MICHAEL MACOR/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
In December 2003, Kamala Harris and Terence Hallinan faced off in a debate during the race for San Francisco district attorney.
With the switch at the top of the Democratic ticket, Donald Trump has become a target-rich environment for Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial chops. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris told Democratic campaign staffers earlier this week, recalling her days as, successively, a Bay Area deputy DA, San Francisco’s top DA, and California’s attorney general. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
While it’s hard to find anyone on the left who doesn’t think a Kamala takedown of Donald on a debate stage would be a boon to civilization as such, one occasionally hears some far-left peeps that her record is a tad too prosecutorial, even as Republicans savage her for being soft on crime. In fact, however, her first election campaign, in which she successfully ousted San Francisco DA Terence Hallinan, makes clear that she long ago navigated the path to being both tough on crime and tough on the conditions that lead to crime.
Hallinan, as his staunchest supporters would readily concede, was a piece of work—prone to so many fistfights as a young man that the California Bar Association had to hold multiple hearings before authorizing him to practice. (Hallinan attributed his often out-of-control pugnacity to a thyroid condition, while his mother testified that he’d begun fighting as a teen in response to the attacks and ridicule he’d encountered because his attorney father was, to all appearances, a Communist at the height of the Red Scare. The Progressive Party that was formed in 1948 to run Henry Wallace for president was still on the ballot in a few states in 1952, and Hallinan’s pop, Vincent, was its presidential nominee. I include this tidbit to give my readers a leg up in any championship round of Political Trivial Pursuit.)
In his pre-DA practice as a counterculture defense attorney, Hallinan represented a vast number of people brought up on various drug charges, assorted murderers, and, briefly, Patty Hearst. In office, his zeal clearly got the better of him when a bar fight involving some San Francisco cops led him to indict the department’s chief, who had been nowhere near that bar, and who also was the department’s first Black chief who’d also devised quotas for minority hiring into the department. That indictment managed to estrange a good chunk of local progressives. Having also fired many of the deputy DAs upon taking office, Hallinan also racked up the lowest conviction rate of any of California’s 58 district attorneys. (One case his office did win was a murder conviction for the owners of a dog that had mauled a woman to death. One of the two deputy DAs who won that case was Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, then Gavin Newsom’s wife and now Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée. You can’t make this stuff up.)
Harris was one of three attorneys who challenged Hallinan in the 2003 election, coming in second to Hallinan in the primary and defeating him by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin in the runoff. Hallinan himself noted that Harris didn’t really run to his right, winning, rather, by peeling away many of his progressive supporters. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “Both candidates supported medical marijuana, opposed the death penalty and said juvenile suspects should be steered away from adult courts in all but the most serious cases.” Instead, Harris emphasized Hallinan’s low rate of convictions (in 2001, having a 52 percent rate of convictions for the felonies he prosecuted, while the statewide average had been 83 percent).
That political persona—a tough progressive—certainly worked in San Francisco two decades ago, and is pretty much the median position of today’s Democratic Party. Trump will doubtless assail and misrepresent Harris’s record, but he has more to fear from her prosecutorial sensibility than he has grounds to attack.
One further note about the early days of the Democrats’ soon-to-be presidential nominee: In speaking today to an old-time San Franciscan, she told me: “What people don’t realize is that Kamala was older than almost all of Willie Brown’s girlfriends.”
So, keep that in mind.
