by Edward Ring
Long before fate made Kamala Harris the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for U.S. President, the Washington Post published an article critical of how she treats staff. The article, published in December of 2021, reported high staff turnover and claimed it “opens up questions about her management style.”
What were they thinking? Very recent top search results on the Washington Post’s coverage of Harris only pull up glowing tributes. In the past two weeks, here are just a few: “Kamala Harris is making politics fun again — for Democrats,” “Democrats make a change and find their hope,” “Kamala Harris and the coconut tree of hope,” “Kamala Harris’s life, career and firsts from AG to the vice presidency,” “Kamala Harris’s powerful laughter in the face of weirdness,” “Kamala Harris walks into the storm — and keeps her footing,” “How Kamala Harris’s early career prepared her for this moment.”
Had enough? Like nearly every other major newspaper and broadcast property in America, the Washington Post is now all in for Harris. Suddenly, she can do no wrong. But reports of her pattern of abusive treatment of staff are credible. In 2019, a small Northern California newspaper published an article by a local elected official, Terry McAteer, where he described the office environment of then California State Attorney General Harris, where his son had served as an intern. In his article, titled “Another Side to Kamala Harris,” McAteer claimed that Harris “instructed her entire staff to stand every morning as she entered the office and say, ‘Good Morning General.’” McAteer said that Harris “vocally throws around ‘F-bombs’ and other profanity constantly in her berating of staff and others. The staff is in complete fear of her and she uses her profanity throughout the day.”
How Harris treats staff is corroborated by the high turnover at her office during her time as vice president. Now that all eyes are focused on her candidacy for president, OpenBooks has conducted an investigation. They found her office had “an extraordinarily high 91.5-percent staff turnover rate.” Of the 47 staffers initially assigned to Harris in 2021, only four remain.
Reports of Harris’s managerial dysfunction were not forbidden territory for the liberal press prior to July 20, 2024. In October 2023, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Kamala Harris Problem – Few people seem to think she’s ready to be president.” Conservative news outlets have also exposed Harris’s weakness as a manager. In 2022, the National Review published an article with the self-explanatory title “People Really, Really Do Not Want to Work for Kamala Harris.” And unsurprisingly, over the past few weeks, similar articles can be found at the New York Post and Fox News.
Missing so far from these revelations—which we are unlikely to ever see again in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, or any other state-approved media—is the connection between Harris’s abusive personality and the essential culture of the left. Someone who explains the pathology of the left with extraordinary clarity is Thomas Sowell, whose quotes on the topic include the following:
The opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.” “People on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them.” “No one can really understand the political left without understanding that they are about making themselves feel superior.” “The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom.
These quotes aptly define Kamala Harris’s political philosophy, but they are equally applicable to her personality and how she treats people. By extension, this explains the character of leftists in general. It explains why Democrat rallies are populated with individuals who are almost all angry and resentful. And further insight into the culture of the left is found in the institutions that, in the 20th century, became the foundation of their power: radical labor unions. The first major unions to endorse Harris for president in 2024 were the teachers unions: the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.
We may acknowledge the vital role that some private sector unions can have in America while still maintaining a clear-eyed appraisal of the teachers unions. They are invariably far-left organizations that have done everything in their power to destroy public education. Their entire political agenda is divisive and confrontational (why should they even have a political agenda?), whether it’s their hypocritical and incessant attacks on “corporations and billionaires” or their fanatical adherence to every dingbat theory of race, gender, and climate ever conceived.
Union support for Harris goes back a long way. During her first bid for major office in 2010, in an unusually tight race against moderate Republican Steve Cooley to become California Attorney General, “union groups, including the California Labor Federation, Service Employees International Union Local 1000 and the California Nurses Association, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help lift Harris to a narrow victory.”
There is something inherently antagonistic about unions. They can usually compel workers to become dues-paying members. They typically portray employers as perpetual adversaries. And unlike businesses that have to compete for customers who have many options, their ultimate tool of influence is going on strike. This antagonism, however, is compounded by the radical leftist bias of unions in California. One way to understand just how pervasively this culture dominates politicians in Harris’s home state can be found by evaluating the backgrounds of the state’s legislators. In 2020, 75 percent of California’s Democratic state legislators had biographies that indicated a background exclusively involving unions and government agencies, compared to only 34 percent of Republicans.
Further evidence of union dominance of California’s politicians is easily found by reviewing their donors. When searching campaign contributions by amount, it is common to find Democratic state legislators in California where every one of their top 20 contributors is a labor union. Usually they are public sector unions, and the biggest player is the teachers union.
In business, even in those corporations that have been corrupted by woke ideology such as we are seeing today, meritocracy remains essential for success. Until the fusion of big labor, big business, and big government is complete—something Democrats and RINOs can’t seem to push forward fast enough—corporate merit is mostly found in operating competence. Qualified engineers. Competitive products. But in the world of government and politics, merit is found in conformity and personal relationships. Not what you know, but who you know.
Obviously, this isn’t binary. Who you know is important for success, even in uncorrupted and competitive businesses. But in the world of government agencies, it’s everything. Out of touch and untouchable thanks to their unions, government workers advance not through competence but through connections and conformity. Then the most reliable among them get tapped to run for office.
This is the environment in which Kamala Harris climbed to the pinnacle of American politics. A culture of leftist hostility mixed with the us-versus-them mentality of unions. A culture where power based on political connections is the only power that matters.
If you know where to look, there is already plenty of information on what Kamala Harris is going to do if she has the chance to impose California’s liberal progressive (and corporatist) political agenda on the entire nation. But it is important to recognize that behind her proclamations of compassion and her incandescent smile and ditzy public persona, there is a conniving and angry person who was made for authoritarian governance. This dangerous duplicity exemplifies what we must always expect from everyone on the left. All of them.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Photo “Kamala Harris” by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center CC BY 2.0.
