An Honest Biography of Kamala Harris

The 20th of October 1964 saw the birth of Kamala Iyer Harris at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, a daughter to accomplished academics Shyamala and Donald Harris. Shyamala was already a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology at the nearby University of California at Berkeley.

Donald had been born in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, in 1923. He first studied at the University College of the West Indies, where he graduated with a University of London Degree. A British Empire scholarship took him to Berkeley where he proved to be a brilliant student, became a teaching fellow and rose to Professor of Economics at the prestigious Stanford University.

Donald also studied his family tree, which he published in an edition of the Jamaica Global. His grandfather married Christiana ‘Miss Chrissy’ Brown. Her father and grandfather were both called Hamilton Brown. The Browns – after which Browns Town is named – hailed from Northern Ireland’s Antrim and were well-established plantation owners. At the abolition of slavery, the Browns owned 1,120 slaves and received £24,000 in compensation, which would be the equivalent of £2.5 million in today’s money.

As for Shyamala’s roots, her father is P.V. Gopalan, a senior Indian civil servant and diplomat. A high caste native of Bombay, it was he who paid for Shyamala’s tuition at Berkeley.

When not visiting relatives in India and Jamaica, Shyamala, Donald and young Kamala lived in comfort in an apartment on Regent Street in Central Berkeley, close to the university. And visits to Zambia, where PV Gopalan served at the Indian mission. Later, the Harris’s Berkeley base became a duplex on Bancroft Way. Still in the university quarter, nowadays properties there sell for a cool $1,000,000.

By the time Kamala turned eight, Shyamala and Donald had divorced, Kamala had a younger sister called Maya and her middle name of Iyer had been changed to Devi. To encourage racial integration, Kamala was bussed to an elementary school a couple of miles from home – a tale recounted in her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold”. This, overall, tries too hard to tick cliched Democrat identity boxes by overplaying her colour and re-locating her to working-class Oakland rather than preppy Berkeley.

Aged twelve, Kamala, her sister and mother moved to Montreal, where Shyamala took up positions at McGill University and the Jewish Hospital. Kamala attended Notre Dame des Neiges school (she is fluent in French) before moving to the more middle-class Westmount High School, where she is remembered as a popular and successful pupil, bound for big things.

Following her graduation in 1986, Kamala Harris enrolled at Washington DC’s Howard, a black college where her mother had been a guest lecturer and had friends on the faculty. The Political Science and Economics student also interned on Capitol Hill as a mailroom clerk for California Senator Alan Cranston.

After graduation, a top law school called: The University of California Hastings School, where Kamala ‘earned’ her place via a programme for disadvantaged students. While at UC Hastings, she flew high, serving as president of their chapter of the Black Law Students Association and interning at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office.

The DA’s office offered her a permanent position conditional on her successful graduation. However, she failed her final exams and continued in a clerical capacity whilst studying for a successful re-sit the next year. Kamala Harris was called to the California Bar in 1990. In her memoir, Kamala skips over the following near-decade in a single sentence.

In 1998, after nine years in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, I was recruited across the bay to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.

The leap allows for an important omission. During some of those nine years, Harris was the mistress of California Democrat royalty, Sacramento State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who has been instrumental in promoting her career. At half Brown’s age, 30 to 60, what first attracted Kamala Harris to the Democrat Kingmaker?

In May 1994, Brown appointed Harris to a $97,088-a-year position on the Unemployed Insurance Appeals Board. After six months, she resigned, taking up a new job the following week, also at the behest of Brown, with the California Medical Assistance Commission (CMAC). Two meetings a month, $99,000 per annum. Brown wrote on the matter for San Francisco’s SFGate news-based website.

Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago. Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly Speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for District Attorney in San Francisco.

USA Today reports between 1994 and 1998, Harris received more than $400,000 owing to positions granted to her by Brown. Brown also gave her a BMW. A larger-than-life character, Brown’s shameless, loud and endless self-promotion includes claiming to be the ‘Renowned speaker of the California Assembly, and widely regarded as the most influential African American politician of the late twentieth century.’

Willie Lewis Brown Jr served in the California State Assembly between 1964 and 1995, being re-elected 16 times. For the final 15 years of his service, he was the Speaker of the Sacramento-based institution. Upon being replaced by a Republican, he was elected, then re-elected, as mayor of San Francisco. In his first act as mayor, he commissioned a $5,735 bust of himself to sit on a pedestal at the entrance to City Hall. His 60th birthday celebrations included an eight-foot-high cake depicting Mount Rushmore ‘improved’ by the addition of his likeness.

Famous for his $2,600 Brioni suit and $400 snap-brim fedora hat, at one time Brown owned nine cars, including a Porsche and a Ferrari. Once asked what he planned to do for the less fortunate, he quipped, “Keep out of their way at Kmart.” The USA Today article regarding the gifted BMW also included the telling line, “Brown – whose career was dogged by corruption allegations.”

When Brown became mayor of San Francisco, Kamala Harris was dumped. She kept the $99,000 a year job, while the long-suffering and dignified Mrs Blanche Brown kept her husband and became the first lady of San Francisco.

Ms Harris’s memoir re-starts in 1998 when she leaves her CMAC position and moves to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. In 2003, she ran for District Attorney herself in a bruising election campaign which included references to ‘bimbo’, ‘sugar daddy’, ‘spurned ex-lover’ and ‘Willie Brown hack.’ On the credit side, SFWeekly described her as,

A well-regarded criminal and civil prosecutor with an enviable record on domestic violence and sexual abuse issues.

But the publication went on to point out her opponents were well-established names, whereas she was unknown beyond a local political, social and legal elite. Pretending to be from Oakland cut no ice. Although her upper-middle-class background, and campaigning in the poorer areas in THAT car told against her, Harris ran a slick campaign with Brown and his campaign manager both donating and recommending her to other wealthy donors.

Monies were funnelled into an expenditure committee called the ‘California Voter Project’, which bought radio time, window signs, bumper stickers and ran ads critical of Harris’s opponents. Harris finished a close second in the primary election, but being the sole anti-incumbent candidate in the runoff, then won comfortably by 56% to 43%.

In 2007, she stood again, unopposed, and in 2010 stood for election as California Attorney General. According to Wiki, after a protracted period of counting mail-in and provisional ballots, her opponent conceded before all of the votes had been counted. Harris triumphed on a 0.7% margin. To keep the votes coming in, Harris talked and acted tough, resulting in critics claiming all she ever did for black people was to lock them up.

But it worked. In 2016, Harris won election to the US Senate in a landslide, having been ahead in the polls for all of the campaign and having raised more than twice as much funding (almost $10,000,000) as any of her opponants.

In 2018, she was appointed to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where her televised performances underwhelmed but were over-praised. During the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica hearings of 2018, this reviewer noted:

Her questioning was well-informed (compared with other, near-brain-dead, senators) and well-prepared. However, she tended to grandstand and pull the old lawyer’s trick of trying to play catch-out by concentrating on one word or phrase. A tactic which impresses no one except other lawyers.

In January 2019, Harris announced she would run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. After a strong start and initial successful fund-raising, her campaign faltered. A brief TV debate blip in her favour – after mentioning being bussed during the days when fellow candidate Joe Biden spoke out against – failed to provide sufficient traction. Her poll rating dropped to below 4%, with an embarrassing end to her campaign coming as early as December, when fifteen other Democrat hopefuls were still in the race.

Eight months later, nomination-winner Joe Biden needed a young, non-white, female running mate. With a shortage of black female Democrat senators, no black governors and only one black female at the start of the primaries, Harris became an unlikely shoo-in to run for 49th Vice President of the United States.

Following the steal of 2020, Harris was tasked with solving the Southern Border crisis. She failed. Her retail skills with the voters are awful. She is Hilary-style unpopular – especially with her own staff. Beyond the hysterical anybody-but-Trump over-enthusiasm of the mainstream media – and the resulting dishonest Kamala biographies – polling shows The Donald ahead of the Democrats in all seven key swing states expected to decide the 2024 presidential election. In three of them, Harris polls even worse than Biden.

What has changed since Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race are the energy levels of senior Democrats and their big donors. Expect the Democrat election-manipulating machine to be cranked up to the max in the hope of another steal this coming November.
 

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