Kamala Harris’ career has been dogged by controversies with critics claiming she was given a boost by her relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s

As Kamala’s former lover – who’s 31 YEARS her senior – demands Biden make her president NOW… all the sordid secrets America’s ‘Momala’ hopes you’ve forgotten

Isabelle Stanley – The Daily Mail July 22, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris‘s ex-lover has a bright idea.

Why wait for 2024? Kamala should be president – right now!

Former San Francisco mayor and notorious playboy, Willie Brown, 90, who is 31 years Harris’s senior and dated her in the 1990s, summoned local reporters for an impromptu news conference on Sunday.

Speaking outside John’s Grill, where he holds court with the city’s political elite, just moments after President Joe Biden‘s surprise announcement that he’d suspended his campaign, Brown told journalists that the president shouldn’t just cede the Democratic nomination to Kamala, but he should make her commander-in-chief immediately

‘[Harris’s] chances go up if [Biden] would at this moment say not only am I no longer the candidate, I’m no longer the president — she is,’ Brown said.

Sounding more like a doting teacher than a past lover, he heaped praise on Harris, telling The San Francisco Chronicle: ‘In all the jobs she’s had… she’s always been outstanding.’

It’s a sharp change of tune from Brown, who advised Harris in 2020 to turn down Biden’s invitation to be his running mate, telling her the second seat was a ‘dead end’.

But his about-face is in line with a general shift that’s now underway in the Democratic party – as left-wing political operators and a sympathetic media desperately rush to rehabilitate Harris’s image in the hope that she can take on and beat former President Donald Trump.

In April, talk-show host Drew Barrymore heaped praise on our Vice President, cringingly christening her ‘Momala’ and saying, ‘I’ve been thinking that we all need a tremendous hug in the world now, but in our country, we need you to be Momala of the country.’

The big question now is if Democrats can paint Harris, who has a dismal favorability rating to match Biden’s (39 percent), as a competent, inspiring and principled leader.

A closer look behind Harris’s career – dogged by allegations of hypocrisy and dishonesty – suggests that such a rebrand may be an insurmountable task.

Even her earliest days in politics were tarnished by scandal.

In 1994, Harris was a 29-year-old rising star in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office when she struck up a relationship with Brown – the then 60-year-old speaker of the state Assembly and one of the most powerful men in California.

Brown – who was once dubbed the ‘Real Slick Willy’ by former president and serial-philander Bill Clinton – was still legally married to his wife Blanche Vitero at the time, but they had separated years prior.

He was notorious for his love of sports cars, flashy designer suits and for being named one of the world’s ten sexiest men by Playgirl magazine in 1984.

‘He’ll go to a party with his wife on one arm and his girlfriend on the other,’ James Richardson, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, told People Magazine in 1996.

Kamala has strenusouly denied that her relationship with Brown – which ended in 1995 before he was elected mayor of San Francisco – was a defining step in her political career.

In 2003, she described the romance as ‘an albatross hanging around my neck’.

But Brown hasn’t been much help to Harris in dispelling the dirty rumors.

In an embarassing 2019 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle, he proudly proclaimed: ‘Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?’

Most daming, he also conceded in the article that he ‘certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco’.

After winning that 2003 DA campaign, Harris’s political star began to rise in earnest, as she asserted herself as the stony face of ‘law and order’ – a far cry from her latest, softer ‘Momala’ iteration.

As San Fran’s district attorney, her office introduced a controversial anti-truancy program that targeted parents of children who skipped school, threatening them with prosecution and fines.

Under the program, in 2013, local mom Cheree Peoples was arrested and handcuffed over her daughter’s school attendance record. It later emerged that Cheree’s child had been missing school because she had a serious genetic condition that required frequent hospitalization.

Harris’s office also fought to keep inmates in jail even after the US Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons had become so serious it amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

But as the seasons changed, so did Kamala’s priorities – with many of her more hardline views shifting dramatically over the years to become increasignly socially liberal.

The best example is her ‘evolving’ stance on marijuana.

As San Francisco’s district attorney, her prosecutors convicted more than 1,900 people for weed violations. Snap forward to this March and Camelon Kamala couldn’t be more different, repeatedly stating: ‘Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.’

Another striking example of Harris’s perceived political opportunism came when she attacked Biden during a televised Democratic primary debate in 2019.

At the time, both were vying to be the party nominee for the 2020 election.

Harris came out swinging – appearing to blindside Biden over his work with former segregationist Senators and for his one-time opposition to a federal busing program that aimed to integrate minority school children into high-performing majority-white schools.

‘There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,’ Harris told Biden, ‘That little girl was me.’

After Kamala’s own campaign collapsed, she joined Biden’s ticket as his running mate – and all such animosity was conveniently forgotten.

But, earlier this year, insiders told DailyMail.com that Jill Biden still held a grudge against Harris for her treatment of Joe during that 2019 TV debate, reportedely privately fuming that Harris should ‘Go f*** yourself’.

‘[Jill] doesn’t let things go and she has never forgiven Kamala for comments that some took to be allegations of racism,’ the source said, ‘Jill was trying to stop Kamala joining the Biden ticket in 2020.’

Once in the White House, Harris’s competence in office has also become a target for critics.

In March 2021, Biden placed Harris in charge of addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration into the US, with the aim of ‘stemming the migration to our southern border.’

Her role led to one of the most widely derided moments of her career: an NBC interview in which she admitted she had never actually visited the border.

When asked why she hadn’t been, she panicked: ‘I haven’t been to Europe. I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making.’

The illegal immigration issue subsequently exploded into an abject crisis. Under the Biden-Harris administartion, some 10 million migrants have crossed from Mexico into America, leaving humiliated Democrat lawmakers no option but to reinstitute strict policies enacted by the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, White House staff have left Harris’s office in droves, with 13 staffers quitting in just a few months between 2021 and 2022.

The mass departures have fueled claims that Harris is an office ‘bully’ with a ‘soul-destroying’ management style.

More than anything, her communication style has attracted the most negative attention.

She has become known for her ‘word salad’ public appearances, during which she deploys jumbled and repetitive phrases to convey seemingly simple ideas.

In August last year, she emphasized to reporters that ‘community banks are in the community’ and that investing in them is therefore good for ‘the community.’

During a visit to a children’s hospital in May, she said: ‘We all believe that when we talk about the children of the community, they are children of the community.’

Then there’s perhaps her best-known soundbite, which she may never live down, made during a White House event last year.

Quoting her mother, Harris said: ‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’

Fans and critics alike have since shared the clip, poking fun at the seemingly nonsensical turn of phrase.

Whatever the intended meaning of her coconut quote, one part of it rang painfully true: Harris does exist in the context of what came before her, and while she and her allies now attempt a rebrand, she may find her past is not so easily left behind.

Source