Kamala Harris, who's stuck at 6% in the Democratic presidential primary polls, now has a back seat driver for her campaign in the advice of her former squeeze, Willie Brown.

The former mayor of San Francisco; state assembly speaker; godfather of California's blue-state politics; and, ahem, mentor, to Harris has all kinds of advice for her because she's doing it wrong.   

Here we go:

Here's the transcript with the key quotes from Grabien:

BROWN: "It's a difficult task for her because she is not concentrated at all on California. Whoever's managing her campaign, in my opinion, will not do it the way it should have been done. Clearly you ought to develop the ability to be the favorite son or daughter in the state from when she comes, which is the way it was in the olden times when we were selecting people. She needed to concentrate. That incredible sendoff that she got in the announcement time back in February in Oakland, it was dramatic, clearly. And three or four continuous visits here would have placed her at the top of the food chain. Ignoring California, not deliberately, but doing all you can to be known in other places causes you not to be doing things at home."

Nice, delicate way of telling his ambitious protégée that she's a political moron.  No wonder she's trailing Andrew Yang in the polls.

More humiliating still, he's right.  As shady and hideous as Brown is, he's always had the street smarts to know how politics works.  And yes, it's completely true that Kamala Harris hasn't done jack for her state — her only master, other than Brown, of course, is her fealty to socialism and Big Government.

The woman has no recognizable roots in the state — she portrays her Berkeley beginnings in the '70s as a sort of fictional Jim Crow South, which isn't recognizable to any real Californians.  She plays corporate woman in pearls for the cameras, which isn't really the typical laid-back California style.  She's never worked in any of California's signature industries — health care, med-tech, defense, the military, farming, cuisine, science, or high tech.  She's worked only in generic government, recognizable anywhere and not special.  She shows no devotion or willingness to rave about California's natural beauty — surfing, desert, mountain-climbing — which is pretty big in the state.  Her background is actually socialist Canada, which isn't exactly a match.  She's never effectively championed any California-specific causes, such as water for the beleaguered Central Valley farmers, high housing costs, wildfire dangers, illegals flooding in, locals fleeing out, lousy highway infrastructure, high taxes, crappy schools, or blue-city urban blight.  She was too busy trying to get her name in the news over issues such as the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.  To heck with California; it was just her convenient stepping stone.

There's actually nothing recognizably Californian about her at all, so no real reason for even the state's Democrats to vote for her.  No wonder she's trailing Yang.  Yang's loopy ideas have a certain sort of appeal to innovation-happy Californians on the left side.  Corporate Kamala isn't about innovating, but about calculating to her best advantage and being on the right trend.  In her heyday, law enforcement and being "smart on crime" was the thing.  That's since become passé, and now a liability, given the excesses of prosecutors such as herself, keeping people in jail beyond their terms and defending false testimony from dishonest prosecutors.  No wonder even the lefties don't trust government when they consider that.

It adds up to why she's not catching fire in her home state, and it's pretty embarrassing.  Wonderfully enough for us, Willie Brown has noticed and is pointing it all out for us, something that is sure to reach Kamala's burning ears.  The man who was once her ticket to the top has now become her back seat driver, her Greek chorus, publicly dishing the advice so as not to have others think he's behind this Harris train wreck of a campaign. 

Couldn't happen to a nicer ambitious leftist, who uses and steps over people on her way to the top, never looking back.  Old Willie is still watching and commenting, from behind.  Willie, after all, has a reputation to defend.

Image credit: Nancy Wong via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.