Willie Brown: Kamala Harris Should Decline to Be Joe Biden’s Running Mate

Former San Francisco Mayor and California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown has written that his former protégé, Kamala Harris, should decline to be former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate if she is given the opportunity.

In his latest column for the San Francisco Chronicle, Brown — who dated Harris, and gave her a start in politics — says that she should ask to be Biden’s attorney general instead:

If Joe Biden offers the vice presidential slot to Sen. Kamala Harris, my advice to her would be to politely decline.

Harris is a tested and proven campaigner who will work her backside off to get Biden elected. That said, the vice presidency is not the job she should go for — asking to be considered as attorney general in a Biden administration would be more like it.

Being picked for the vice presidency is obviously a huge honor, and if Biden wins, Harris would make history by being the first woman to hold the job.

But the glory would be short-lived, and historically, the vice presidency has often ended up being a dead end. For every George H.W. Bush, who ascended from the job to the presidency, there’s an Al Gore, who never got there.

Read Brown’s full column here.

Early in the campaign, Brown acknowledged his past relationship with Harris, including the fact that he had appointed her to salaried state positions while they were dating, and said that neither she nor any of the other candidates had what it took to defeat President Donald Trump.

Now, however, Brown seems to regard Trump as likely to  lose, given the coronavirus pandemic, because he “was the one in the White House when it all went down.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.