SFGate Gives Kamala Harris Advice That She Will Ignore

I'm behind the times: I thought that the San Francisco Chronicle still owned the free SFGate website, which was founded in 1994. (SFGate runs several Chronicle articles verbatim every day, so perhaps my mistake was understandable.)

That relationship lasted 25 years, until the Chronicle's parent, the Hearst Corporation, split the two organizations, complete with separate news and editorial staff. Technically they are now sister publications owned by the parent Hearst Corp.

She can think on her feet. WaPo reminds us that
she weathered the SF crime lab scandal in 2010.

Although SFGate leans left in its Opinion section, it's much more centrist than the Chronicle which still carries the flag for DEI, slavery reparations, etc. The following SFGate editorial advice to the Vice President would never be published in the Chronicle:

The GOP says San Francisco is a mess. Kamala Harris should agree. [bold added]

The San Francisco attacks will be potent. The city has long had a national image problem, and it’s not just people who don’t live in the city who feel that way; poll after poll from recent years shows San Franciscans themselves believe the city is on the wrong track. There’s a reason this year’s leading mayoral candidates are accusing one another of copying their policy proposals on police staffing and public safety.

But Harris could take a course of action that would not only parry the attacks but also help solve another problem she has. She can throw San Francisco — the city where she launched her career in electoral politics — under the bus.

Let’s back up. Harris has two major weaknesses to overcome if she wants to win the White House. The first is the issue that is, frankly, San Francisco. Harris’ national ascent started in San Francisco, when she became the city’s district attorney in 2004; her mantra that she can “prosecute the case against Donald Trump” is her directly campaigning on her tenure in the city. The problem is people across the political spectrum now view the city as a wasteland of needles, vacant storefronts and cars with shattered windows.

The second is the fact that Harris is a career political shapeshifter, and that shapeshifting — specifically her attempts to cater to the progressive wing of her party in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries — has left her exposed to attacks that she’s a radical leftist who wants to defund the police and weaken enforcement against illegal immigration. Early polling confirms that Harris’ biggest issue is that she's perceived as too liberal. This week, she named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a gun owner and hunter who used to represent a rural congressional district, as her running mate, reportedly in part because of his possible appeal to rural and exurban areas that traditionally vote Republican.

Throwing San Francisco under the bus helps Harris with both weaknesses. She is already stylizing herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and someone who is more of an immigration hawk than Trump. She should more specifically portray herself as the last non-radical San Francisco district attorney. She has a set of spinnable facts that can tell the story of San Francisco’s demise and how it was not because of her but rather despite her. It’s because of her departure (she left to become California’s attorney general in 2011) that San Francisco went to s—t, she can say. After all, her two successors, George Gascón and Chesa Boudin, are now national bogeymen with name ID for anyone who has watched even five minutes of Fox News while visiting their grandma for a holiday.

The editorialist, Eric Ting, proposes a plausible defense against future Republican attack ads against San Francisco. Ms. Harris can say, look at the mess it became when I departed, my successors went too far left, and my policies will restore it.

That strategy can work, but it will also require the Harris campaign to admit that she made some mistakes in the past (e.g, supporting 2014's Prop 47, which lowered some felonies to misdemeanors, including property crimes involving less than $950).

However, reversing course requires some facility in argumentation, and Vice President Harris has not demonstrated that skill in the past five years. That's probably why her handlers will keep her under wraps as long as possible.