Willie Brown on Kamala Harris: ‘She’ll Deport My Ass’

SAN FRANCISCO — Since Kamala Harris became vice president, her former boyfriend and political mentor has had a stock line he dispatches with his signature, in-on-the-joke laugh.

If Harris ever becomes president, Willie Brown likes to say, “She’ll deport my ass.”

However, last weekend when I called Brown, the seemingly ageless 90-year-old former San Francisco mayor had a new version at the ready.

“She may send me back to Mineola,” Brown said, setting up the punchline with a pause. “Sending me back to Texas would be a deportment!”

It was classic Willie.

Yet it also reflected his consciousness of time and place, how in the winter of his life he’s thinking of his beginnings: the small, East Texas town he left for California — as so many Black Texans and Louisianans did in the 20th Century — in search of opportunity and fulfillment. He found both and then some.

I had a long lunch — is there any other kind? — with Brown here in June. It was a Friday so we were not at Sam’s Grill, his usual weekday haunt.

Instead we met at Le Central. That’s where Brown has been taking the roast chicken with pommes frites, side of “cheap mustard,” and a screwdriver on the rocks in a wine glass every Friday since 1974. His regular group started as a gang of six — including legendary newspaper columnist Herb Caen and the men’s clothier Wilkes Bashford — but is now down to only two, Brown and the Bay Area architect Sandy Walker. Such are the wages of time.

My idea then was to write about Willie-at-90, how the iconic, irrepressible and iconoclastic California Assembly Speaker-turned-mayor-for-life viewed the political scene as he entered his tenth decade, still as outspoken as he is well-tailored.

That was then.

Brown told me by phone he had gotten 48 media inquiries about Harris since President Joe Biden left the race and effectively turned the nomination over to his understudy.

The former mayor is no longer directly in touch with Harris but is eager to offer suggestions. He said Biden should step down now so the country can see her as president before the election; Harris should avoid making her history-making identity central because “the voters want her to answer them ”; and that she ought to embrace her hazy ideological categorization because “if she keeps people continually guessing then she can adjust the interpretation of your guess every time she sees you.”

More striking was how emphatic Brown was that the party rally around Harris, namely her California contemporary and quasi-rival: Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“He had agreed a long time ago that under no circumstance would he ever challenge Kamala,” Brown told me of Newsom.

Since the Sunday Biden withdrew from the race, Brown has been after Newsom to embrace Harris, I’m told by Democrats familiar with the pursuit. Newsom, like many Democrats, issued an initial statement praising Biden and endorsed Harris the day after the president’s withdrawal.

That Brown is attempting to unite Harris and Newsom in full harmony after one of the most historic months in modern American politics is a reminder that we are living in the world Willie made.

Sixty years after he was first elected to California’s legislature, the year LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, Brown remains active in the political game he relishes. The last two times I saw him in San Francisco, he began his day, respectively, meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).

When we had lunch in June, Brown was trumpeting an East Coast Democrat he’s gotten to know, Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland. The former mayor got straight to the point about the 45-year-old former Army officer.

“The governor of Maryland is the next guy, Wes Moore, if he plays it right,” said Brown. Why does he impress you, I asked.

“His credentials, the military, that takes him into the white world clean,” Brown shot back. “You don’t have to prove…” he said before pausing.

I got the point.

Brown’s political heirs may roll their eyes at his assessment, particularly two decades after the rise of Barack Obama. And it may prove less-than-prophetic if the country elects a half-Jamaican, half-Indian woman with no military experience this November. Yet that stiletto analysis of Moore comes from somebody with perhaps unequaled authority on the evolution of race and politics.

Brown fled Jim Crow Texas and emerged in the first generation African-Americans were allowed, haltingly, into elite society.
“It was the point at which Black people started to be identified as being a professional — health, medicine, law — because before that you were preachers and teachers or you buried people,” he said. “That was it.”

He forged relationships with figures like Jesse Jackson and former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder at conventions and conferences, plus “we all had an NAACP obligation,” he said. Then there was the Black press, which linked an up-and-comer in San Francisco to one in Richmond. “If they really liked you, you were in Ebony — with pictures,” he recalled.

One of Brown’s favorite stories to illustrate the tight-knit relationships of his generation of Black politicians: he dispatched former Rep. Charles B. Rangel to knock doors in a heavily Black public housing project for Brown’s mayoral campaign in the 1990s. “He was the damn Ways and Means Committee Chair,” Brown recalled with a laugh of the image of the similarly well-turned-out New Yorker making his way through hardscrabble Hunter’s Point.

Brown is the most enduring Black political figure in the country — who else attended JFK’s 1960 convention as a young Democrat and next month will be called upon for expert insight on the party’s nominee nearly two-thirds of a century later?

Of all his proteges, Harris, understandably, draws the most attention. Brown was hardly her only key ally, but as speaker he did appoint her to a pair of state boards. More important in what was San Francisco’s cloistered high society , before the tech money came to town, he was her entree to many of the city’s most prominent figures and donors.

Yet consider the other dramatis personae of this summer’s better-than-fiction thriller.

There was the de facto proxy war over Biden between two senior members of California’s House delegation, Waters and Nancy Pelosi . That clash mostly played out behind the scenes: Waters pressed fellow Congressional Black Caucus members and other lawmakers to stick with Biden while Pelosi wielded her phone like a weapon to push the president toward a dignified exit.

I’m told by a lawmaker who witnessed it, though, that Waters and Pelosi also had a robust conversation on the House floor about how a Biden succession plan would be handled (the former speaker had indicated she wanted an open process , but it’s no secret Pelosi isn’t a KHive denizen , as Brown said with a long laugh: “I’m not sure she had any particular candidate in mind but I’m sure it would not have been Kamala!”)

Waters was perhaps Brown’s most vital lieutenant when both served in the California Assembly. And Brown and Pelosi both hail from the San Francisco political organization of Phil Burton, the powerhouse former U.S. representative . Brown, already Assembly speaker, helped Pelosi win her first House election, in the 1987 special election to succeed Burton’s widow, Sala, who had won her husband’s seat when he died in office.

Then there’s Newsom, the would-be Democratic presidential nominee still in the wings, who got his first appointment in public life (San Francisco Parking and Traffic Commission) from Mayor Brown.

When we had lunch, I pointed out the irony that Newsom as lieutenant governor spent eight years waiting for an octogenarian, Jerry Brown, to get off the stage and now may spend eight more waiting for…

“Kamala to leave!” Brown interjected.

I was thinking of Biden, but Brown may prove more prescient: Newsom may be walled off from a presidential bid until 2032 if Harris wins this fall.

Brown, naturally, already has an idea in mind for Newsom to bide his time and earn some foreign policy credentials: stay out of the cabinet, and Washington, and serve as America’s Ambassador to the United Nations in donor-filled New York City.

Willie’s World is hardly limited to just Californians, though. Think of who else played a behind-the-scenes role in the Biden affair. Brown claims to have introduced Harris to Obama, when the then-mayor threw the first California fundraiser for Obama’s nascent Senate campaign in 2003. (Brown likes to say he retorted “what’s his actual name?” when he first learned of the Illinois state senator.)

The Clintons? Brown has known them for decades, helping them raise millions in San Francisco as speaker and mayor, and sat next to Bill Clinton in June when the former president came to town to honor San Francisco’s other legendary Willie.

And that, now-famous, check Donald Trump wrote to Harris for her re-election as California attorney general?

Yes, it was access-if-needed money arranged by Brown. He also claims to have first introduced Harris to Trump when the New York developer summoned Brown to Manhattan in the 1990s. Brown, Harris and a few other associates had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Brown was speaking at Harvard, when Trump sent up his plane to ferry the group to Teterboro, New Jersey.

Trump urgently wanted Brown’s advice on how to build a property in Los Angeles, having been told by fellow casino magnate Steve Wynn that the Assembly speaker was the man to see.

“Wynn told Trump that ‘If I was doing anything in California I’d talk to Willie Brown because anybody else will take your money and do nothing,’” Brown recalled at lunch (keep in mind that Brown was a high-ranking public official and not, necessarily, a lobbyist for developers at the time).

In any event, Brown said Harris didn’t join the meeting with Trump but there is a picture of the Californians all on what’s now called Trump Force One. (“I have the picture,” he said, flashing a smile.)

I’m not saying all roads lead back to Willie, but I haven’t even gotten to Kimberly Guilfoyle. That would be Newsom’s former wife, Donald Trump Jr’s current fiancée and a former deputy district attorney in San Francisco who Brown has known since she was a girl because of her father, who worked his way up from the local building trades to become a prominent real estate investor and political consigliere known as “The Godfather.”

It all may seem impossibly cozy and the sort of politics that has led so many voters to embrace political outsiders — or ones purporting to be outsiders.

But never having to face the voters again, Brown is happy to say what he thinks about why Trump has succeeded.

“He’s an entertainer, that’s all it is,” Brown argued.

And that can overcome everything else, all of Trump’s manifest liabilities?

“Oh yeah, if the public is fascinated with your antics, you survive,” he said, before lowering the boom. “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t really tell the voters they’re idiots.”

Brown was far more candid about Harris at lunch, before the debate, when Biden’s renomination seemed inevitable and his vice president was more unpopular than he was.

Brown worried out loud that Harris had “the Hillary syndrome” — that “people don’t like her” — and fretted it was not fixable. Thinking through Harris’s future if Biden were to lose, Brown said: “You need a Black woman on every goddamn corporate board in America!”

Yet even then, Brown praised her without being prompted, and recalled her personal kindness to people who just suffered a loss or were in a time of need.

When I reminded him of that over the phone, Brown, who’s never more than seconds away from a laugh, turned serious. He recalled that his then-girlfriend helped work with his sisters to arrange his father’s funeral in Texas and would go into AIDS wards in San Francisco when that was still taboo to some people.

It may not be of interest to the British tabloids who’ve descended on San Francisco to join Brown’s table since Biden dropped out, but the former mayor is more interested in the political fortunes of another California woman: his youngest daughter.

Sydney Brown worked for Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) but is heading to Yale Law School this fall and, her father hopes, a fast return to California.

“I got to be around to fund her race,” Brown told me before cracking: “She thinks I’m never going to die!”

His hope for Sydney: local office first in Marin County and eventually the presidency.

It may have been because it was early June and we were discussing Biden’s worsening infirmities, but Brown returned to the passage of time and mortality time and again when we met in San Francisco.

Discussing the health struggles of Jesse Jackson, who’s only a year older than Biden, Brown said: “The aging process is catching up with all of us.”

Besides a decline in his sight, it hasn’t yet with Brown. But given how reflective he was, I asked how he’d like to be remembered, what should be the Willie epitaph.

“Didn’t serve any time,” he said without missing a beat.

Once we stopped laughing, I asked again.

“The legacy of the number of people holding office that came from me,” he said, calling Waters, Newsom and Harris “the top three,” but reminding me of his ties to former mayor and Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

“I really had a good run with a lot of good, quality people,” he said.

But Brown couldn’t help himself.

“None of those people, so far, are a great embarrassment,” he added.

Ben Johansen contributed to this report.