When the news broke Sunday that has evolved into Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive eleventh hour choice of the Democratic party to seek the presidency, some of my snarkier social media connections immediately went into tabloid and grade school mode.  Some saw this as confirmation of what a good friend of mine calls the “power of the poussoir”, and you can mull over on your time exactly what that means.  Your first impression probably would be correct.

Immediately, I began to see references and links to the stories of how Harris allegedly rose in the Bay Area legal and political circles on the lap of former mayor Willie Brown.  And in the circles I travel in, there’s less than six degrees of separation between those rumors and those close enough to have had a personal connection to her.  So there’s ample opportunity and, in theory, reason to fall in line with those who have already resurfaced those stories as a kneejerk reaction to this series of disruptive events.

And, I’ll own it, I wasn’t quick to come to Harris’ defense.  After all, she is still the candidate of a party that has been perpetually guilty of misreading who and what they need to target in order to win over a plurality of America.  And let’s just say she has benefitted as much as anyone from that sort of incomplete and outdated feedback.

But when a story regarding Harris’ numerous and now clearly generous friends and supporters among Hollywood’s elite from THE ANKLER’s Matthew Frank dropped yesterday, I got a tremendous sense of deja vu.  Especially when I came upon these nuggets:

When Harris burst onto the scene to become the San Francisco district attorney, Chris Rock and her longtime pal Dana Walden contributed to her distinct fundraising advantage…Harris lived in Brentwood before moving to Washington D.C. and still has a home there with her husband Doug Emhoff, the entertainment lawyer she met on a blind date that was arranged by Chrisette Hudlin, the wife of producer-director Reginald Hudlin. Her political benefactors are also her friends: Before the pandemic and Harris winning the vice presidency, one could find Walden, Harris and their husbands at such Westside dining haunts such as Toscana in Brentwood and El Cholo in Santa Monica.

In a 2020 story from THE WRAP’s Diane Haithman, Walden confirmed the deepness of the connection between she and Harris:

“Kamala and I have a mutual best friend, and we’ve been close friends for 27 years. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of her upcoming role as the Vice President, especially for young women,” Walden told TheWrap. “As the mother of two young women, I have been extremely lucky that Kamala has been a role model for my girls for a very long time. She has spent her entire career giving a voice to the voiceless and she’s a tireless champion for people who have been unable to defend themselves. She cares about people — all people — and she’s brilliant and compassionate, which is exactly what this country needs right now.

And as Frank continued in yesterday’s piece, the Walden ties go even deeper :

That same year (2013), Harris met her soon-to-be husband. However, her blind date meet-cute had even deeper Hollywood ties, as Harris later recounted during a 2022 fundraiser at Walden’s home. As it turns out, Dana and her husband Matt had introduced the Hudlins on a blind date.

“Dana and Matt introduced on a blind date Chrisette Hudlin and Reggie Hudlin, who then introduced on a blind date me and Doug,” Harris said. “So, in many ways, Dana and Matt are responsible for my marriage.”

Now, I don’t know Harris.  But I do know Walden.  And yep, I heard plenty of stories about Walden’s romantic history, and not just the more sordid ones about her own supposed extramarital trysts that supposedly prompted her rapid ascension through the ranks of Fox.

The Walden I knew was once named Dana Freedman, and she was a pert, disarmingly attractive publicist for the ARSENIO HALL SHOW at the peak of that show’s meteoric popularity.  She was single, regularly arranging and attending numerous A-list parties and yes, attracted the attention of a lot of people I personally knew.  Including a few colleagues who she had some sort of relationship with.  One in particular was a notorious womanizer whose own ascension to top positions was attributed in part to his own disarming looks and swagger.  If you will, the male equivalent of the power of the poussoir.

So I had heard those rumors before I began to deal with her in numerous internal think tank sessions.  But as I got to see and hear her speak, think and opine with insight, candor and fearlessness, whatever stories about how came to the position she was then in, let alone the ones she’s advanced to since, were put onto the back burner of irrelevance they deserved.  Having seen her up close, I net out far closer to the viewpoint espoused by Haithman’s WRAP colleague Brandon Katz in 2022 with these ulimately prescient headlines:

Disney’s ‘Badass’ New TV Chief Dana Walden May Be a Bigger Threat to CEO Bob Chapek

If ousting Peter Rice was meant to eliminate competition, insiders say Chapek may have underestimated Rice’s former deputy.

Harris’ consultant, Jim Stearns, had warned his candidate that her opponents would dredge up her ties to Brown, and the moment arrived at a church in the city’s gentrifying Noe Valley neighborhood. The race for San Francisco district attorney was still in its infancy, and Harris, who had never before run for public office, was polling in single digits.  And so, when an audience member inside the church asked how, if elected district attorney, she could operate independently from Brown’s political machine, Harris was ready with not just an answer, but a counterpunch. “Make them understand that if they’re going to try to hurt you, they’re going to get more hurt,” Stearns said he counseled her.

As Stearns tells it, Harris rose from her seat at the front of the sanctuary and stepped behind Terence Hallinan, the incumbent who billed himself as “America’s most progressive district attorney.” She told the audience, “You know Terence Hallinan has attacked Bill Fazio for being caught in a massage parlor,” a reference to a 1998 raid. Fazio, a former prosecutor who had run two close races against Hallinan and was now taking a third shot at the office, maintained he was there to conduct interviews for a legal case he was working on. He was never charged with any crime.

Then, Harris walked behind Fazio, Stearns said, and recounted the times her opponent had criticized Hallinan “for people having sex in his office,” referring to an incident in which two of Hallinan’s prosecutors were found in flagrante delicto inside the building.

The response was immediate. “People just jumped on their feet and gave her a standing ovation,” Stearns said. “And I was at the back of the church, and the look on the face of Terence Hallinan and Bill Fazio was, ‘Oh, shit.’’”

In the terse words of John 8:7, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Now please don’t think I’m running out anytime soon to help Harris with her campaign.  Frankly, judging by the amount of money and the breadth of support she’s received in the last 72 hours alone, she doesn’t need it and as long as she insists that the intelligencia her party continues to employ is somehow on point, I’m not sure I would want any part of it.  And there’s more than enough about her actual track record in the offices she’s held to openly question whether she’s truly qualified for the job she’s seeking, even with the acknowledgement that her competition is arguably even less so.

If anyone wants to cast doubts about her competency based on those histories, go right ahead.  It’s more than fair to say she’s a lot less auspiced and personally responsible for success in her realm than Walden is in hers.  It wouldn’t be the worst strategy for Harris to again pay attention to any thoughts Walden might have to connect with the masses.  She’s more than proven she can.  Now it’s up to Harris to do the same.

Until next time…