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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Obviously, everyone's talking about California Senator Kamala Harris, now, Joe Biden's running mate in the presidential election, and we will too. We'll open up the phones for your thoughts in a little bit. I want to start with two clips, the first one about a minute long of Senator Harris. One of the big questions about her during her run for president in the primaries was about her record on criminal justice reform as the San Francisco DA, and then, as California's Attorney General. Here's one minute of how Senator Harris describes her record and her approach to being a prosecutor after she was challenged on in a CNN Town Hall in January of last year.

Kamala Harris: I've been consistent my whole career. My career has been based on an understanding, one, that as a prosecutor, my duty was to seek and make sure that the most vulnerable and voiceless among us are protected, and that is why I have personally prosecuted violent crime that includes rape, child molestation, and homicide.

I have also worked my entire career to reform the criminal justice system, understanding to your point, that it is deeply flawed and in need of repair, which is why as Attorney General, for example, I lead the Department of Justice, which is the largest state Department of Justice in any state in California, and implemented the first of its kind in the nation implicit bias and procedural justice training for police officers. It is why I created the first in the nation for any Department of Justice an open data initiative that we named Open Justice for the first time, making transparent and showing the public statistics around deaths in custody, arrest rates by race, and making that information available to the public.

Brian: Kamala Harris from the CNN Town Hall last year when she was in the Democratic primary race for president. Here's one more of her for now. This is Senator Harris kind of in prosecutor mode. The witness, if you will, or maybe the equivalent of the defendant is more like it, is Brett Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2018. Harris is trying to establish whether Kavanaugh would have a conflict of interest in ruling on issues related to the Muller investigation by having discussed the case with people from Trump's private law firm, if Kavanaugh did that, and maybe as we listen to this clip, we might imagine Harris debating Mike Pence this coming October.

Kamala: Have you discussed Muller or his investigation with anyone at Kasowitz, Benson & Torres, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump's personal lawyer. Be sure about your answer, sir.

Brian: You heard the beginning of what was a lot of squirming by Kavanaugh as he was trying not to give a direct answer to a direct question, Senator Kamala Harris and now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh from his confirmation hearing in 2018. With us now, WNYC legal editor as well as All Things Considered host, Jami Floyd, and Axios reporter, Jonathan Swan. Remember, Swan had maybe the most detailed and specific interview ever with President Trump about 10 days ago. We'll play some relevant excerpts of that. Jami, thanks for coming on, and Jonathan, welcome to WNYC.

Jonathan Swan: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Let me first get your top line takes on this pick, why Kamala Harris out of the various candidates on Biden's shortlist, and what's the significance of this moment? Jami?

Jami Floyd: Well, I think it demonstrates that we no longer in political campaign think in terms of which state I need to select from to win, that old geographic approach to winning, and we are now thinking in terms of much more socio-political matters. In this moment of pandemic and protests, Kamala Harris made sense. It's a historic moment. It's a historic pick that moves us forward in the direction in which we need to go as a country, as a society.

The Biden campaign gets credit for making a smart choice, but Kamala Harris also earned this spot. We need to recognize that. She's been out there marching with the protesters to demand justice for George Floyd and reform of the system more so than any of the other people who were on the shortlist. She was one of the senators who led the Anti-Lynching Bill push in the Senate. She's standing on the right side of history at this moment. The Biden campaign recognizes that in choosing her.

I think we should also, Brian, acknowledge, as we approached the 100th anniversary of suffrage next week, the women who came before her on this journey and not just the other women who ran this time with her, such as Elizabeth Warren and our own Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, but the trailblazers who came before her, like, of course, Hillary Clinton, but also, the Black women who came before her, like Shirley Chisholm, the first Black candidate for a major party presidential nomination, the first woman to run for the Democratic Party nomination, first Black woman to run for it. Then, of course, we could go all the way back to Victoria Woodhull.

I mentioned Shirley Chisholm because when Kamala was just a girl, Shirley Chisholm was running for president. That had to have a light in her imagination as a girl, I know it did so for mine. Now, Kamala is poised to walk through the doors of the White House, not as first lady but as vice president, and quite possibly, someday, as president of the United States.

Brian: Yes, good point about building on the work of others who came before her. Next week is the 100th anniversary week of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote in this country, and people remember Elizabeth Cady Stanton and some of the other white suffragists. We're going to have an author on the anniversary week who talks about some of the forgotten Black women suffragists who fought for that right but were not as remembered in history. Johnathan, same question, why Kamal Harris out of the various candidates on Biden's shortlist? What's the significance of this moment?

Jonathan: Well, I think Jami spoke very eloquently to the significance of the moment. As for the calculations in the Biden camp, this was pragmatism overriding everything else. She is someone who's been battle-tested. They wanted someone-- They know this is going to be the roughest, ugliest campaign, probably, even uglier than 2016. They need someone who can handle herself in that environment, who has shown a capacity to perform on the debate stage.

There's going to be only one debate between her and Mike Pence, and that's going to have a significant amount of importance, particularly, as people are going to be looking at her as the heir apparent and Biden has set this election up as a transitional election, that he will be, effectively, at some point, handing over the keys. He's intimated that he may be a one-term president, so people will be looking at her.

You always consider whether the vice president is capable of serving as president, but I think that question has added intensity in this election given that Joe Biden is the oldest nominee that we've seen in American history for a major party. That's important there. Also, politically, the Trump campaign, of the shortlist, based on my conversations with President Trump's advisors over the last few weeks, she was their least preferred pick.

They've thrown around a number of different attack lines against Joe Biden, mostly, unsuccessful because they haven't proven up his negatives in polling the way they would hope. The one that they've settled on-- The frame that they've settled on is this idea that Biden is this mentally incapacitated puppet or vessel for the far left, the idea that when you elect Joe Biden, you're not really electing this moderate genial figure that you've known for decades, you're actually electing this man who will be entirely controlled by the far left.

They wanted, to the extent of the VP pick mattered, they would have preferred that the Biden team picks somebody who would have been easier to fit into that frame to, say, they were already, for example, leaping on Congresswoman Karen Bass's past statements about Fidel Castro. They were calling her communist Karen. They would've preferred that he picked Karen Bass so that they could say, "See here, we told you he is this radical leftist."

Kamala Harris doesn't really give them that opportunity. She has a fairly pragmatic history to the extent that she's been criticized. It's largely for being too tough on law and order during her tenure as Attorney General in California. It doesn't really lend itself to the idea that she's this wild-eyed communist, radical, Antifa sympathizer. It doesn't really fit into that frame.

Brian: Now, listeners, we invite your first reactions to Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate. Are you enthused, disappointed because you wanted someone else? Are you maybe more moved than you thought you were going to be? I've heard some of that from some people already. We invite your first reactions to Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate or your questions for our guests, Jami Floyd and Jonathan Swan, at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet a question or a comment @BrianLehrer.

By the way, a program note, we will provide live special coverage of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's first appearance together. This is going to happen sometime today. As far as I know, they still have not announced a time, though, Jonathan, as a moment to moment political reporter, maybe you're ahead of me on this. I gather it's likely to be sometime this afternoon. If it happens during the show this morning, we're going to cut away and take it. I'll tell you that whenever it is, WNYC will provide live coverage of that moment.

Jami, I want to follow-up on what Jonathan just brought up, with respect to Senator Harris's record on crime and criminal justice reform and especially for you as a lawyer and our legal editor, looking back over the press clips from the last year, it's easy to find a range of opinion, even just in progressive circles. For example, in USA Today, a piece by Public Defender Niki Solis called, "I worked with Kamala Harris. She was the most progressive DA in California," versus one from Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic last year called, "When Kamala Harris was a top cop. Can the candidate be trusted to hold government officials accountable and oversee a progressive criminal justice system? Her past says no." How do you begin to weave this together into an understanding of her record in this area?

Jami: Well, I think you look at the facts rather than opinion about sentiment and whether or not one likes Kamala Harris. I should say, I go back a long way with Kamala Harris. We're not besties, but we are Bay Area Black women who practice law in the Bay Area. That's a pretty small club. Tony Harris, her brother-in-law, and I actually practiced law together at the same law firm when we first started out.

Brian: I did not know that.

Jami: Yes. We've kept up over the years. I know Kamala's record quite well. I was a public defender when she was a district attorney, both when we were first starting out, but of course, I then watched her career very closely and I know her record quite well. When she started out as a prosecutor, she was at the Alameda County DA's office, which is one of the most progressive in the country to start with.

Being a district attorney in and of itself is not a progressive thing, but this is the '90s. If you think you might want to get into politics, you don't become a public defender, like I did, in those days. You might do that now, but you become a prosecutor. If you think you want to help the Black and Brown community, you become a prosecutor. That's what she did in the most progressive office in the Bay Area. She then later goes to the San Francisco DA's office, which was then run by a very progressive man named Terence Hallinan.

She didn't like the way he ran the office, so she runs against her old boss in 2003. It's a very bitter election, one which she, by the way- in which she chooses to set up her campaign headquarters in Bayview-Hunters Point, which is one of the most isolated, to this day, but certainly then isolated and neglected parts of San Francisco. It's a Black neighborhood in San Francisco. San Francisco, I will say publicly on this station, was then and remains a very segregated city, and Kamala campaigned on a promise to not seek the death penalty, to only prosecute three strike cases in very violent felonies.

She claimed that Terrence Hallinan was neglecting Black and Brown communities that were plagued by violence, especially gun violence, places like Bayview and the Tenderloin. She claimed that victims of rape and domestic violence, mostly Black and Brown women were being neglected. This was a progressive prosecution agenda. Then, she said, "It's not progressive to be soft on crime with an eye to the Black community." Looking back with hindsight, it's easy to criticize, but she was hearing from these communities and these women.

Then, when she was elected, Brian, she made good on those promises. She did not seek the death penalty even in one case where a very respected police officer was tragically killed. She did not prosecute marijuana cases or reduced them to misdemeanors. This progressive approach didn't end with her campaign promises. She actually set up a special court to divert the young offenders and try and get them out of the system. I could go on, but some of her reforms are still in place.

You're hearing this, by the way, Brian, from someone as you know whose life work has been dedicated to the cause of equality and justice from the perspective of the criminal defense bar. I know there's been criticism of her, but it's generally unfair, though I am grappled with whether to defend a former prosecutor who's going to run for president. I've just assessed her record. I've talked with people, Niki Solis. I read her-- I worked with Niki Solis, by the way. I read her op-ed, and I think she's spot on. If we're clear-eyed about it and we look at the record of Kamala Harris, she's a perfect balance for Joe Biden, who is going to have to defend his record on that crime bill that we've heard so much about. That's my answer to the question. Look at the facts. Look at the facts of her record.

Brian: Just to go one step further, the article in The Atlantic, that's more critical, cites her efforts to keep innocent people in prison even after exculpatory evidence emerged. It goes into a couple of particular cases, did not disclose police misconduct to the defense in drug case trials after it was revealed in a police crime lab scandal and a few other examples that the article gives, leading to his conclusion that, "Harris displayed a striking ignorance about scandalous misconduct and hierarchies that she oversaw." You familiar with those examples?

Jami: The crime lab case is a very well-known case in the San Francisco, Bay Area, and she will have to defend and explain that case. I would say that any prosecutor of her level, meaning, San Francisco district attorney and then attorney general, two very high profile positions, would have a hard time running for president and vice president. They're going to be hundreds of cases for which you are going to have to account. Anyone who has a record as lengthy as hers is going to have to explain some of her decisions. I'm speaking more broadly and boldly about the context of her record and her approach to law enforcement as progressive and thoughtful, someone who would divert young, non-violent offenders to help them get back on their feet.

She established a program called Back on Track. She put a progressive community organizer in charge of that program, the woman is named Lateefah Simon, to make sure the program would continue to exist long after she, Kamala Harris, was gone, routinizing something, institutionalizing a change in the system. That's what we're talking about now, changing the system, and that's what she did. Yes, we could do a case by case analysis. I'm sure she made some mistakes because we all make mistakes, but she was thinking deeply about the ways in which the system wasn't working for people. If you're going to put a former prosecutor on the ticket, that's the kind of complex thinker we want.

Brian: With our legal editor and All Things Considered host Jami Floyd, and Jonathan Swan from Axios, Seth in Bucks County Pennsylvania, you're on WNYC. Hello, Seth, thank you for calling in.

Seth: Hi, Brian, thanks so much for this segment. When you asked how I felt about it, and then, gave two polar opposites that hit the nail on the head, I am deeply moved almost to tears of this moment that the top of our presidential ticket has a Black woman. Then, I am also deeply disappointed [laughs] based on some of the things that The Atlantic article points out. I have to do much more investigation, but my gut tells me that this ticket is appealing for moderates because my sense is from my Facebook feed and from everything I read, people just want to erase 2020, pretend it never happened, let's go back somewhere, and somewhere back there doesn't exist anymore, and I think that climate change and redistributing police resources to communities are essential.

Brian: Seth, thank you very much. I'm going to leave it there. I'm going to go to Robin in Briarcliff Manor. You're on WNYC. Hi, Robin.

Robin: Hi. I'm just over the moon, Brian. I can't tell you how excited I've been. I've been in this deep funk, like many of your listeners, since 2016. I even watched Kate McKinnon singing Hallelujah from time to time still. I'm over the moon. I look at the ticket, our ticket, and I feel like this is my America, competence, and inclusion.

Brian: Robin, thank you very much. Paula in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Paula.

Paula Whitney: Brian, good morning. Actually, it's Paula Whitney. I'm transgender.

Brian: Okay. Hi.

Paula Whitney: I'm a dark-skinned, former Manhattan prosecutor under [unintelligible 00:21:37]. I have, first, an observation, and then, a question. My observation is that with the exception of Val Demings and Stacey Abrams, all of Biden's other potential running mates are all very light-skinned women, such as Keisha Lance Bottoms, Susan Rice, and Tammy Duckworth. My question is, did Biden pick from this particular pool in order to sway white voters?

Brian: Paula Whitney, thank you very much. Jonathan Swan, I will throw that question to you.

Jonathan: That's a question that I can't possibly answer. I don't have any insight [laughs] into how he thought about that or even whether he thought about that. I completely punt.

Jami: I don't.

Brian: Jami?

Jami: I'll take it.

Brian: Please.

Jami: As a light skin Black woman who has often been told I look like Kamala Harris, which is an extraordinary compliment-- I don't know if the caller had said that she is African American. One of those last two callers did say that she's African American.

Brian: She called herself dark skin.

Jami: Okay. Colorism is an extraordinary problem in our society. I agree with Jonathan that we cannot know how much the campaigns thought about or Biden himself thought about the race. We know they thought about race because they said they were going to take a Black woman, but the actual skin tone of the candidates. I think we have to be honest in this country about how much color plays a role in the relative success of Black people.

I say this as a light skin Black woman who understands that color, being a light-skinned person benefits a light-skinned Black woman, and if you're a darker-skinned Black woman, that is a struggle and a burden. We can talk about Black men in a different-- It's a different rubric. I think it's a very profound question that the caller asked, but I do think that for any voters who may want to question Kamala, and I've heard this conversation had within the Black community, about her Black bona fides. I've had the question about my own Black bona fides.

There are cold hard facts about Kamala's deep roots in the African American community. She was born in Oakland, California. She grew up going to a Black Baptist church, and she also went to a Hindu temple because her parents wanted her to have that inter-faith background. She went to an HBCU, Howard University. She chose to go to a historically Black college. Then, as we all now know, famously, she began kindergarten in her second year in that desegregation busing program, which she so famously chided Joe Biden about on the stage.

Then, finally, Brian, I will mention that she and her sister were taunted when they visited her father, her parents divorced, and they visited her father at Palo Alto because he taught at Stanford, and the other children would not play with them because they were Black. She is light-skinned, yes, and Maya is also light-skinned, but they suffered that extraordinarily painful Black experience of being discriminated against. Even with the colorism, we share this as Black people, this lived experience of discrimination. I think she feels it deeply, and to the extent, I know her through her brother-in-law, it is a shared experience in that family of being African American in America.

Brian: Jonathan Swan, as you know, we originally invited you on today before the running mate news broke to talk about your Trump interview last week and the ramifications. Congratulations on asking, from my point of view, follow up questions probably better than anyone I've ever heard with Trump, who always tries to change the subject. This will go down as one of the unforgettable things that we're about to replay that he's ever said as you press him on the COVID death toll in the United States on his watch, not just the number of cases.

President Trump: I think it's under control. I'll tell you what-

Jonathan: How? 1000 Americans are dying a day.

President Trump: They are dying, that's true. It is what it is. That doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. It's under control as much as you can control it.

Moderator: How do you see that answer, politically, 10 days or whatever it is later, and what it revealed about his relationship to the pandemic?

Jonathan: It doesn't matter what poll you look at, whether it's a public poll, whether it's doing reporting on private polling. The American public appears to have made up their mind on their assessment of President Trump's handling of the coronavirus, and it is not a positive verdict. The American public do not approve of the way that he's handled this virus. The realists inside President Trump's camp understand that the extent to which the election is a referendum on his handling of the coronavirus is the extent to which he's unlikely to be reelected. What they want to do is change the conversation.

Part of the reason they're so aggressively publicizing and discussing the possibility of a vaccine is because what they're trying to create is a situation where, in October, the public conversation has moved beyond who of these two men is most fit to handle the worst public health crisis in a century, onto a conversation about, "Well, okay, it looks like we're going to have a vaccine imminently, so who of these two men is best placed to restore the American economy." That's a conversation in which Donald Trump, according to polls, does much better against Joe Biden.

Brian: With Kamala Harris on the ticket, this exchange from your interview becomes even more salient. Trump claims he's been a better president for African Americans than any president, except Lincoln, even LBJ, who got the major civil rights laws passed in the 1960s, and you pressed him on that, as we hear in this clip. I think we have that clip where-

Jonathan: You believe you did more than Lyndon Johnson who passed the Civil Rights Act?

President Trump: I think I did, yes.

Jonathan: How? How possibly did you-

President Trump: Because I got the criminal justice reform done. I got prison reform.

Jonathan: Lyndon Johnson?

President Trump: I've done things-

Jonathan: He passed the Civil Rights Act.

President Trump: Yes. How has it worked out? If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did-

Jonathan: Do you think Civil Rights was a mistake?

President Trump: - how has it worked out because, frankly, it took a long time. For African Americans-

Jonathan: You think that was a mistake?

President Trump: - Jonathan, under my administration, African Americans we're doing better than they had ever done in the history of this country. I did a lot, job numbers, all of the money, they had money, they were getting great-- Their percentage was up, their housing ownership was up. They did better than they've ever done until we got hit-

Brian: Jonathan, what was the president even trying to say there, asking you how that Civil Rights Act worked out?

Jonathan: As you can tell from the clip, I was stunned when he said that and tried to clarify in the moment, "What do you mean how has that worked out? Are you suggesting that it was a mistake to pass that piece of legislation?" It was one of those moments, and then, he pivoted. He has these pre-programmed riffs that he delivers on the Black unemployment rate under his presidency, which was the lowest, at least, in recent memory. It's his default response to basically any question that concerns race.

Later in the interview, I was asking him about whether he thinks that police treat African Americans differently from white Americans. Again, he doesn't like engaging with those questions. He simply likes to tout those statistics as the answer to everything. He has said publicly, numerous times, that he believes that the way to achieve harmony in this country is through economic policy. He doesn't tend to engage on any other level with these issues.

Brian: Jonathan, I know you have to go. Thank you for giving us some time today. Jonathan Swan from Axios. Jami Floyd still with us for a couple of minutes from LA, by the way, we should mention. Jami, you're on vacation this week, actually, but you agreed to come on with us-

Jami: Always for you, Brian.

Brian: - considering your connections, even personal ones, to the moment, we really appreciate. Being in LA, I wonder if there's any sort of, particularly, California coverage-- I apologize, everybody, for the noise that you can probably hear in the background. There's a little construction going on outside my building. Any particular, "Oh, our senator's been tapped," or any particular critical coverage because sometimes the local media somewhere is more critical about their own people than they are about people elsewhere who might be looked at more through rose-colored glasses? Anything you're seeing there in LA?

Jami: Needless to say, I always, when I travel, Brian, read the local paper, and it's these tops of the fold front page of the LA Times reaction to Kamala Harris. The headline being, "Kamala Harris is the VP pick, Californians react." That's the headline. [chuckles]

Then, it is the spread, pretty much, of what you've done on your show this morning, some concern about her record on one sidebar article, another article talking about the balance that she brings to the ticket, a bit of it being about her record as prosecutor, and then, some of it about her social justice, balance, and work as a senator vis-à-vis Joe Biden and who he is, which we haven't talked much about today and how they will balance one another out. Then, there's a little piece at the bottom, "Looking ahead to the debate." Pretty much the same reaction we're having, nationally, but from the California perspective, or I should say, the perspective here in Los Angeles.

Brian: We got one more perspective in, on the phones, that's an immigrant perspective, and someone who's interested in Senator Harris's immigrant background, in particular. Natalia in Astoria, Queens, you're on WNYC. Hello, Natalia.

Natalia: Hi, thank you for having me. Just my reaction yesterday was to research her Indian and Jamaican background. I was born in Colombia, and I've been in this country for over 27 years. I was thrilled to see that background and is saddened that she's been framed. I will not argue with whatever you want to find your connection and if she found her connection through the African American community and fought for them and defended them as I've heard and been reading about her career. I was saddened that very little talked about the fact that she is a first-generation immigrant. As a Colombian, I am incredibly proud. I live in Queens. I've lived in Queens and Washington DC and that is something that I wish was talked about more.

Brian: Natalia, later in the program, I'll let you know and let everybody else know. One of our guests will be Christina Greer, the Fordham University professor who wrote a book called Black Ethnics, specifically about African Americans and Back immigrants, including from the Caribbean. We're going to get more deeply into that aspect coming up later in the show. Jami, you want to give us one last thought as you walk out the door? Maybe on that last thing you mentioned from the LA press coverage, handicapping the debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris to come? I was starting to imagine it as I was listening to that Kamala Harris-Brett Kavanaugh clip from his confirmation hearings.

Jami: Yes. I think these debates will be strange, to be sure, because you won't have the audience, we'll all be watching remotely, so we can't watch with our friends. Democrats and, indeed, progressives who watch will need to ask themselves one question, critical of Kamala Harris or not, "Do you want Donald Trump as your next president?" That's the question. If you don't, then, any quibbles you have with Kamala Harris or even Joe Biden, you probably need to put them aside and vote for Biden and Harris on November 3rd. If you cannot bring yourself to do that because of something in the Harris record or something she says during the debate, then, you need to prepare yourself for another four years of Donald Trump. That's really the question.

It's very clear what the choice is. We have the Bernie supporters who are not terribly comfortable with a moderate ticket, but it's a very clear choice when you're watching the debates. When you listen to what Kamala says, when you listen to what Mike Penn says, that is the question to ask oneself on November 3rd and thereafter.

Brian: WNYC legal editor and All Things Considered host, Jami Floyd. Jami, thank you so much. Such a deep analysis. I didn't even realize that you personally knew, even if through a degree of separation, Kamala Harris, or how close your connection was as both of you worked in San Francisco at the same time. Thank you for such a deep analysis today.

Jami: I would predict, Tony Harris worked for President Obama at the Justice Department, and he's a brilliant lawyer in his own right. I would keep an eye on him. That's what I will say. I imagine he may be back in Washington. Okay.

Brian: Enjoy the rest of your time out there. I hear what you're saying. Of course, they'll have to avoid family ties conversations or dance around them, if something like that were to happen, but interesting note.

 

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