Come back, Kamala. Come back.

Back to California, where you might have a future.

Away from Washington, D.C., where they will never give you a fair shake.

You’re politically trapped. You’re the unpopular vice president of an unpopular president. As a team, the two of you are headed to a catastrophic election defeat, even though your likely opponent is an insurrectionist ex-president held legally liable for rape and facing multiple criminal indictments.

Two-thirds of Democrats, and anyone who can read swing state polls, want your boss, Joe Biden, not to run for re-election, and instead open the door for a campaign that could produce a more electable nominee. But everyone knows Biden, 81, will run anyway.

What’s more appalling is that you are getting much of the blame for much of this. Biden’s many allies in politics and media suggest he can’t drop out because the nomination would go to you.

They note that you do worse in presidential polls than him. But they leave unmentioned the truth that you’re unpopular because your job as vice president is to represent him, and he’s given you peanuts to work with. He and his administration have never articulated a clear vision or direction for the country, or a second term. Biden’s team has bungled crises, like the Afghanistan withdrawal, and broken promises to reverse toxic Trump policies like rights-violating immigration restrictions and inflation-inducing trade protections.

You’ve loyally represented Biden on those issues, and gotten nothing but criticism for it. Your critics claim that you’ve failed to articulate convincing defenses for Biden’s misbegotten policies, especially on immigration. The real problem is that his policies—which include mass deportation and denial of asylum requests—are indefensible.

It’s time for you to face reality: If you remain on the ticket as Biden’s vice president, there’s no way out. If Biden loses, you’ll take the blame.

If Biden somehow wins, you won’t get a lick of credit: The credit will all go to Trump’s awfulness. You’d still be confined to a second term of representing an elderly, visionless president, leaving you too weak to make a plausible presidential bid yourself in 2028.

Sometimes the best way forward is to step back. You should announce, as soon as possible, that you will not be the Democratic nominee for vice president next year.

You do this by being blunt. Try this: “This country will sustain irreparable damage if Donald Trump becomes president again. And I don’t want to do anything that will help him. While I’ve done a much better job as vice president than what the media say, the polls show I’m unpopular with the public, and the president already has an uphill fight to win re-election. So, I have informed him I will not run for vice president. Now, he can pick a new running mate and reset this campaign.”

This will make you look selfless—you’re giving up a high office because you want to protect the country. You’ll win extensive praise, especially from Democrats desperate for a stronger ticket. Who knows? You might create pressure on Biden to reconsider his own decision to run.

And while you’d be closing a door in D.C., you’d be opening a bigger one here in California.

That’s because you’d be returning to a state that will soon need a new governor. Gavin Newsom is termed out in 2026, so his seat will be open.

If you ran for the job, you’d be the overwhelming favorite.

Some people will suggest it’s too early to think about the 2026 governor’s race. But the campaign is already well underway. Three state elected officials have already declared their candidacies. None of them should worry you. Two, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and Controller Betty Yee, have little name recognition. The third, State Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond, seems to be running to demonstrate his complete lack of self-awareness. He is known mostly for administrative incompetence and pandemic-era failures in education.

Two other politicians—Attorney General Rob Bonta and State Senate leader Toni Atkins—may jump in, but they can’t match you in star power or fundraising. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass could be a formidable governor, but she seems unlikely to run.

I suspect Californians would welcome you as governor—you’re more decisive and focused than Newsom. As governor, you’d set the agenda and decide the budget. With a legislature dominated by your fellow Democrats, you could get far more done than you’d ever manage as president in a polarized Washington.

And the job is much bigger and better than your current one. California governors enjoy great executive authority, so much so that their office has effectively become a second American presidency. You’d still be an international figure, but without having to abide an octogenarian president.

And, you could build a record that would make you a far stronger candidate for president later on, if that’s something you wish for your future.

Plus, you’d enjoy California weather.

Doesn’t that all sound much better than another thankless vice-presidential campaign, and perhaps another four years in the rain and misery of Washington?

Come back, Kamala. Before Christmas if you can.

The post Come Home, Kamala appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Twitter Live yesterday, journalist Dan Morain, author of the new biography Kamala’s Way, and Kimberly Peeler-Allen, co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization building the collective political power of Black women, visited Zócalo to discuss these topics and more in a wide-ranging conversation on the vice president.

Harris’s path from Oakland to the White House is a “California story,” said Morain, who has long covered California politics. He framed her career against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, the desegregation of schools, and the notoriously progressive political landscape of San Francisco.

“I’m not sure she could have risen in another state,” he added. “I do think that California increasingly is open to people who don’t look like me, who aren’t all white guys, and that’s great. Certainly, in 2010, when she ran for attorney general it was very close, but she won. I’m not sure she would have won in Texas. I’m not sure she would have won in New York or in any other states.”

During the discussion, Morain and Peeler-Allen also explored Harris’s campaign strategies for District Attorney, Attorney General, and the Senate, and what they reveal about Harris’s politics and evolution over time. “The DA and the Attorney General, they have to enforce the law—a U.S. Senator is not constrained that way, so she could be perhaps more herself,” Morain said. They also speculated what a future presidential run by Harris might look like, with Morain predicting her experiences from the 2020 campaign will help her shape a stronger campaign the next time she runs, whether that’s in four years or eight.

Before closing out the conversation, Morain offered a more personal insight into Harris. “One of the things I learned,” he said, in the course of reporting his book, “is she would reach out to people—in instances where they were in pain, where they were near the end of life, and just hold their hand in ways that the public would never know.”

Quoted with Dan Morain:

“When I think about [Kamala Harris], I think about transition. She’s a transitional figure in California, and I think that nationally she also is a transitional figure. Whether she becomes president is a whole other question … but what is going on in California will be going on in much of the rest of the country. We are a majority-minority state, have been for a long time—we’re a state of immigrants and a nation of immigrants, and I think we’re better for it.”

The post What Does Kamala Harris’s Rise Say About America?  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.

That’s the promising question behind the news that Karen Bass is a top contender to be the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

Bass is best known as a consensus-building and uncommonly kind politician who has served South L.A. in the State Assembly (including time as speaker) and in Congress over the past two decades. But far more important than her political career is Bass’ role in a larger story about South L.A.’s transformation over the past 30 years—and about what true leadership looks like in the 21st century.

South L.A., with 850,000 people covering 50 square miles, is the size of San Francisco; it’s also the last great working-class place in coastal California. And at the heart of its complicated story of improvement is Community Coalition.

Bass and other neighborhood activists helped start Community Coalition in 1990 amid the crack-cocaine epidemic. Since then, CoCo’s staff and many members have built it—through painstaking, block-to-block work that rarely gets media notice—into one of California’s most successful institutions.

From afar, CoCo might seem unfocused. It works on an incredibly broad array of issues, from trash clean-up to college access to drug treatment. But that’s because it organizes around the varied concerns of South L.A.’s diverse residents, not a poll-tested political agenda. The wonderful paradox of CoCo is that its focus on street-level organizing has made the organization extraordinarily successful in developing leaders for the city, the region, and the nation.

CoCo’s leadership development philosophy seems contrarian these days: You rise not via self-promotion and sloganeering, but by empowering your neighbors, and learning how to follow their lead. Bass and her unflashy, collaborative style embody this approach, but she is just one of hundreds of CoCo alumni in Southern California governments, non-profits, civic institutions, and business organizations. Among these leaders are Marqueece Harris-Dawson, now a powerful L.A. city councilmember, and Alberto Retana, a CoCo organizer who, after a stint in the Obama administration, returned to serve as CoCo’s president and CEO.

“Regardless of who’s in office and regardless of the conditions that oppress us,” Retana said in an online commemoration of CoCo’s 30th birthday this year, “we too must step up for South L.A. and keep fighting!”

Bass was a physician’s assistant and clinical instructor at USC’s medical school when she gathered neighborhood activists in a living room 30 years ago. These South L.A. residents were desperate to address crack cocaine’s toll on their community, from addiction to police abuse. So they started CoCo—originally Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment—in the belief that the people of South L.A. needed to be involved in creating solutions for such problems.

That premise still defines Community Coalition’s mission to “elevate the voices of our members, shift power to the community, and tackle the root causes of poverty, crime and violence.” And it informs CoCo’s three main methods—organizing, advocacy, and providing community services.

Flexibility and practicality distinguish CoCo among local institutions old and new. In its early efforts with the crack epidemic, CoCo tried multiple tactics before identifying liquor stores as the nexus of crime and drugs. After the 1992 Civil Unrest, which caused historic damage in South L.A., CoCo worked to prevent more than 150 liquor stores that had been destroyed from being rebuilt; many were replaced with housing, grocery stores, or laundromats.

From there, CoCo branched out—to almost everything. CoCo developed a successful youth organizing program, led efforts to help children stay with families instead of being forced into foster care, and originated the model for youth services that is now called “Summer Night Lights.” And CoCo was integral in successful battles to build more schools and provide more college prep classes in South L.A. and across California.

CoCo’s work often builds on itself. After CoCo started to organize the King Estates neighborhood with a focus on changing city nuisance abatement policy, residents also suggested revitalizing Martin Luther King Jr. Park. So CoCo started an Easter egg hunt in the park, which evolved into a music festival, Power Fest, a popular South L.A. event.

After Bass departed CoCo leadership in 2004 to enter politics, the group formed even more coalitions and further increased its reach. CoCo has sought to remake the justice system, protect immigrants, address structural racism, and enhance neighborhood power over land use and economic development.

Such work led CoCo into ballot measure politics, both locally and statewide. The organization was a major supporter of Proposition 30, a statewide tax hike in 2012. It organized to pass the criminal justice reform measures Propositions 47 and 57—and for the even more difficult work of implementing them. More recently, CoCo has gone national as a training resource for community work, with a new center to bring people from all over America to L.A. for fellowships in organizing.

In all of this, CoCo has been operating in a South L.A. that is undergoing rapid demographic change, with Black people leaving and Latinos arriving. The organization has taken great care to balance Black and Latino representation among its leaders, organizers, and even attendees at community meetings. USC sociologist Manuel Pastor has credited CoCo as one of the local multi-racial organizations making South L.A. a model of “ethnic sedimentation,” where racial and ethnic groups collaborate and build productively on each other’s histories, rather than of “ethnic succession,” where conflict arises as a new group replaces an old one.

The notion of South L.A. as a national model may surprise Americans who still associate the area with gangs and riots. But no place could be more relevant to a country that finds itself near rock bottom. Over the past 30 years, crime in South L.A. declined by more than two-thirds, health care access expanded, education improved, and transportation, arts, and food options exploded. Is there any doubt that the United States could benefit right now from emulating Community Coalition’s devotion to cultivating new leaders and building unity from the ground up?

If Joe Biden picks Bass as his running mate, CoCo organizers, past and present, could well be leaders in a new administration. Given their track record, the prospect of a South L.A. vice presidency might offer Americans something that is hard to find these days:

Hope.

The post Why South L.A. Has Earned the Vice Presidency appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.