Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images
Bass authored the far-reaching police-reform legislation that passed the House, persuading every single House Democrat and even three Republicans to support it.
“The rightful favorite of the whole party.” In recent weeks, this phrase (which a dying Lenin coined to describe Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik leader he hoped would succeed him) has struck me as a pretty good description of Karen Bass, the Los Angeles congresswoman who is now one of the frontrunners to become Joe Biden’s running mate.
Why is this previously obscure representative now fast becoming the rightful favorite across the Democratic Party? To begin, she’s the one African American contender with the kind of progressive chops that could help bolster Biden’s support among both young Blacks and leftists still reluctant to work or vote for him. Should Biden decide he can’t go with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Bass is the sole remaining vice-presidential contender with a long record (indeed, longer than Warren’s) of working tirelessly for the causes of economic and racial justice.
Bass may check every one of the Democrats’ boxes—Black, female, progressive, pragmatic, coalition builder, and someone who doubles down on Biden’s capacity for empathy, which so many Americans wish to see in their leaders—but she’s also coming under a rapidly escalating red-baiting onslaught from Donald Trump’s henchmen. To be sure, Bass came of age in the militant milieu of South Los Angeles anti-LAPD and social justice activists, but her own activism was always keyed to winning majority support through organizing, listening, and persuasion. It’s those attributes that have enabled her to thrive as she moved into mainstream politics.
Bass only recently came to broad public consciousness for authoring the far-reaching police-reform legislation that passed the House, and for persuading every single House Democrat and even three Republicans to support it. But this is a cause she’s been working at for the past 47 years.
“I met Karen in 1973, when I was 20 and she must have been 19,” says former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, “working on the Campaign Against Police Abuse. She was an activist in the African American community, and I was an activist in the Latino community, but we both focused on building a Latino-African American coalition. She wasn’t trying to be in front of the cameras; she was a door-to-door community organizer.”
Steering the first-ever serious police reform bill through the House—no wonder California’s convention delegates pledged to Bernie Sanders said she was their top choice for vice president.
Curtailing the LAPD’s endemic racism and brutality was already a hardy perennial cause of the L.A. left when Bass and Villaraigosa were young leftists. Reaching across racial and ideological lines in the sometimes ethnocentric and sectarian left circles of that time was not a habit common to all such activists. Bass, though, excelled at it, and it’s a habit she’s honed in the ensuing decades, as the universal Democratic support she won for a bill cracking down on previously sacrosanct levels of police immunity clearly illustrates.
Lining up a unified vote on what for some members was a tough issue—no wonder Nancy Pelosi is reported to have talked up Bass in her phone calls to Biden.
Steering the first-ever serious police reform bill through the House—no wonder California’s convention delegates pledged to Bernie Sanders said she was their top choice for vice president. (That, and her long and strong support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.)
The key to Bass is that while “she deeply comes out of the movement,” as Villaraigosa says, she also has a keen eye for how to win support for progressive causes from people far removed from the movement’s sensibilities, largely through her ability to understand those others’ sensibilities. Her aptitude at this is one reason she was elected by her peers to head the Congressional Black Caucus. “Winning that post shows her ability to play in different parts of the country,” says University of Southern California professor Manuel Pastor, who’s analyzed many of the social movements in which Bass has played key roles. “To lead the CBC, you have to connect with urban and rural districts, not just with coastal cities but with the South and Midwest.”
Not surprisingly, Bass has also built a stronger relationship between the CBC and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, as well as with the Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus, too. “She’s continued the cross-ethnic coalitions she built in the 70s,” Villaraigosa says.
Perhaps Bass’s most impressive piece of cross-ethnic work came in the aftermath of 1992 Los Angeles uprising that erupted in spasmodic reaction to the acquittal of the four cops who’d beaten Rodney King. Two years earlier, Bass had founded the Community Coalition (CoCo), devoted to improving conditions in South L.A. at a time when it was mired in crime, gang warfare and a drug epidemic. Authorities, including then Sen. Joe Biden, prescribed intensifying the “War on Drugs” with a heightened police presence in minority communities and even more mass incarceration, “solutions” which the LAPD took to with its accustomed brutality.
Bass believed that involving the community in diagnosing and addressing South L.A.’s ailments would produce more sustainable, less harmful strategies. CoCo members went door to door and found that what residents wanted most was to diminish the high number of liquor stores and cheap motels in the area, both of which had become centers of drug dealing and violence. At the time, most of South L.A.’s liquor stores were owned and operated by Korean immigrants.
In the ’92 uprising, a number of participants vandalized, set fire to and otherwise destroyed liquor stores; some of them ventured out of South Central to damage establishments in L.A.’s Koreatown a couple of miles to the north. Shop owners and employees were threatened; some were badly injured.
In the months following the uprising, Bass believed the drive to reduce the prevalence of liquor stores had to continue, and persuaded the L.A. City Council to pass an ordinance limiting the number of liquor stores that could be rebuilt in South L.A. Just as important to her, however, was to do this in such a way that Black-Korean tensions were diminished and Korean store owners didn’t have to bear the brunt of that transition.
Even before the riots, Bass had helped build the Black-Korean Alliance under the aegis of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. Right after the uprising, “she reached out to me,” says Jai Lee Wong, who worked for the commission, “since she was concerned the resolution could be perceived as anti-Korean, and she wanted my help in reaching Korean community leaders and Korean media.” Bass held multiple meetings with the Korean Grocers Association (which included liquor store owners) and the Korean Chamber of Commerce, hearing their concerns as they heard hers. She pushed the City Council not simply to limit the number of liquor stores but to provide financial assistance to those store owners who wanted to replace them with other kinds of establishments, such as laundromats. Her work “mitigated a lot of the tension,” Wong says, and Korean-language media ended up supporting her efforts.
“She was always foreseeing both opportunities and obstacles, thinking ahead to prevent negative situations,” Wong adds.
By the turn of the millennium, Bass’s work for progressive causes and her ability to cross political boundaries to promote them had brought her to the attention of a number of civic leaders and elected officials, not just in Black L.A. but in the city’s emerging labor-Latino alliance, which had become Los Angeles’s new political dynamo. In 2003, I was interviewing the man at the center of that dynamo, L.A. County Federation of Labor head Miguel Contreras, when he surprised me with an offhand but unusually specific observation.
“Karen Bass is thinking about running for the Assembly next year,” he said, in a district encompassing the historically black Crenshaw area and a slice of L.A.’s Westside. (The incumbent would have to vacate the seat due to term limits.) “She’ll win easily,” he said. “And she’ll become Speaker after Fabian [Nunez] is termed out” in 2008.
Contreras, who died in 2005, remains the only truly genius-level political strategist I’ve known, but his conviction that Bass would become Speaker—something no Black woman had yet achieved—still stands out to me as an inspired act of prophecy. What he apparently saw in Bass—a deep commitment to principle, but also a pragmatism about how to turn such principles into law, and a capacity to work well across a wide political universe—was a level of talent that he recognized as exceptional.
Not surprisingly, Bass had to be persuaded by her fellow activists and political pros like Villaraigosa and Contreras to run for office at all. It had never been part of her game plan; indeed, the number of politically radical contacts she’d made as an organizer attests to her belief that she wasn’t destined for mainstream political leadership. “She’s always been about the issues, not political self-promotion,” Villaraigosa says.
“She had to be convinced to run,” the former mayor adds. “I called her and said, ‘Look: Imagine what it would be like for a young Black girl to see you as speaker of the legislature of America’s largest state.’”
Bass’s eventual speakership was not the one that anyone had envisioned. She ascended to the post in 2008, as the economy collapsed, and state government’s revenues collapsed with it. She became the Democratic legislature’s chief interlocutor with Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in fashioning a budget that cut deeply into programs she had long sought to expand. Some of her fellow progressives criticized her, but the credibility of her commitments kept Democrats united behind her. The crucial factor in retaining that support, Pastor notes, was that “she made sure the cuts didn’t destroy social programs; they merely reduced spending levels so the programs could rebound when the economy did.” Due to her efforts, health care and safety net programs that Republicans wanted to axe nonetheless survived. More remarkably, Republicans legislators (including Kevin McCarthy, now the Republican leader in the House of Representatives) came away from these battles favorably impressed by Bass’s diligent search to find just enough common ground—based on her capacity to understand their concerns—to enable the budget to pass.
Will her personality, her abilities and her record play well enough for Biden to give her the nod?
Though Biden and Bass come from different political worlds, Pastor sees one crucial commonality. “In a nation that’s deeply grieving, both Biden and Bass effuse empathy and recognize the need for healing,” he says. “Karen’s whole approach to the crack epidemic and the post-1992 rebuilding was all about healing, about bringing people together to get over the trauma and grief and separation. Today, in this very trying moment for America, Karen’s personality plays exceptionally well.”
Will her personality, her abilities and her record play well enough for Biden to give her the nod? Her longstanding position on policing certainly gives her the potential to bring more progressives and young Blacks to the polls than Kamala Harris or Val Demings could. At the other end of the political spectrum, her empathetic and non-divisive manner has won her not just the respect of Kevin McCarthy but the support of George Will. Her pragmatism is an asset, too. Long before she was under consideration for the vice presidency, she kept telling progressives that they’d need to deal with Biden if he were elected, and that relentlessly bad-mouthing him was not the way to win his ear.
That’s one side of the ledger. The other is that like many young Black activists in South Los Angeles in the wake of the 1965 Watts uprising and the unrelenting abuse from police, she was immersed for a time in a radical political culture, though, then as now, she exuded an openness, pragmatism, and affability not always in evidence in such cultures.
Should Biden and his advisers think the Trump campaign’s redbaiting attacks on her (which have already begun) would eat into or even erase his and the Democrats’ current lead, they may well to go with somebody else. Should they go with Harris, however, that still would leave a door open for Bass to do her work on a larger stage. If a Biden-Harris ticket is elected, that would create an open Senate seat in California, which Gov. Gavin Newsom would fill by appointment. No matter the right’s attacks, Karen Bass would remain the rightful favorite of the whole, hegemonic Democratic Party in California—and she’d make an excellent senator from the nation’s largest state.
