Kamala Harris Is the Latest Product of San Francisco’s Long-Running Political Machine

The secret sauce of the city’s political success? A mix of big money, high society, and socially progressive ideas.

Within a week of each other this past August, two California politicians, both women, took to the television screen for important speeches, one at the Democratic National Convention, one at the Republican. They presented a startling contrast.

Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, in a conservative plum pantsuit, spoke elegantly and probingly for 18 minutes about the problems the country faces. To be sure, her speech was historic—made as it was by a half Black, half South Asian woman running near the top of a national ticket—but its delivery wasn’t especially passionate; it was, in fact, a little flat.

Days later Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality, adviser to President Trump, and romantic partner of Donald Trump Jr., stood at the podium at the RNC in a skintight Kardashian-style red dress and ranted for six minutes about the evils of the Democratic Party, the grandeur of Trump, Joe Biden’s extreme leftism, and the death of California, her home state, from drug abuse, violent protests, and blackouts. Her speech was many things, including flamboyant and extreme, but it was not boring. (A few weeks later, she was alleged, in a report by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, to have committed baroque sexual abuses against staff at Fox that led to her dismissal there. She has denied the allegations.)

What Harris and Guilfoyle had in common, however, was that they were forged in the same crucible, one that has shaped much of American politics in the past half century: San Francisco’s Democratic political machine.

The machine—which operates around a fulcrum of big money, high society, and socially progressive ideas—has molded such Democratic politicians as governors Pat Brown and Jerry Brown (father and son); Willie Brown (former San Francisco mayor, machine boss, and no relation); Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein; former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer; San Francisco mayors Ed Lee and London Breed; and San Francisco mayor, lieutenant governor, and now governor Gavin Newsom (to whom Guilfoyle was married until 2006, before she eventually hitched her wagon to the cause of archconservative Republicanism).

Harris and Guilfoyle know each other: Both worked in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, a political launching pad, in the early 2000s. “San Francisco is this little town,” says Miriam Pawel, author of The Browns of California and other books about California politics. “It is so different from everywhere else in [the state], and they all know each other. So many of California’s politicians come out of this—right out of the machine.”

But until now there has never been a Democrat from California on a national ticket, so the San Francisco Democratic Party machine, though enormously influential nationally, has never been represented in such an august position. Every Californian to run for president or vice president has been a Republican, and there have been precious few. Only one native Californian, Richard Nixon, has won the presidency. (Ronald Reagan, another Republican president with serious California cred, having been governor, was born in Illinois.) Nixon is also the only Californian, born or bred, to have won the vice presidency, but his political career was jump-started in Washington and New York—not in-state.

Power Point

We don’t pay much attention to political machines anymore. I do, because I happen to come from a family whose patriarch, my grandfather David T. Wilentz, was the boss of a powerful northern New Jersey Democratic machine, back when they were called “organizations” or “clubs.” Call them what you will, party machines are usually groups of behind-the-scenes second-tier politicians and socially connected people who represent power centers, who oil the often creaky mechanisms of city and state governments, and who urge forward politicians who will further their own and, theoretically at least, society’s betterment.

It hasn’t always worked that way. Machines have often been notoriously corrupt, especially New York’s Tammany Hall under the leadership, from the 1850s through 1877, of the infamous Boss Tweed. Even in the machines’ less brutal incarnations, the words patronage and pressure were integral parts of the lexicon. My grandfather bothered, at one end of the spectrum, to recommend friends’ kids for jobs as toll takers on the New Jersey Turnpike; he also worked, at the other, to shape or browbeat New Jersey congressmen and senators on policy issues dear to the machine and the party.

The Kennedys came out of a similar club in Boston, which was run alternately and inimically by various Irish Americans, including John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and P.J. Kennedy, both grandfathers of President John F. Kennedy, the Boston machine’s greatest creation. (According to political legend, my grandfather helped organize New Jersey to give JFK a victory there in his 1960 presidential bid against Nixon.)

The Kennedys came out of a similar club in Boston, which was run by various Irish Americans. President John F. Kennedy was perhaps the Boston machine’s greatest creation.

From the early 1900s through the 1980s, the American justice system sought to dismantle old-school machines and root out the most egregious instances of cronyism. Tammany fell early on; many others faded away with changing mores and political templates. Still, their latter-day iterations exist as political bases for fund-raising, social climbing, and political agency—especially for the wealthy. San Francisco’s is probably the most visible of these today: It is covered by local media, known to residents of the city, wired into every aspect of municipal political life—and it produces big characters nationally.

“One reason that San Francisco’s political culture produces so many success stories is that it’s a really intensely political community, from its citizens in general to journalists in particular,” says Dan Newman, a San Francisco political consultant and strategist for Governor Newsom. In this small town of 880,000, he says, politicians are recognized on the street and approached as if they were movie stars or famous athletes. “You could hear people on public transportation [in pre-Covid days] talking about a board of supervisors meeting, which they followed like a sport,” Newman says. “Politicians here learn to hit major league pitches before they even take a step out of the city. There’s none of that youthful struggle you often see in other, less seasoned politicians when they step up to the next level in the state or in DC. They have already been through a lot with voters, reporters, complex rivalries, etc. They already know the game.”

For newcomers to the sport, like Silicon Valley moguls, the machine offers entrée to the political fray and influence over their industry’s policy future, while also affording them a route into San Francisco’s social swirl and its media limelight. (Which is one of many reasons they don’t all want to live in Palo Alto.)

The Social Swirl

When I see Harris and Guilfoyle in action, I know that they’ve both had to curry favor with powerful people, especially men, and that they’ve had to work hard for that approval. I know that money, sometimes big money, has played a part in their success and in how they rose to their respective levels and positions. I know, too, about the political game-playing and the quashing of rivals. Like all operatives in a political machine, they have had to struggle to prove their indispensability and to ingratiate themselves. (But training in politics and game-playing isn’t the be-all and end-all, of course. There is also character. The opposing personalities of Harris and Guilfoyle have led one—Harris—almost to the very zenith of the political hierarchy in America, whereas Guilfoyle’s alleged on-the-job behavior at Fox seems to have led to early dismissal from her job as a host on The Five, and now a public airing of professional misconduct.)

Many politicians who are San Francisco machine beneficiaries were, unlike Harris, in it from birth or arrived there through old family connections to its society figures—people like Gordon Getty and his wife, the late Ann Getty, of the Getty Oil fortune, as well as other families with deep pockets and a history of political giving.

The Pritzker family, whose fortune originated four generations ago in Chicago, is also a money minter for San Francisco-produced candidates like Harris. As is the Fisher family, which founded the Gap clothing chain. The Fishers are traditionally Republicans, but they support Democratic candidates if they like them. And they like Harris. Dede Wilsey, widow of the real estate developer Alfred Wilsey, is another Republican donor who is not always a party loyalist and supports Harris. (As the Republican Party wanes in California, social connection grows in importance relative to party affiliation.)

The fundraising side of the machine is, of course, a formidable engine. Harris began auspiciously enough in 2002, when she convinced real estate developer Mark Buell to manage the money for her very first campaign, for San Francisco District Attorney, against a former mentor of hers, Terence Hallinan, who was the longstanding incumbent. It helped that Harris was good friends with Buell’s stepdaughter, Summer Tompkins Walker, a figure on the youthful social scene whose mother, Susie Tompkins Buell, Buell’s wife, is a founder of North Face and Esprit and also a legendary Democratic giver. Harris and Mark Buell envisioned a finance committee for Harris peopled by youthful socialite women, and those were among the people who helped make Harris into a fast-rising Democratic star.

Like Summer Walker, many of these young heiresses had somehow already become Harris’s friends, including Vanessa Getty, daughter of Ann and Gordon, and Susan Swig, who is from yet another real estate family with a progressive political and philanthropic bent. Other sectors of California’s economy have also supported Harris, most notably Silicon Valley, including the Benioffs of Salesforce (also part of the San Francisco swirl); the Silicon Valley investors Tom and Theresa Preston—Werner (also of San Francisco); Drew Houston of Dropbox (likewise a San Francisco dweller); and Laurene Jobs (who lives in San Francisco).

All in the Family

As integral as social connections and fundraising prowess are to the machine, so are the interconnections among careerists who have passed through San Francisco’s board of supervisors and district attorney’s office, fertile grounds for future California Democratic superstars.

Often, the web of relationships can read like a gothic romance or a telenovela.

Former governor Jerry Brown’s father Pat Brown was San Francisco district attorney, then state attorney general, and then governor. Often this web of relationships can read like a gothic romance or a telenovela. Soon after she graduated from college, Nancy Pelosi, who was born into an important Baltimore Democratic machine family, moved to San Francisco with her husband Paul, a San Franciscan. Her brother-in-law Ron Pelosi, who was then married to Belinda Newsom, Gavin Newsom’s paternal aunt, was on the board of supervisors there. The Pelosi brothers, in other words, were already wired into the motherboard of the machine.

With that connection, Nancy soon began her stunning ascent to the upper reaches of California and national Democratic politics. Gavin Newsom, whose father William (brother of Belinda, the aunt married to Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law) was a state appeals court judge and the administrator of the enormous Getty family trust, rose through the city’s board of supervisors after founding a successful wine business—with the backing of family friend Gordon Getty.

And long before she made her startling appearance at the RNC this year, Guilfoyle, who had studied law at the University of San Francisco Law School and spent four years as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles—and had also been, briefly, a Victoria’s Secret model—headed back to San Francisco, where her father Tony was a real estate investor and a big political macher known as “the Godfather” in the city’s Democratic Party. Tony Guilfoyle was especially close to Gavin Newsom, and he was a central figure in Newsom’s campaigns for board of supervisors and then for mayor.

In 2001, Kim Guilfoyle and Gavin Newsom, two heirs of San Francisco power, married—to great local hoopla, and even some national attention. A Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot of Gavin and Kimberly, spooning in full evening dress on the carpet in Ann Getty’s gilded, almost Trumpian living room, with its panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, provides a window into the kind of rarefied atmosphere the machine affords its favorite offspring.

Eyes on the Prize

Harris’s rise seems predictable now, but it wasn’t always easy to imagine that she would be accepted and promoted by San Francisco high society and the machine. She was, after all, the daughter of two immigrant academics (one from Jamaica, the other from India, neither a political operative or office holder), a graduate of historically Black Howard University, and originally from Oakland, across the bay, with all that that connotes. She was an outsider, in so many ways. And yet she propelled herself, after graduating from UC Hastings College of the Law, to loftier and loftier professional heights: from prosecutor in the Alameda County district attorney’s office in Oakland (1990); to the San Francisco DA’s office, where she became head of the Career Criminal Division, an office that attracts a lot of media attention (1998); to San Francisco DA (2003); to state attorney general (2010); to United States senator, replacing Barbara Boxer (2016); to presidential candidate (2019); and now to vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket.

Kamala Harris’ rise seems predictable now, but it wasn’t always easy to imagine that she’d be accepted and promoted by San Francisco high society and the machine.

The credibility that others brought to the machine by birth or money, Harris had to earn though charm, intelligence, presentability, and ambition. But the machine in San Francisco is like that.

“It has room to evolve continually and grow and embrace diverse newcomers,” Newman says. “At the progressive forefront of a city like San Francisco, a group like this can continually produce people who truly represent the moment. The big San Francisco families turn up again and again, and there’s this kind of incestuous overlap. The generations are self-consciously progressive; they don’t want to be a retrograde group, but the opposite.”

Harris penetrated this group not only by making friends with wealthy socialites but by doing the necessary jobs: by attending every gala, every cocktail party, every social event she was invited to, and then by being featured frequently at those events on the cover and in the pages of the monthly society gossip paper, the Nob Hill Gazette, as a figure to watch; by serving diligently on every not-for-profit and for-profit board she was appointed to, which early in her career included lucrative but unglamorous positions on the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and on the California Medical Assistance Commission; and by befriending major power figures like the Gettys, the Buells, the Swigs, the Newsoms, and many others.

Her early and important mentor was the long-time state assemblyman and assembly speaker, and then mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, the first Black person to hold that office and a major operator in the San Francisco machine of his day; he is still living. You could say, in fact, that the world of the San Francisco machine today was concocted by Willie Brown. Harris and Brown dated for a time. She was 29 when they first met, and Brown was 60. It was Brown who, presciently recognizing talent and rewarding it, appointed Harris to those two early seats, on the Insurance Appeals Board for $97,000 a year, and then on the Medical Assistance Commission for $72,000 a year. Willie Brown also gave Harris a BMW that became an infamous symbol, among San Francisco gossips, of their complicated ties, political and personal. (The relationship was over by 1995.)

San Francisco Values

When I moved to Los Angeles two decades ago from New York, I looked around and knew I was a foreigner in this supposed never-never land of sun, warmth, and friendliness, and of (on the other hand) noir made fantastically actual (because of the state’s numerous spectacular crimes). But I soon learned that this was a state with systemic problems, like many other states, and I felt comfortable with problems, since I’m originally from New Jersey. Because California is so huge—geographically (the third largest state in the country), demographically (the most populous), and economically (the world’s fifth largest economy, by GDP)—its issues reflected the world’s; and if it found solutions to problems, those resonated beyond its borders.

The seeds of its national importance were sown early: It was the first Western state admitted to the union, in 1850, making the United States a full continental nation by adding the Pacific coast to the Federal map. Many from the East Coast and the Midwest moved to the newly minted state, and also immigrants from the Pacific rim and elsewhere. Today, California is a huge engine of technology, agriculture, and infrastructure, and a harbinger of the demographic change that is altering the nation: In 2000, it became the first large-population state to become majority minority. It is a repository for new ideas and culture, and also, on the downside, a place of enormous income inequality, arguably the worst in the nation: It has the greatest number of people living in poverty of any state (adjusted for cost of living) and the greatest number of resident billionaires.

More important than all of this, it is the state that is perhaps most immediately and visibly facing and addressing the challenges of America’s future: climate change, demographic change, and population density. And because it is a behemoth, what it does affects world markets and global behaviors, the greatest example of this, perhaps, being the state’s early and stringent regulation of tailpipe emissions: California’s smog standards are now followed by automakers globally. It was San Francisco politicians who came up with the idea .

The California Candidate

These days, the city continues to push the state to set progressive environmental and social standards in various areas. Governor Newsom just recently issued an executive order that would require all new passenger vehicles sold in California to be zero-emission by 2035. Indeed, if a Venusian were to land on earth and begin reading on Wikipedia about pollution controls or pesticides or a variety of other environmental and social issues, she’d understandably believe that California was one of the globe’s leading progressive nations, with San Francisco as its capital.

In 2018, at a GOP event where she introduced Vice President Mike Pence, Kimberly Guilfoyle told the audience, “I have fully recovered from San Francisco,” which sounded like a requisite disavowal before embarking on the extremist right-wing chapter of her life, and in light of recent news seems like an understatement.

Yet quite apart from whether Biden and Harris win or not, this election may reflect, in part, how America as a whole reacts to the ferment and vitality in Northern California surrounding precisely those progressive ideas and policies that the California Republican party used to call, mockingly and dismissively, “San Francisco values.” Meaning: support of gay marriage, progressive taxation, regulation of industry, pro-environmental policies, pro-labor policies, choice on abortion, marijuana legalization, fair immigration policies, higher minimum wages, etcetera—the whole nine yards of forward-looking thinking in this country.

There are those who “poke fun at squishy California,” says David Ulin, editor of Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, among other books. “But California is a modern society in a state that shouldn’t even exist. Forty million people living at the edge of the continent on unstable ground… but they’re here because of planning, confidence, and will. These are American attributes, and in California we have had them and still have them.”

No matter how the presidential election turns out, “San Francisco values” are not going to disappear from the political culture of contemporary America.

No matter how the presidential election turns out, “San Francisco values” are not going to disappear from the political culture of contemporary America. By picking Harris, a San Francisco powerhouse, as a running mate, Biden has implicitly said many things. Among them: A woman makes a valid president; a child of immigrants is an appropriate president; a second Black president is a fine idea. And his choice also suggests that the political landscape of San Francisco, which has helped build California, will be a rich field from which future national policies can be plucked.

That said, Harris may also have been chosen because, while seeming to rep all those liberal trends by virtue of her political upbringing, she is also a former prosecutor who had held some less than progressive positions on a variety of law-and-order issues.

Translated: she has always been careful to ensure her political future by walking a middle ground. That’s a habit with a machine pol, who will always have his or her eye on the next and more important election.

But one of Harris’s useful attributes is that she doesn’t look like a typical machine product. She seems fresh, different, kind of sparkling. She’s biting and clever, stylish and energetic. But in a sense, too, she’s a great fat man, his cartoonish pot belly straining at the buttons of his business suit, with a lit and smoking cigar hanging from the corners of his mouth, like the old caricatures of Boss Tweed and his friends. Like Boxer, Feinstein, and Pelosi, Harris has already gone beyond the machine, yet for the San Francisco “club,” a victory for her ticket this year would be the greatest success ever.

Amy Wilentz

Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir for 2013, among other books. Named a Guggenheim fellow in 2020, she writes frequently on politics and culture in California, is a contributing editor at The Nation magazine, and a professor in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California, Irvine.

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