The first thing to know about Kamala Harris’ campaign for California attorney general is that she is not necessarily favored to win.
It was 2010 — the height of Tea Party power — and Harris, running for statewide for the first time, was struggling to shed the same San Francisco liberal label that Donald Trump is once again wielding.
At that time, 45-year-old Harris was already seen as a rising star of the Democratic Party. “The female Barack Obama,” Gwen Ifill had memorably labeled her a year earlier. But many rising stars are snuffed out early, and Harris faced a formidable Republican foe in Steve Cooley, the popular and moderate Los Angeles County district attorney.
Subscribe to The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
Cooley’s reputation as an even-handed, corruption-busting prosecutor had him tied or narrow before Harris arrived in October — thanks in large part to his distinctive popularity among Republicans in Los Angeles. He had won elections three times in the state’s most populous Democratic stronghold.
Harris was running out of both time and money when he arrived for their only conversation on the first Monday in October. Then, about 45 minutes into the hour-long standoff, Cooley gave a response that was honest, fatal and stupid.
It was a turning point in the campaign. Harris escapes a month later with one of the narrowest statewide victories in modern California history — less than 0.85 percent of the vote. Yet even on election night, Harris’ chances had looked so bleak that Cooley declared victory. The race remained unclear for three weeks.
“Everybody’s writing history like it’s inevitable,” said Harris’ chief strategist for the 2010 race, Averell “Ace” Smith. His first state win, he said, was anything but.
“It was as close to a near-death experience for a political career as you can get,” said Chris Jankowski, a Republican strategist who then headed a national GOP group that spent $1 million on a failed bid to end Harris’ career before it did. could really start. “If he had lost the race, he wouldn’t be running for president — no chance.”
Now, as Harris arrives at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, seeking to become the first female president in US history, that long-forgotten moment in a debate nearly 14 years ago stands out as one of the lesser-known but most significant turning points. points in the arc of his political career.
This is the story of those 47 seconds – and what followed.
‘I deserved it’
To say that the lone encounter in the 2010 attorney general race drew little fanfare would be an understatement.
It was held at noon, far from the state’s largest media market, and in a courtroom at the University of California, Davis Department of Justice. To the best of anyone’s memory, it wasn’t even shown live on TV. The moderator, a local TV political reporter named Kevin Riggs, had sat down with three other reporters who were serving as panelists that very morning in the coffee shop to share topics.
Dan Morain, who worked on the editorial page of The Sacramento Bee, asked who would bring up double-dipping — that is, taking both a public salary and a public pension. It had been an issue in the Republican primary, first raised by John Eastman, Cooley’s primary opponent. Today, Eastman is better known for his efforts to keep Trump in office after the 2020 election, which led to his impeachment and dismissal.
“I’m going to ask that,” replied Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Leonard, who wrote about Cooley.
Public pensions were a hot topic at the time, and Cooley made waves for prosecuting public corruption in the town of Bell, where local officials paid outlandish salaries in a poor municipality.
In a hands-on courtroom setting, Leonard said the $150,000 California attorney general’s salary was half the $292,300 salary Cooley earned as a local district attorney. If he took a taxpayer-funded pension as a former district attorney and a taxpayer-funded salary as state attorney general, Cooley would make more than $400,000.
“Are you going to double up by taking both your pension and your salary as a lawyer?” Leonard asked.
“Yes,” Cooley said without hesitation.
He looked at Harris. He didn’t say anything.
“I deserved it.”
But Cooley wasn’t done yet. “I have absolutely earned every pension entitlement that I have and I rely on that to supplement the very low, incredibly low salary that is paid to the Attorney General,” he added.
“It was deafening,” Riggs said. “It was amazing,” Leonard said. “It was terrible,” Morain said. “It was jaw-dropping,” Smith said.
And it was true, Cooley recalled in a recent interview.
“It’s that I answered honestly,” Cooley said. “It was a mistake. A lot of people said, ‘You should have dodged it, Steve.'”
Kevin Spillane, Cooley’s top strategist, blamed himself for not coaching Cooley to get around better. “It’s a credit to his character,” Spillane said of his client’s honesty. “But that’s a responsibility in politics.”
Harris, on the other hand, had stood still. Morain, who has since written a book about Harris’ career, called it a “Vin Scully moment” and likened it to how the famed baseball broadcaster often let the voice of the game speak for itself.
“Would you like to add something to this?” Riggs offered.
“Go for it Steve!” Harris said during the conversation, letting out a now familiar laugh. “You deserved it!”
It was all over in less than a minute. The good news for Cooley was that virtually no one had seen how he answered the question. The bad news was that it was about to change.
Competition to cut an effective simple ad
Brian Brokaw, Harris’ campaign manager, sat next to chief strategist Smith at the panel. “We looked at each other,” Brokaw said, “and sometimes it’s hard to tell in a room how something hits the ground, and we said to each other, ‘That was pretty bad, wasn’t it?'”
They agreed it was bad. They soon called the campaign’s publicist, Mark Putnam, and told him to watch a video of the conversation.
What exactly happened next is disputed.
“I called Mark Putnam,” Smith said, “and I said, ‘I think we just won the race. Can you advertise this?’”
Putnam said he was asked to watch the conversation to produce the social media content and was overwhelmed by what he saw — and that he was the one who told the team, “We just won the campaign.”
Both Putnam and Smith recalled that — to the advertiser’s delight — Cooley’s answer fit the 30-second spot almost perfectly.
“I looked at it and realized I didn’t have to do any editing,” Putnam said. In one day, he cut an ad that was as bare-bones as it was devastating: just Leonard’s question, Cooley’s answer, and quiz music. At the end, the screen fades to black while the white text reads, “Isn’t $150,000 a year enough?”
At the time, the average household in California earned $54,280.
Putnam said there had been a “real reluctance” to run the ad within the campaign without testing the message in a survey. “It’s important to know that this ad almost didn’t get made and almost didn’t air,” Putnam said. Smith called it nonsense. “We didn’t have the money to test anything,” he said, “and we had to take decisive action.”
It was certainly true that the campaign was completely broken. A mid-October financial report revealed less than $850,000 in the bank – and more than $100,000 in debt. It wasn’t enough for a single week on television across the state.
So they decided to use nearly every dollar to run a double-dip ad exclusively in Los Angeles—hoping to land in Cooley’s backyard. They didn’t have enough money to book the last three weeks at once. “We use it as it came,” Brokaw said.
Still, the ad seemed to be “everywhere,” said Leonard, who stopped watching TV with his wife to avoid his “nasal British accent” asking a double-take.
Harris, on the other hand, had dreamed of ending the campaign on a high note by promoting a record or a vision. But they didn’t have enough money to do both.
He finally hinted at a completely negative recommendation. “This is forever in honor of Kamala Harris,” Smith said. “He literally agreed to push all the chips into the middle of the table. You rarely find a candidate who can make such a bold decision.”
Offer “Kill Hercules to bed”
Around the same time, national Republicans, seeing the long-term threat posed by Harris, launched a last-minute pushback against him — a $1 million ad buy in Los Angeles that included a brutal testimony from the mother of a police officer killed in 2010. San Francisco, who criticized Harris for refusing to seek the death penalty for the gang member who killed his son.
Smith, the Harris strategist, speculated that they were trying to “kill Hercules in the crib.”
He was right.
“This was a deliberate targeting of someone who was clearly a rising star,” said Jankowski, who chaired the Republican state executive committee at the time. “That’s what we thought, and that’s when the donors bought it.”
Harris had his own cavalry: President Barack Obama visited a rally in Los Angeles in late October. Obama faced congressional losses nationwide, but still prioritized a flashy California event featuring Harris, who had been one of his earliest supporters in 2008.
“I want everybody to do the right thing by him,” Obama told the crowd of 37,000.
In addition to Cooley’s exposure to double-dipping ads, the Republican ticket around him collapsed, led by the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman. Cooley recalled that he led for 10 days, but was warned by his team about the coming Democratic surge.
“The vote was just going south,” said Spillane, Cooley’s top strategist.
A contest that stretched out the election day
The race was still nail-biting on election night. Cooley jumped into the lead and, against Spillane’s advice, declared victory. The San Francisco Chronicle followed suit and ran the story “Cooley Beats Harris.” The print still hangs on the wall in Smith’s office.
At their party, Harris and his supporters huddled over laptops and watched the increasingly favorable earnings deep into the night. “People are falling asleep all around him, and he’s still there,” recalls Matt Haney, now a member of the assembly who worked as a campaign volunteer. “We were there until the sun came up.”
Subsequent results in Los Angeles tilted more and more in Harris’s direction, who Smith said “carved into his historical record” his late promotion impact.
An internal Harris poll in early August showed Cooley ahead by 10 percentage points in Los Angeles County. The final result: Harris won the county by 14 points.
Harris ultimately won by less than 75,000 votes, and Cooley conceded to him three weeks after the election. No Republican has come this close to winning statewide since.
“The ads were very effective,” Cooley admitted. He went on to blame Whitman’s collapse for his loss more than “some clever ad” that sounded sore about Harris and his qualifications.
“It’s hard to go back and say he definitely wouldn’t have won without that moment,” Putnam said of the double-dip. “I can’t play God. But the moment was decisive.”
A few months after the race, Cooley called Leonard and invited him to a meal at the Water Grill in downtown Los Angeles. Cooley didn’t tell him why.
Halfway through the meal, Leonard remembered Cooley reaching across the table and thanking him by shaking his hand.
“If you hadn’t asked that question,” Cooley told him, “I’d have to be in Sacramento.”
c. 2024 The New York Times Company
