Although 14 years have passed since Kamala Harris ran for California attorney general in 2010, a passage that could have marked the political life of the current Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States has recently been revealed.
According to The New York Times, at the time, Harris was in a David and Goliath scene, as her opponent was Steve Cooley, the popular and moderate district attorney of Los Angeles County, whose trajectory seemed to catapult him to a sure victory.
The reality was that Harris was on the verge of losing the election, and according to the polls, by a very wide margin.
But 47 seconds dramatically changed the course of that election after a debate in which Cooley gave an answer that was too frank and naive for a district attorney.
NEW: The 47 Seconds That Saved Kamala Harris’s Political Career
My piece on one of the most crucial and long-forgotten episodes in the arc of her political career — in a race she nearly lost.https://t.co/Mbl39tZwtm
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) August 18, 2024
In the environment at the time, public pensions were a controversial issue and Cooley was campaigning to pursue public corruption, where local officials were taking outlandish salaries in an impoverished municipality.
In that context, when questioned in the debate, it was said that the $150,000 salary of the California attorney general was half of the $292,300 salary that Cooley earned as the local district attorney, so The question was about whether Cooley planned to collect a pension and a salary as attorney general, which would earn him more than $400,000.
Spontaneously, the answer was “Yes… I have earned it,” leaving the presenter and Kamala Harris herself silent for a moment.
But that was not all, Cooley spent 47 seconds explaining that, “I have definitely earned any pension rights I have, and I will certainly rely on them to supplement the incredibly low salary that the attorney general is paid.”
Fourteen years after that moment, Cooley still remembers that stumble: “The thing is, I answered honestly… It was a mistake. A lot of people said, ‘You should have just dodged that question.’”
Harris, for his part, only uttered phrases like: “Go for it, Steve!”, bursting into laughter. “You’ve earned it!”
From that moment on, Kamala Harris’s campaign knew it had not only won the debate, but probably the election.
As with the rest of the campaign, the strategy was to replicate Steve Cooley’s fateful 47 seconds, which ultimately led to the victory of the current vice president and Democratic candidate for the White House.
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