No Special Treatment - Updated

photo credit: Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle photo, taken 9/27/05

Former mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California assembly Willie Brown published an interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle, dated today and titled Sure I dated Kamala Harris. So What?. This is the article in its entirety:

I’ve been peppered with calls from the national media about my “relationship” with Kamala Harris, particularly since it became obvious that she was going to run for president. Most of them, I have not returned.

Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago. Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker.

And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians.

The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that that I would be indicted if I “so much as jaywalked” while she was D.A.

That’s politics for ya.

Update: I posted this short little article, about Kamala Harris, written by Willie Brown, without thinking too much about it. Now the story's a thing on Twitter: 

oh man https://t.co/KEeHcT6Nxj

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee (@myhlee) January 26, 2019

I hit refresh on my phone six times before realizing that my phone wasn’t having issues and that this Willie Brown column about dating Kamala Harris is actually only four paragraphs long. https://t.co/MSN1wb9jio

— Kyle Blaine (@kyletblaine) January 26, 2019

This Willie Brown op-ed  -- just 9 sentences long -- is an instant classic --> Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what? https://t.co/QLZH1QugLC via @sfchronicle

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) January 26, 2019

This is the funniest thing I’ve read all week. https://t.co/Aj2l9fsNtP

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) January 26, 2019

And this is the tweet Olivia is responding to:

Click click click click click click click click click click  https://t.co/HcyblSO1wr

— carolynryan (@carolynryan) January 26, 2019

   
Update #2 on Tuesday, January 29: People are still talking about this. Here's how Vox.com explains things:

Brown’s relationship with Harris overlapped with his speakership in the mid-1990s, at which point Brown and his wife Blanche had been separated for more than a decade. While Fox News has sought to cast their pairing as an “extramarital relationship,” the San Francisco Chronicle notes that Brown had been “long-estranged” from his wife when he was with Harris. Harris was 29 when they met, while Brown was 60.

One of the key points of scrutiny related to their relationship has been the two jobs that Brown appointed Harris to around the time they were dating. One position was on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the other was on the Medical Assistance Commission. Harris held both jobs in 1994, the same year she was linked with Brown, according to the Los Angeles Times. The two ultimately ended their relationship the following year.

When Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003, she knew that her relationship with Brown — and allegations of cronyism — would be raised as an issue despite the sexist nature of such critiques, Politico’s David Siders writes. “No woman likes to be judged by their relationships. We want to be judged by who we are, not who we are romantically involved with,” said Rebecca Prozan, Harris’s campaign chief.

As Siders notes, suggesting that Brown had any influence over Harris’s professional ascent obscures the fact that he broadly exerted the same influence over numerous politicians in the region, given his wide-ranging position of power.

“It is difficult to find any successful politician in San Francisco who does not have history with Brown,” writes Siders. “Before being elected mayor of San Francisco the same year Harris ran for district attorney, Newsom owed his start in San Francisco politics to an appointment by Brown to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission, and later, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.”

It also gives Brown outsized credit for successes that Harris worked to achieve herself.

“Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work,” Harris told SF Weekly during her 2003 DA run. “I refuse ... to design my campaign around criticizing Willie Brown for the sake of appearing to be independent when I have no doubt that I am independent of him — and that he would probably right now express some fright about the fact that he cannot control me.”
Read the article here.