You’ve complained publicly that you’re overwhelmed with texts and calls, and I understand why. With the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, you must appoint someone to fill the final two years of her United States Senate term. Everyone in politics wants this gig, and that’s a lot of pressure.

So let me take this burden off your hands. You don’t have to make the excruciating decision to elevate one of your politician buddies over all the others. The right candidate is no politician, and is hereby making himself available.

That perfect candidate is me.

You may find the idea absurd at first. You might ask: Why in heaven’s name would I bestow a U.S. Senate seat on some smart-ass columnist who makes fun of me publicly, has no government experience, and currently occupies the esteemed elected office of School Site Council chair at his local elementary school?

The answer to your question lies in that absurdity. Only a crazy choice for the open seat is capable of meeting this crazy moment for you and for California.

Let’s start with your own political interests. Our state offers literally thousands of highly accomplished people, many of them your donors, who could see themselves in the Senate. Dozens of smart, honest Democratic politicians—from U.S. House representatives like Karen Bass or Katie Porter to mayors like London Breed or Robert Garcia to statewide elected officials like Xavier Becerra or Betty Yee—are desperate to rise to higher office, too, after decades of waiting for the Feinstein-Pelosi generation to get out of the way.

You’re in a terrible position because there is no obvious best choice, and since you can pick only one, your choice is guaranteed to breed resentment. There’s a real risk that some terrific Democrat you reject will end up running against you for governor in 2022! Right now you don’t need any more enemies, with all the unpopular choices you face in dealing with COVID, a recession, and the budget.

So don’t fall into the no-win trap of picking a highly qualified, highly ambitious Democrat! Instead, pick me, an unqualified journalist who is not a member of any political party and has zero political ambitions!

I would fill the seat for two years while those Democrats battle amongst themselves to take the seat in 2022. The voters would decide, not you. Maybe I would develop Potomac fever and try to run myself, but you could kill off my candidacy just by quoting my past columns.

Now, your political advisors will tell you that appointing me would make you look bad, because I would be seen as a joke. But that perception would be the central virtue of my appointment. By sending me to Washington, you’d be standing up for California, and sending an unmistakable message to the country:

Yes, our new senator is a joke—but nowhere near as big a joke as the U.S. Senate, or American pretensions of democracy.

In other words, you’d be saying that California—facing a deadly pandemic, deep societal divisions, and the existential threat of climate change—can no longer tolerate a federal system that cancels our best efforts to protect our people and save the world.

The Senate is the embodiment of that undemocratic system.

It’s indefensible that California and its 40 million people get the same two Senate seats as Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, Delaware, or the Dakotas, even though each of those states has fewer people than Fresno County.

It’s intolerable that a party hostile to California holds majority control of the Senate, even though that party represents only a minority of the voters, and of the people.

It’s insufferable for California to receive the most unequal representation of any province in any federal system outside South America.

It’s been unbearable to watch this democratically fraudulent Senate back a president who lost California and the popular vote—even as he violated the rights of our residents, sabotaged the census, and lied about everything from our elections to our forests.

And it’s impossible not to feel rage that the Senate approved three of that president’s Supreme Court nominees—one of whom faced credible testimony that he assaulted a California psychologist, and another who was rushed through in record time, even as the Senate refused to send aid to California’s collapsing cities and schools.

Governor, there is no way that California should do anything that makes the U.S. Senate look good. But that’s exactly what you’d be doing if you appointed a great public servant.

Just imagine if you picked Secretary of State Alex Padilla. He would bring MIT-trained brilliance and a record of improving California’s voting system to a body that insults our democratic intelligence. Padilla, whose parents emigrated from Mexico, also would bestow California’s attractive diversity on a Senate that, extensive studies show, favors white people in smaller states and contributes to the systemic racism that plagues our country.

Should we really be sending the Senate our best?

Padilla would be wasting his time and talents in a Senate controlled by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who will spend the next two years blocking the new president’s priorities. Even in the face of such obstructionism, Padilla would remain his polite and diplomatic self, embracing the “unity” now championed by President-elect Biden. But don’t forget that Biden, a former senator from tiny Delaware, benefited from the anti-democratic system that oppresses the Golden State.

We Californians would all be better off if I—or another unserious choice, like a comedian with a great anti-Senate set, or one of those clowns up in Blue Lake—were dispatched to the Capitol as a human middle finger to this anti-democratic monstrosity.

If that middle finger were me, I’d be happy to vote how you like on whatever scraps of legislation McConnell lets through. I could even report back to you discreetly on Dianne’s health. Beyond that, I would put all my writerly energies into attacking the Senate in which I would sit.

I wouldn’t deliver a speech without calling for the dismantling of the body. I would constantly quote the late, long-serving congressman John Dingell, who argued for the Senate’s abolition, and Alexander Hamilton, who criticized the Senate because it represented states, not people.

“As states are a collection of individual men, which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or the artificial beings resulting from their composition?” Hamilton said. “Nothing could be more preposterous or absurd than to sacrifice the former to the latter.”

And if nothing is more preposterous than the U.S. Senate, then your appointee for that open seat can’t be too preposterous. Governor, you know all too well that fighting fire requires fire. Why not fight the absurdity of the American system by sending an absurdity to Washington?

Your fellow Californian,

Joe Mathews

The post Make Me California’s Next Senator appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Unlike Robert Redford,” said event moderator Julian E. Barnes, national security reporter at the New York Times, guest Asha Rangappa, a Yale national security law scholar and former FBI counterintelligence agent, “knows what we do now.”

Barnes then turned to Rangappa and opened the discussion by asking her to take stock of our national security institutions after four years of a Trump administration. How badly politicized are they now, and how hard will it be to undo that damage?

Nothing is broken for good, said Rangappa. However, she expects that the Department of Justice and the FBI, in particular, will take time to walk back from the politicization introduced by this administration.

“I think simply not being the target of vocal attacks by the person sitting in the Oval Office will go a long way,” she said, “but it’s going to be a challenge because under a Biden administration, there may be crimes uncovered involving people from the prior administration, and this once again will place the Department of Justice and the FBI in political crosshairs, even if they are pursuing legitimate operations.”

There’s a tradition in American politics, said Barnes, where the prior administration isn’t prosecuted when a new administration comes to power. He asked Rangappa if she thinks president-elect Biden should respect that history.

There’s too much that needs to be looked at, Rangappa said, pointing, for instance, to the paper trail that led to migrant children being taken from their families. “That to me is in the realm of when we discovered the [George] W. [Bush] administration had authorized torture,” she said.

The best way to determine if the government should take legal action against the Trump administration, she said, is to bring in a special counsel who can figure out what actual violations of federal law were committed. “I know we’re kind of special counseled out,” she joked, however, she added, “you really want someone who is insulated from political influence and has a very clear mandate that they follow.”

“That’s the best we’re going to be able to do short of letting it go, which I don’t think will be an option,” Rangappa continued.

Before the Trump administration leaves office, Barnes asked, is Rangappa concerned about any 11th-hour declassifications?

Yes, she said. What concerns her most is that the administration’s selective declassifications are all a “constant attempt to displace blame on the 2016 interference from Russia to Ukraine or some other entity.” That is one of the goals of declassifications before Trump leaves office, she believes: “to make the case [that] this didn’t happen.”

These 11th-hour declassifications, Rangappa said, will ultimately benefit Vladimir Putin the most. This information not only helps Russia with plausible deniability, she said; it primarily will help the Russians identify leaks and could potentially put sources in danger. “That’s what worries me.”

Looking further ahead, Barnes asked what can be done to prevent the norms that Trump broke during his presidency from being broken again in the future.

Strengthening protections for inspector generals of the intelligence community is one avenue, said Rangappa, pointing out, for instance, that the impeachment proceedings only happened because inspector general Michael Atkinson alerted Congress to the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s communications with the president of Ukraine. “Inspector generals are a vehicle for Congress to learn about misconduct in the executive branch,” she said. “What we saw was an attempt to cut that channel off at the knees by installing loyalists in that position or creating dubious legal justifications for not passing on whistleblower complaints.”

Audience questions piled in for Rangappa, asking her to address everything from whether Trump might attempt a self-pardon to the future of the Department of Homeland Security.

Self-pardon, Rangappa said, “depends on whether Trump is going to be a rational actor or a not-rational actor.” Rangappa also thinks it’s possible the president may step down at some point—“maybe even the day before inauguration”—so that Pence would be able to grant him, his children, and other players, like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, pardons. “That I think would be much more airtight,” she said.

Another audience member wanted to know how worried the intelligence community is about secrets Trump could reveal after leaving office. “It’s absolutely a real concern,” said Rangappa, noting the president’s $421 million of debt. “From an intelligence standpoint, he’s vulnerable, and he has valuable information that other countries would be very tempted [by]—and they’d be dumb not to try and exploit.”

One of the last questions of the discussion returned to the intelligence community itself, and how intact it is at this point.

The damage is mostly at the top, said Rangappa. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned of the last four years, the thing that has saved us is our vast bureaucracy,” she said. After all, it was a CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the Ukraine call, and rank-and-file agents who continued the investigation. “Our civil service, our bureaucrats—these are the people that are making our country run,” she said. If a critical mass of people were to exit, then the culture of these organizations might change, but that hasn’t happened. “I think right now the culture of these organizations is mostly still nonpartisan,” she said.

The post After a Historic Election, Asha Rangappa Looks Ahead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In India, the world’s most populous democracy, there isn’t anything like an “Election Day.” There’s an election schedule.

India’s 2019 general election happened in seven phases over more than a month, and it took almost another week after the last polling day before Indians knew the winner. With 911 million people eligible to vote and voter turnout at more than 67 percent, the process necessitated some 11 million officials, including security forces, pressed into service, some of whom travel to remote corners of the country by foot, train, and even an elephant or two. It’s been called the biggest management event in the world. It’s also very much a 21st-century affair.

India began introducing electronic voting machines in 1998, and since 2004, they’ve been used in all general and state assembly elections. They’re fitted with GPS devices to ensure they don’t get hijacked, and the machines come with a voter-verifiable paper audit trail, which allows officials to make sure that the electronic results are secure. (Five percent of paper results are checked against the electronic tallies.) Voters have their fingers marked with indelible ink so they do not vote more than once, and ballots are kept under guard until counting day. Despite occasional claims of hacking and court challengers some studies have shown the machines have actually cut down on electoral fraud and led to a dip in vote shares of some incumbent parties.

At a time when the U.S. is in the news for reducing voting booths and ballot drop off centers, it’s incredible to think that a polling station was set up in the Gir forest of Gujarat in India for just one voter. That’s because Indian law requires every voting citizen have a polling place accessible within 2 kilometers (just under 1.25 miles) of their home—a rule that applies even to the caretaker of a lonely temple in the middle of the forest. Foreign journalists offer up anecdotes like these as part of the colorful exotica of elections, India’s so-called “festival of democracy” (an elephant always helps in that regard)—but there’s something much more serious at work. These efforts might seem over-the-top but ultimately, they try to ensure that when the results are announced, citizens who voted accept them as legitimate. On April 11, 2019, voters in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, on the northeastern extremity of India, cast their ballots and went back to their daily lives knowing full well that they would not know the results until late May. But they retained faith in the democratic process and their vote’s worth.

It was not always this way. Parts of India were notorious for electoral fraud. Musclemen would capture electoral booths and stuff ballot boxes with votes marked in the name of their candidate. Even now, there are reports of voter intimidation and bribery. Every election brings up stories of entire families missing from voter lists. But overall, faith in the electoral process has increased by leaps and bounds ever since a no-nonsense, by-the-rulebook bureaucrat took over as India’s 10th chief election commissioner. T.N. Seshan, a longtime civil servant who ran elections from 1990 through 1996, dispatched central police forces to polling stations to prevent ballot boxes from being stolen. He introduced voters’ photo ID cards, enforced spending limits, and went after politicians who tried to bribe or intimidate voters. He even made candidates clean up the electoral graffiti they painted on city walls. Most importantly, he asserted the Election Commission of India’s autonomy like no commissioner had done before him, even though politicians called him arrogant and tried to clip his wings.

The multiple-stage election that resulted allows security forces and electoral officials to move from one part of the country to another monitoring the process. There are issues—the role of big money in elections, fake news, the tug-of-war over the autonomy of the Election Commission—but by and large, Indians have faith that their elections are more or less free, fair, and peaceful. As Mukulika Banerjee, anthropologist and author of Why India Votes? pointed out, in a country riven by deep social inequality, election day is one day in the calendar when you can experience what equality feels like. “By pressing that button, I prove that I exist even if nothing in government policy seems to remember that people like me exist,” she said.

That faith in democracy is the real issue here. For someone watching the American elections from afar, it’s mindboggling that “Will you accept the election results?” is actually a question that needs to be asked of the candidates running for the highest elected office in the land.

Ever since the infamous hanging chads of Florida in Bush v. Gore, Americans have come to view electoral delays with ideological suspicion. There have been persistent conspiracy theories about electronic voting manipulation. And now the bogey of potential postal ballot fraud has been added to the mix, even though the biggest problems bedeviling mailed-in ballots are errors, not fraud. In 2012, the New York Times reported that mailed-in absentee ballots were rejected at double the rate of actual in-person votes because of issues like signature mismatch or postmark problems.

But the conversation has not moved to how to make the process less prone to error so that no voter is left behind. Instead, elected U.S. officials, who should be at the forefront of building public confidence about the electoral process, have chosen to preemptively sow doubts about it. They’ve chosen to weaken the entire democratic edifice for short-term political gains.

This year, Donald Trump told the Republican National Convention unequivocally, “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.” He has called mail-in voting a scam and claimed without any proof that at least 3 million undocumented immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, a number that neatly encompasses the number of votes by which he lost the popular vote. The fact that the president might not accept the results of the election is even part of the narrative of the 2020 presidential election is a sign of something rotten in the state of democracy itself.

India, in an odd way, having lived with tainted elections, seems to have grasped what Americans have not—faith in the legitimacy of the process is, in the long run, more important than the election result.

Take India’s former prime minister Indira Gandhi, who was always eager to blame a mysterious “foreign hand” for everything from spreading her opposition’s propaganda to stymieing development. She even suspended normal democratic processes in 1975 by imposing a state of emergency. But when the Indian electorate delivered a stinging blow to her party in 1977 and she lost her own parliamentary seat—a rebuff she had not anticipated—even the autocrat accepted the people’s verdict.

That the 2020 election is unfolding over weeks might feel unprecedented to many Americans. But what is truly unprecedented here is that Americans are being actively encouraged to lose faith in their own democratic process by their own elected officials. That’s why it’s crucial this November onward that the U.S. learn from democracies like India about how to table election anxiety and accept that democracy delayed is not democracy denied.

The post What America Can Learn From India’s Weeks-Long Elections appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was March 1994, and after 12 years of bloody civil war that left more than 75,000 dead or disappeared, Salvadorans were heading to the polls for the first democratic election in a generation. The United Nations peace accord signed two years earlier mandated the election and the presence of international observers.

I was one of hundreds of them. I’d volunteered to travel to El Salvador from my home in California to share the expertise I had gained from working on voting rights at the ACLU.

The voters, most of whom had come to the city from far-flung country villages for the election, continued to wait patiently in line, even as the early sun drove the temperature up on the treeless street.

When a red Toyota pickup with smoked windows slowly drove down the middle of the dusty street, I watched the line collectively recoil as people instinctively withdrew from the curb.

The truck was the signature vehicle of the infamous death squads, who had wreaked terror on the Salvadoran countryside for more than a decade, targeting anyone associated with the revolutionary Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, including peasant organizers, union members, and—as those in line clearly feared—poor people who dared to vote.

The courage and persistence of the voters I encountered in El Salvador reminded me of the fight for voting rights by African Americans during the Civil Rights movement. And the intimidation they faced recalled the threats, snarling dogs, raw display of armed power, and brutality against those who dared to exercise their right to vote that Americans long hoped we’d left far behind.

I hadn’t thought too much about that moment when the pickup truck cruised by a quarter century ago—until this month. Then I heard the U.S. president, during a nationally televised debate, urge white supremacist groups to “stand back and stand by,” and refuse to give guarantees about a peaceful transfer of power while warning of voter fraud.

And I heard his son’s call to action to supporters. “We need every able-bodied man and woman to join the Army for Trump’s election security operation,” said Donald Trump Jr. in a “defend your ballot” ad. “We need you to help us watch them.”

Those statements, with their implicit threat of violence upon voters, swiftly brought me back to El Salvador 26 years ago.

On our first morning in the capital, San Salvador, for training, a few of us walked to the market before collecting our United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) credentials. We wandered the city streets, passing pastel-colored buildings pockmarked with bullet holes. We heard the cries of vendors hawking cheese, shoe polish, head bands, baby clothes, watches, cassette tapes, and T-shirts. The aftermath of a wartime economy.

A faint smell of smoke grew stronger as we approached the plaza. Shopkeepers swept up broken glass. The night before, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA party, held a rally that ended in fistfights, a stabbing, and a fire. Strings of red, white, and blue flags waved limply across the park over a stack of smoldering tires.

At the market, I bought a pink straw hat. Everyone said San Miguel, where I’d be going to observe the elections, was the hottest place in El Salvador.

The credentialing center was at El Presidente, the fanciest hotel in San Salvador. The colonnaded building on top of a hill, surrounded by flame trees and magenta bougainvillea, was a stark contrast to the streets of the war-torn capital. Uniformed doormen greeted chauffeured cars delivering wealthy families with chubby, well-dressed children and huge carts of matching luggage. They were returning from Miami, New Orleans, and Los Angeles to vote.

As we waited in long lines for our credentials in the air-conditioned, marble-floored lobby, we chatted with international observers from Europe and Latin America. The ONUSAL rep instructed us to keep our credentials around our necks and visible at all times. They would identify and protect us.

The next day we attended a training at the Convent of San Jacinto on the outskirts of the capital. One wall was painted with a larger-than-life Christ breaking a rifle over his bended knee.

Our role on election day was to stand near the polling booths and create a visible presence so that the voters would feel safe; anyone who tried to menace voters would be deterred by the international observers. We were to take careful notes of any harassment or intimidation and report it to an official. We were not to approach anyone causing trouble or engage in any arguments. After being issued two bright blue shirts labeled Misión Observadora, we climbed into vans headed to our assigned spots.

San Miguel is a three-hour ride from the capital. The guardrails and boulders along the Pan American Highway were covered with election signs and slogans: a white star on a red background for the FMLN; a cross in red, white, and blue for ARENA; a white fish on green for the Christian Democrats—and a smattering of other colors and initials denoting the multitude of smaller parties in the race.

As we approached the Rio Lempa, we passed the charred remains of a large concrete-and-steel bridge. Our driver crept cautiously across a temporary low-lying, wooden pontoon bridge. He explained that the guerrillas had blown up the old bridge a few years earlier to keep the Army from crossing.

San Miguel, then a city of 180,000, was surrounded by farming villages, cornfields, and sugar cane. Our small hotel sat across from a barracks that once housed 15,000 soldiers, who had been financed, equipped, and trained by the United States. The heat was intense, and everything smelled like insecticide—the supermarket, the inside of the van, even the drinking water. At our local orientation, a doctor reminded us to watch out for sunstroke, sunburn, and bites from scorpions, snakes, and bugs. The region had just suffered a cholera epidemic, and she cautioned us not to drink the water or eat shellfish.

Over the next few days, we met with representatives of each of the parties. It seemed that everyone in town—except for us, the “official observers”—knew that the head of the local ARENA party, Eduardo, was a leader of the death squads in San Miguel. Eduardo followed us around and hovered over meetings where he did not belong. No one told him to leave.

The day before the elections, I was asked to translate at a meeting with local representatives of the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE), who were in charge of all the technical aspects of the electoral process. After five minutes or so, Eduardo sauntered in and sat down at a desk on the side of the small room. He wore a light blue polo shirt, a large gold cross around his neck, and a black leather fanny pack with the handle of a pistol clearly protruding. He lit up a Marlboro and fiddled idly with the phone; you could tell he wasn’t really using it. He wanted us all to know he was listening, especially to the local TSE workers’ answers to our questions.

As I translated, I heard myself start to stammer. I forgot the word for birth certificate, even though I’d used it 20 times in the past week. Fe de nacimiento, fe de Nacimiento, I repeated to myself as sweat dripped down my back.

Members of our delegation asked their prepared questions, and I continued struggling with words I should have known. Eduardo watched me. He watched the local delegates. I translated questions about ballot boxes, chairs, the ban on firearms and alcohol on election day. Inside I was panicking. He stayed in my line of sight.

Our guide had told us that, one day on his way to high school, he saw eight corpses on the street in San Miguel. How many was this man responsible for?

Eduardo finally got up, and as he left, he slapped one of the TSE officials on the back and whispered into his ear. I felt faint and desperate to get out of this dark, airless office.

By the time we concluded, I was trembling. With clammy palms, I shook hands with everyone. They seemed relieved that the meeting was over—whether it was because they had so much work to do before election day or, like me, were grateful to be out from under Eduardo’s watchful eye, I wasn’t sure.

That panicky feeling stayed with me the next morning as I watched thousands of Salvadorans line up to vote.

My dread abated somewhat as a steady stream of voters approached the polling booths without being harassed. Once the polls opened, Avenida Roosevelt was closed off, so no more vehicles could pass. Surly looking men in mirrored sunglasses occasionally strutted through the crowd, and though they sneered at us foreign observers, they kept their distance from the voters. Throughout the day we heard complaints of people’s names missing from the electoral lists, a shortage of ballots, sealed boxes of ballots being delivered already open to the TSE headquarters—irregularities that may have affected the outcome. But we witnessed no violence.

No presidential candidate received an absolute majority that day; in a second election held a month later, the ARENA party took power. Hearing the news back in the States, many of us were incredulous that a party associated with the death squads and other human rights abuses could have won the popular vote. The official U.N. report cited the irregularities: Hundreds of thousands of voters had been disenfranchised due to missing birth certificates or registration cards. The threat of violence was not the only obstacle the Salvadoran voters had faced.

These past few weeks I’ve watched footage of people all across the United States lining up to vote, with the president and his son’s warnings echoing in my ears alongside Eduardo’s presence while I translated in San Miguel.

The U.N. is not here, but organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights are recruiting lawyers and poll watchers across the country.

Tens of thousands have volunteered.

The post An Election Observer in El Salvador Looks Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This column is not an endorsement of the vice presidential nominee. But you can ignore all the anxiety on the left about her shifting positions. And you can dismiss the never-ending racist and sexist conspiracies from the right about her origins. You can feel confident that she’ll perform well in the campaign ahead.

Because her heart is from the right place.

Could there be there any better preparation for running a country as insane as the United States than a political career in a state as crazy as California?

Lord knows, you shouldn’t trust Kamala Harris—she is both a politician and a lawyer, two professions that deserve every jaundiced ounce of your skepticism. But you should trust the Golden State that made her—as a classroom for dealing with the widest variety of people, and as a proving ground for navigating the endless complications of 21st-century life.

Let’s say you were put in charge of producing an American vice president, which is to say someone who could step in as president and make all the tricky and difficult decisions that high office requires.

Where better to raise her than the Berkeley of the late 1960s and 1970s? Just by moving around the city, you would expose her—as Kamala Harris’s mother did—to all kinds of people, rich and poor, activists and academics, those with brilliant ideas for changing the world, and others who were off-their-rockers. You would make hers a mixed-race family, and her parents would be immigrant scholars from places on opposite ends of the world—say Jamaica and India—so she would understand America in that deep way that only new arrivals do.

You would have her live in an integrated community with renters and homeowners and the middle-class and the working-class. You’d have her attend a newly integrated elementary school, learn piano and ballet from real artists, and clean test tubes in the university labs while going to Hindu temple and learning hymns at the 23rd Avenue Church of God.

Maybe the vice president you were training would live in a foreign city for a few years (in Kamala’s case, Montreal), and attend college in our nation’s capital. But when she came back for law school, you’d send her to a place like UC Hastings. There, stuck between the powerful people of San Francisco City Hall and the state Supreme Court, and the desperate and destitute of the Tenderloin, she’d get constant reminders that official decisions have consequences.

You’d have her start as a prosecutor first in Alameda County and then back in San Francisco, so she could see the horrors that ensue when societies and families fail. And you’d assign her to the most wrenching cases, involving domestic violence, sex crimes, and the abuse of children, so she could understand the depths of human vulnerability.

To steel her for America’s nasty politics, you’d have her launch her electoral career in San Francisco, with the toughest political culture of any city in the state. You would not give her an open seat, but rather force her to beat an incumbent district attorney—her former boss—in a tricky, three-person race.

You’d have her stay close to the powerful and local political machine, learning (and borrowing donors) from its greatest practitioner, Willie Brown, while also forcing her to figure out how to separate herself from the insiders and interests, and how to collaborate with reformers. You would hope the experience would teach her to survive in a political arena of attacks and corruption—and it would. One San Francisco political strategist compared Harris to Tim Robbins’s character in The Shawshank Redemption, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”

And once she’d triumphed in California’s Sodom, San Francisco, you’d send her down to its Gomorrah, Los Angeles. You’d have her run for state attorney general against a very popular district attorney, a Los Angeles Republican named Steve Cooley, who had locked up the endorsements of all the state’s law enforcement organizations. And because a Republican who wins Los Angeles wins statewide, you’d have her all but move to a city where almost no one knew her name and send her into neighborhoods deeply suspicious of outsiders and prosecutors. You’d make her find a way to beat the hometown boy on his home turf.

You’d send her, victorious, to Sacramento, where she would work with the most experienced governor in history, Jerry Brown, one of a group of geriatrics—Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi—who dominated politics. And she would study these elders, learn how they got things done quietly, and figure out how to seize some of the power they held. Her work as attorney general would also force her to learn the whole nation-state of California, with its hyper-complicated regions that are bigger than most states.

Then you’d have her run again, statewide, for the U.S. Senate. And to make it challenging, you’d put her in a strange top-two system that would have her competing not against a hapless Republican—but rather against another popular Democrat, from the state’s largest ethnic group.

And in surveys just a few months before the November election, you’d have Kamala Harris—the leading Black politician in a state with a small and declining Black population—losing Latino votes by 25 points to Loretta Sanchez. But then she and her team would go quietly to the border, to Imperial County’s primarily Latino community, and test every message of hers they could. And wouldn’t you know it? By November, she would have figured out how to be more popular with Latinos than her opponent.

Through all of this, she would taste every flavor of California crazy, while retaining her powerful calm, and her sense of humor.

Of course, so many varied and challenging experiences would make her cautious, and disciplined about protecting herself from attacks. And in a polarized time, such caution—even coming from, by voting record, the second most progressive person in the U.S. Senate—would sometimes look like moderation. This would be quite a distinguishing trick, at least in California. Most people here like to sound progressive but are actually quite moderate, while she would manage to look like a moderate while being quite progressive.

But the appearance of moderation would draw its own attacks, from progressive partisans, and end her presidential campaign before it got started. Of course, abandoning her presidential campaign—a first defeat—would allow her to regroup, to forge new alliances and address weaknesses, and win the vice presidential nomination.

And she would be ready for whatever came next. California, after preparing her for nearly all her life, had already made sure of it.

The post Don’t Trust Kamala Harris; Trust the California That Made Her appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.