Campaign Watch

Willie the albatross Early polling in the district attorney's race suggests deputy city attorney Kamala Harris has a long way to go if she's to beat incumbent Terence Hallinan come November. After months of campaigning and a splashy June kickoff, only 9 percent of 800 likely San Francisco voters said they'd choose her to be the city's top prosecutor, according to a recent poll by the campaign of a candidate for citywide office that was shared with the Bay Guardian.

Hallinan has his own problems, with 32 percent of those polled rating his job performance "only fair." But that pales compared to the troubles facing Harris. Topping the list: her romantic liaison with Mayor Willie Brown. Voters wouldn't necessarily mind that she was his sweetie during his first bid for mayor in 1995, the data suggest. What's likely to turn them off is that Harris – like Brown's highly paid campaign treasurer (and mother of his youngest child), Carolyn Carpeneti – has reaped easy financial rewards because of the relationship.

In 1994 then-speaker of the assembly Brown moved Harris from the $97,000 a year Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board post he had given her to the high-paying California Medical Commission. The two state panels are among the three most frequently blasted by government watchdogs for "allow[ing] politically connected people with no expertise ... to earn large salaries for jobs that are less than full time," according to a Feb. 23, 2003, report in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

At 30 years old, Harris had no experience that would qualify her to oversee the work of 15 staff members who negotiate Medi-Cal reimbursement rates with state hospitals. Even so, from 1994 to 1998 she was paid a cool $78,624 a year on top of the publicly funded salary she earned as a prosecutor in Alameda County. (For her part, Harris has said she considered the work "very important.")

In 1998 – the year her commission pay went up to $99,000 – she took a six-figure job as a prosecutor in Hallinan's office. Brown's appointment of his former girlfriend to two high-paying state panels provided a "very persuasive" reason not to elect her, 56 percent of those polled said. Fifty-seven percent found that augmenting her prosecutorial duties with work on a state panel, and then missing 20 percent of state meetings, was a "very persuasive reason" not to elect her as well.

Harris's campaign manager, Jim Stearns, believes his client will have no problem convincing voters she didn't ride into town on Brown's coattails.

"This is a campaign where each of the candidates has some negatives," said Stearns, referring to accusations floated in the 1999 district attorney's race that candidate Bill Fazio, who is running again, got caught hanging out in a massage parlor. "In comparison, Fazio and Hallinan's negatives are much worse." (Savannah Blackwell)