Kamala's Karma

"You should ask a police captain to conduct a protest training," she says. "That way you can protest safely. For example, people need to know not to run!"

Harold Kyer, who is organizing the Muni protest, seems a bit embarrassed to have to straighten her out. "Our community is not police-friendly, Ms. Harris," he explains gently. "They will not come to a meeting if the police show up."

The get-together ends. Harris zooms away in a black BMW (not hers) piloted by a volunteer campaign chauffeur. She's on a tight schedule, and does not have time to walk the community and talk to the low-income women and children who populate it. She insists, however, that she won't forget them.

"I have no intention," she says, "of turning a blind eye to the problems at Sunnydale."

From his Marina District office, political consultant Philip Muller is raising money for Kamala Harris -- without her consent.

Muller, who worked on both of Willie Brown's mayoral campaigns, is doing this through an independent expenditure committee innocuously called the California Voter Project. (Such committees are often used by special interests to raise political cash far in excess of state limits on individual contributions.) Muller plans to buy radio time for Harris, and he says he might air commercials critical of Hallinan and Fazio. He's also printing up window signs and bumper stickers for Harris.

His main fund-raising tool is a letter signed by Brown that requests $500 donations to "help Kamala win." He says the mayor's signature is legitimate, and Brown's spokesman confirms that.

Harris says she has had no contact with the mayor about his fund-raising on her behalf. She is "not sure" how she feels about his efforts, but she doesn't spend her time worrying about it.

Muller's unsolicited involvement in her campaign is galling in another way though. Unbeknown to Harris, Muller's committee was behind an anonymous mailer that attacked Harris' brother-in-law, Tony West, when he ran for a San Jose Assembly seat in 2000. The mailer suggested that West lived in Oakland (he didn't) by superimposing his head on the Oakland Raiders logo, with two swords sticking through his skull. Months after West lost the election, the San Jose Mercury News criticized Muller for unleashing "last-minute mailers riddled with distortions" and not revealing their true source.

When SF Weekly shows her a copy of the Mercury News article, Harris yelps, "You are kidding me. This is outrageous. Offensive. I will have no part of this. You watch what I do!" A few days later, after she calms down, Harris notes that there is nothing she can do to stop Muller, since the law forbids her campaign from even contacting his committee.

Muller's efforts notwithstanding, Harris is raising plenty of money on her own. According to her finance chairman, Mark Buell, a major Democratic Party fund-raiser, she has banked nearly $400,000 to date. (Hallinan says he's raised $157,000, while Fazio, who had raised $105,000 by the end of June, declines to reveal how much he's taken in since then.)

Buell insists the Harris campaign has "not received a penny from Willie Brown." When informed by SF Weekly that public records show Brown personally gave Harris $500, the maximum individual contribution allowed, Buell's memory suddenly improves. "Oh yes," he says. "My stepdaughter asked Brown for a contribution in a restaurant.

"I was not in communication with Willie, except for the chat I had with him about the race," Buell continues. "He said the best way for Kamala to win is to take Fazio out. So I had lunch with Fazio, but he would not get out." (Fazio confirms this account.)

Buell excuses himself from a telephone interview, saying, "I am going to a lunch for [mayoral front-runner] Gavin Newsom to get a list of people from him to do a fund-raiser for Kamala." Harris supports Newsom's November ballot initiative, Proposition M, which will further criminalize panhandling in San Francisco but provides no new funding for housing or health services for beggars. Her support of the initiative seems at odds with her more liberal stance on other social welfare issues.

Yet Harris doesn't hesitate to play up her sympathy for down-and-outers when raising cash for her campaign.

One evening at Clouds Restaurant, atop Yerba Buena Gardens, she addresses a group of black professionals, telling them, "The most victimized people do not vote, so you have to act on their behalf."

A few nights later, she hits up an all-white Pacific Heights crowd with the same speech. Among the wine-sipping guests is romance novelist Danielle Steel. The hostess, Frances Bowes, whose fortune derives partly from Hula-Hoops and Frisbees, says she met Harris at a benefit thrown by clothier-to-the-wealthy Wilkes Bashford, a longtime Willie Brown crony, in 1994. Bowes and Harris served together on the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Harris started a successful program to bring art into the public schools.

Bowes is particularly impressed by "Kamala's incredible theme, which is to protect young girls that become enslaved to prostitution. She is so vital and impassioned, anybody who heard her would vote for her for president.