ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Just over a decade ago, President Barack Obama went to the San Francisco Bay Area for a Democratic fundraiser. He paid a joking compliment to one of the state's rising stars, California's attorney general, Kamala Harris.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GIL DURAN: And at the fundraiser, he referred to Attorney General Harris as easy on the eyes, something along the lines of being the best-looking attorney general in the country. And this became a massive, you know, scandal.
SHAPIRO: That's Gil Duran, who had recently gone to work for Harris as the attorney general's communications director. So it was his job to manage the fallout.
DURAN: Suddenly, we are at the center of this international circus, and she had a very tactful and graceful response that she knows what he meant. They're good friends, and it's not a big deal. And it passed. The way she handled it, I think, was great and very kind to the president.
SHAPIRO: Today, Duran is an independent journalist, while his former boss is a Democratic presidential candidate with the shortest campaign in modern U.S. history. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has been well known for decades. So all week, we're talking with people about chapters in Harris' life before she came to Washington as a senator. It's a series called I Knew Her When.
Harris has a reputation for high staff turnover. And while many former employees give anonymous quotes about their frustrations working for her, Gil Duran is one of the few former staffers who will speak on the record about it. When he first went to interview for the job as her communications director, the attorney general and her staff sat on one side of a large table. He was on the other.
DURAN: It was pretty intimidating, even for a guy who had just been the spokesman for the governor of California and was used to having to stand there and go toe-to-toe with reporters and with the public. You know, it was a very different kind of job interview, unlike any I had ever had, kind of like being put on the stand for a bit. So...
SHAPIRO: Cross-examination. What was your impression of her in that first meeting in that job interview where she was peppering you with questions?
DURAN: Well, that she was tough, that she was really interested in whether I would be a fit for her organization and that she was trying to ferret out whether I would break or crack under the pressure of the media and the press that would be coming her way shortly. At the time when I first met her, she was more of an obscure figure outside of San Francisco. She had won a state office in a very tight race, but I think most people across the state didn't really know who she was. And that was about to change pretty rapidly.
SHAPIRO: So you get the job. You show up to the office. What was the experience of working for her?
DURAN: I was around some of the smartest people I've ever worked with in any office. She collected really an amazing array of very smart lawyers and other people - many of whom like me, had had jobs much higher up in government, mostly in the federal government, and had all collected here to try to be a part of this Kamala Harris organization because people felt she had a bright future. And people really wanted to work for her because of who she is - because she's a woman, because she's a woman of color and because she's somebody we don't often see rising to these positions in politics.
The operation, other than that, was a bit tough to be a part of. It's no secret that I ended up leaving after five months, and it was not a good fit. You know, I've never written about any detail about my experience in her office. And partly, I made that choice because so many other people were doing that from her subsequent campaign and from her vice president office.
SHAPIRO: I understand your desire not to dig into the details of your departure. Is there any kind of office workplace story you can tell us not to trash your former employer, but to paint a picture of what life on the job was like?
DURAN: Well, I think, you know, some of the stories have captured how she can sometimes be slow to make a decision and get frustrated by feeling unprepared for something like a press conference or a meeting. And it's not always clear - it wasn't always clear to me why that was our fault rather than on her. I think that's been a main tension in her subsequent operations as well. I'm not saying anything that hasn't already been said. And I found that - as someone who came from a big office and who had worked for Dianne Feinstein, who's probably - was the most competent manager in political history, also someone tough to work for, but the toughness came out of her sense of organization and her demand that everybody meet a very, very high standard. I found it hard to navigate a situation where it wasn't really clear to me how I could do a good job because doing the job in a way that had worked everywhere else didn't seem to work there.
SHAPIRO: She has been described as detail oriented, which can be either a strength or a weakness. Is that something you can tell us about?
DURAN: Well, I think it depends on the details. I think she can be detail oriented about some things. She tends to really put a lot of thought into issues because I think she's trained as a lawyer and as a prosecutor, where you're looking for very specific details and going over the case again and again. I think that other times she struggles with some of the details, like the details in 2020 of her own campaign platform. There were people who accused her of pretending to have been more strongly in support of progressive policies than she had been as attorney general.
I think part of what made it difficult in the office was I think she's very aware of her place in history and of the expectations that are put on her by so many people. And I think she felt that she would be held to a much, much higher standard than white or male politicians. I was just thinking this morning, if Kamala said anything half as crazy as what Trump said over the weekend when he said his supporters would never have to vote again if they voted for him one more time, she would be drummed out of the race tomorrow, right? She doesn't have that kind of ability to make a mistake, and she never has.
SHAPIRO: It's interesting to me because when I think about the kinds of criticisms that you are leveling, that she was too deliberative and indecisive and maybe blamed staffers for some of her own shortcomings as you perceived them, I also hear you acknowledge that there was more pressure and scrutiny on her than there might have been on a white man in the same position and that, to some extent, the problems that she was trying to anticipate are things that have now come to pass. And it sounds like you're saying you fault her for this, and also, it's hard to blame her for it at the same time.
DURAN: Well, I think she could have handled it better. Like I said, too, a lot of us were way above the pay grade of working in the attorney general's office in California when we went to work for her. We did that because we wanted to make sure this person had the best people around her, and she burned through a lot of us. And that's just the way it happened, and that's just the way it is. But I hope she has learned from that. She's got to run basically a perfect race here, and I think she can do it. I think she's highly aware of that pressure and that expectation. If she loses this race, so much progress that people have been fighting for for decades will be clawed back. And so I think that kind of pressure tends to sharpen the mind.
And I have never counted Kamala Harris out, even in my most critical columns. I never once said she's finished. I've always assumed that some day like this might come. And my only purpose in being openly critical is - well, in addition to the fact that politicians in America deserve to be criticized, and that's part of the job of journalism - is to implore her to work on these things and improve.
SHAPIRO: Would you ever go work for her again?
DURAN: I don't think that's in the cards for either of us.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
DURAN: But I certainly hope to be able to criticize her when she's President Harris, and I pray that we get there.
SHAPIRO: Well, Gil Duran, it's been great talking with you. Thank you so much for your time.
DURAN: Thanks for having me.
SHAPIRO: He's a journalist who served as communications director for Kamala Harris when she was attorney general for the state of California.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHAPIRO: Tomorrow, we'll talk with someone else who used to work for Harris and still considers her a mentor.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
