, about how she's comprehensible but a little bit inscrutable.

I think she'd be great in that setting. I kind of want her to do more because I feel like she has been very natural in the more informal interviews that she's done and it's kind of the policy interviews where sometimes she gets a little talking pointy, right? And so in some ways, I think that it would be a good vehicle for her, but I don't know. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. No, I'm with you. I'm with you.

I think that she has generally fared very well in less formal settings where she knows that she can be expansive. I think she would benefit from a three-hour interview as opposed to a one-hour interview where no one can say, sorry, we've got to keep moving on this. This goes back to when Harris was first being introduced into the San Francisco political world by her then boyfriend, soon to be Mayor Willie Brown. And there's no question that he opened some doors, as is the case for virtually any political

aspirant. Somebody helps him out. But then she had to earn it, and she could have been viewed as this sort of lesser chick on his shoulder, but proved herself to the people in that political universe, how capable and even how charismatic they were. I heard that particular word charismatic over and over from people who first met her in the big donor community. These were people who had a skepticism because of how she was being presented as Willie Brown's

girlfriend. I think that Rogan, in a lot of ways, would evidence a different kind of skepticism too, but I think that in something like that where she has plenty of time to explain herself, she could, I think, come across well. And by the way, Tim, I mean, you know, she's a football fan. I mean, she's a big 49ers fan and can talk at length about that. She's, you know, a big Warriors fan. She loves music.

So it's not as if she's just this, straight-laced individual who relies on talking points. No, I think she would thrive in that kind of setting. By all measure, sure, we can nitpick, but she's crushed it. She's just risen to the moment in the debate at the convention. You've covered and I've worked for candidates who looked good on paper that couldn't do that. I'm just curious, like when you were talking to all of her friends and the people that had known her,

was it, did everybody expect it? Were they surprised? Were they, you know, like, I knew she was gonna show you? I don't know, because sometimes you can't tell who's gonna have it and who doesn't. Right, yeah, I mean, look, they all felt vindicated and because they felt that she had really been short-shifted in how the press had misrepresented her in their view and they felt that this is the Kamala Harris they know. I actually found former mayor Willie Brown at the end of a craps game.

He had just played at a restaurant in San Francisco. And so I went over and talked to him for like half an hour. And he also felt that Brown never lost her words, had a lot to say on the subject of Kamala Harris. But he said she's the most prepared person ever. And you could see that, that she had like whole copy blocks memorized, that she had like any good prosecutor anticipated every potential eventuality and rose to the circumstances. He was really delighting in that too.

Now I think that for them, this was, I mean, look, it's out of body for all of them to see her at this high level. But in terms of her attributes and how they were shown to a national audience, no, they weren't surprised in the least. Mad Fientist What are the vibes about whether or not she's going to win? There, the people around her seem very confident that she'll win. I mean, as you know, Tim and the Democratic party writ large, uh, it's, you know, it's a time of hand wringing and, and, uh, I myself, you know, have

no gut impulse on this, you know, I cover the far right and I know how confident they are and Trump has sustained a great deal of interest within the party. I mean, the party loyalty towards Trump is kind of breathtaking, but she's not exactly fading from view herself and there is particularly high support amongst women. And so, 100,000 votes in seven states, we'll see. You towards the end, you kind of sum this up. Nonetheless, it's your trajectory rated with portent, the sort that sometimes seems like the fruit of a Hollywood script writer's overly caffeinated imagination. A daughter of immigrants, reverential of law and order, determinedly stoic, finds herself

pitted against a bombastic white male who's been accused and convicted of numerous criminal offenses and whose political vocabulary is a soundtrack of grievance and bigoted insults. The two have in common a desire for the presidency and nothing else. Is that right? Nothing else? I can't think of anything else. I'm open to any suggestions. You tell me.

I can't think of anything else either. It seems like a pretty crystal clear call to to me Robert Draper. You're wonderful Thank you so much for sharing this with us and for coming back on the board podcast. I'm sure we'll do it again soon I hope so always a pleasure. All right, everybody else will be back tomorrow with a special guest very excited for it We'll see you all that peace Do you feel alright? Heroes are someone you wonder where A little white pill is for your despair A little blood space between the stars A travel mouth goes to the expensive cars

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