Kamala's Karma

Dr. Shannon Thyne, who coordinates the Department of Public Health's child sexual abuse program, works closely with the unit Harris heads at the City Attorney's Office. Together, they created a program to spot evidence of child sexual abuse in emergency rooms. While Thyne credits Hallinan with setting up effective programs to deal with those who prey on children -- making it easier, for example, to remove young victims from abusers and put them into foster care -- she says Harris has long been the mover and shaker on the issue.

As Harris campaigns in the Mission, a man on the street tells her that he likes Hallinan's "permissiveness." Harris responds that people ought not to confuse "compassionate justice" with Hallinan's failure to prosecute property-destroying war protesters.

"It is not progressive to be soft on crime," she says.

In fact, Harris' law-and-order rhetoric worries Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who does not want her to win. "Harris would be a hard-nosed prosecutor," says Adachi. "It's not the tradition in San Francisco to favor punishment over rehabilitation. We are not concerned with the conviction rate, we don't want to come down hard on people accused of crimes, we don't want to nail them to the cross."

Harris just laughs at this criticism, which would qualify as a wannabe DA's dream endorsement almost anywhere except San Francisco.

Despite her credentials and zesty campaigning, Harris acknowledges that recent polls indicate she is lagging far behind Hallinan and Fazio.

With the incumbent at 28 percent and Fazio in the mid-20s, she has 14 percent of the prospective vote (having risen from 9 percent back in February). The silver lining, she says, is that unlike in most political races, the percentage of undecided voters in the DA contest is rising (from 27 percent in March to 35 percent this month). That growing pool, she believes, gives her an opening.

As her name recognition slowly increases, the possibility of her winning is driving her opponents bananas. In an interview about his own candidacy, Fazio couldn't leave the subject of Harris alone. "How can Harris root out corruption if she has Willie supporting her behind the scenes?" he interjected, apropos of nothing. "I do not care that they had a relationship, but there are legitimate questions whether or not there is payback there."

San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno sees the efforts of Hallinan and Fazio to smear Harris with her past association with Brown as misogynistic. He says the two male candidates are focusing on the Willie factor because Harris "presents a real threat and they have no other cards to play."

His sentiments are echoed by Harris' sister and fellow attorney, Maya Harris West, director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU's Northern California chapter. "This hype around Willie Brown is such a distraction and so opportunistic, sexist, and ridiculous," says West. "When a woman dates an accomplished man, why are people so willing to assume it's only because of him that the woman is successful?"

Harris' mother agrees. Shyamala says the "malevolence" of the personal attack on her daughter makes her angry. "What has Willie Brown done for her? Introduce her to society people when they dated? If they did not like Kamala on her own right, they would have dropped her after she dropped Willie. Kamala is comfortable in all kinds of social scenes. She can pull it off in high society, too. She has the manners, the eating habits.

"Why shouldn't she have gone out with Willie Brown? He was a player. And what could Willie Brown expect from her in the future? He has not much life left."

Given the voter demographics she is targeting, and her own ethnicity, it's not surprising that Harris' campaign headquarters is smack in the middle of Bayview­Hunters Point.

"I feel the black community is my base," she says. "I feel comfortable there, with people coming in off the street to check out the headquarters." Local African-Americans, she notes, turn out in relatively small numbers at the polls, even though they are disproportionately represented as the objects of the district attorney's prosecutorial attention.

But with her law degree and upper-middle-class background, Harris doesn't always seem completely in tune with her would-be constituents.

One day, she visits the decrepit Sunnydale housing project escorted by Ruth Jackson, a community activist who lives nearby. During Brown's administration, the Housing Authority spent more than $25 million remodeling Sunnydale, but the most prominent improvement appears to be the huge letters decorating one building: MAYOR WILLIE L. BROWN COMMUNITY YOUTH CENTER.

Down the street, young men sell drugs, glancing sideways at strangers. Outside the center, Harris talks to three other men who are friends of Jackson. She tells them why it is important to vote against Prop. 54, a ballot initiative intended to prevent the state from gathering racial information from Californians. Harris explains that Prop. 54 will undo affirmative action, that it is a step backward toward Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized segregation. The men listen politely, genuinely interested in what she has to say.

Harris has a brainstorm: The men should sponsor a mayoral debate in the community center. They are lukewarm to the idea. They're planning to stage a protest demonstration the next day because, they say, Muni broke a promise to hire black youths from their ZIP code to help build the new light-rail system snaking down Third Street. Harris brightens.