If Kamala Harris runs for California governor, the job is essentially hers for the taking.
So goes the common wisdom.
After all, she’s a household name, which is no small consideration in a state as vast and politically inattentive as California. She has a coast-to-coast fundraising base and a record of winning statewide contests going back to 2010, when she was first elected attorney general.
Who better, supporters say, to engage President Trump than the former prosecutor who whipped him in their one debate and only just lost the popular vote after being thrust overnight into a drastically truncated campaign?
Antonio Villaraigosa isn’t buying that for a second.
Unlike others in the crowded race for governor, who are likely to drop out if Harris jumps in, L.A.’s former mayor said he’s not budging.
In fact, Villaraigosa insists he wants Harris to run — just so he can beat her and, he says, send an anti-elitist message to those Democrats who have their noses in the air rather than eyes fixed on hard-pressed voters and their myriad frustrations.
“I think she’s been OK that we’ve been a party of just people that drive a Tesla and not a Toyota pickup, or ride a bus like my mother did,” Villaraigosa said. “I think she has no idea what it means to buy a carton of eggs and spend $12 at Ralph’s.”
Harris is “the face of that party,” he went on, warming to the heat of his smoldering rhetoric. “The party that thinks that people that don’t have a college education are stupid. The party that believes that … people voted for Trump just because he’s a great used-car salesman and not because what he was selling resonated with people that work every day. The people who shower after work. Not before.”
As Harris uses the summer to decide her future — retiring from politics or running again for president being other options — no Democrat has been as brash and bold as Villaraigosa when it comes to assailing the putative front-runner and erstwhile leader of the national party.
Earlier this week, he accused Harris and Former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra of helping cover up President Biden’s decline in office, seizing on the scandal fueled by a new book, “Original Sin,” that offered details of Biden’s eroding mental and physical state.
“She could say she didn’t know,” Villaraigosa said, elaborating on that initial volley during a lengthy conversation. “They can’t prove that she did. But last time I looked, she had lunch with him pretty regularly … She had to have seen what the world [saw] over time and particularly in that debate. The notion that she didn’t? Come on. Who’s going to buy that?”
That sort of talk is more typical of, say, Fox News than a candidate bidding for the support of fellow Democrats. Villaraigosa, a former labor leader who’s gotten crossways with teacher unions among other party mainstays, professed not to care. If anything, he said, he’s been encouraged by the response.
“For every one of those people” — upset by Villaraigosa’s remarks — “there are three of them, maybe not as high up among Democrats, who are saying the same damn thing. That’s why this got so much traction … Since Vietnam, people don’t believe in government anymore. They don’t believe in their leaders. And every time we lie or misrepresent … [or] hide the truth from them, their support and their belief in our institutions” diminishes.
Harris would have plenty of time to push back on Villaraigosa’s depiction, should she choose to run. In the meantime, what’s notable is his eagerness to take on the former vice president, positioning himself as the most vocal and assertive of her potential gubernatorial rivals.
Others have taken a few pokes.
“No one should be waiting to lead,” former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter told The Times’ Seema Mehta after entering the contest in March.
Becerra echoed that sentiment when he announced his candidacy in April. “Watching what’s unfolding before our eyes made it clear this is not a time to sit on the sidelines,” Becerra said.
But that’s comparatively weak tea.
“If she wants to come in the race, she should come in now,” Villaraigosa taunted. “Let’s debate. What are the challenges facing our state? Where are the opportunities? Where do we meld them together? How do we make this a better state for our kids?”
During the 40-minute phone conversation, starting in his car and finishing after Villaraigosa arrived home in Los Angeles, he toggled between criticisms of Harris and statements of good will toward a one-time political ally.
The two have known each other, he said, since the mid-1990s, when Villaraigosa was a freshman assemblyman in Sacramento and Harris was dating then-Speaker Willie Brown. He supported her run for attorney general — “I did three press conferences” as L.A. mayor — and was quick to back her as soon as Biden stepped aside last summer and Harris became the Democratic nominee.
“I supported her,” he said. “I got behind her. Her husband” — former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff — “has thanked me a number of times when he’s seen me in person.”
The disagreement now, Villaraigosa said, is over the direction of a party he sees unmoored from its history as a champion of the middle and working classes and too beholden to interest groups that make up its patchwork coalition. Harris, he suggested, is the personification of that disconnect from Democratic tradition.
“At the end of the day, what I’m arguing for is, let’s get to the place where we’re focused on getting things done and focused on common sense,” Villaraigosa said, citing, among issues, his support for Proposition 36, the anti-crime measure that voters overwhelming approved last November. The vice president, he noted, refused to take a position.
But don’t, he said before hanging up, take his attacks on Harris the wrong way.
“This isn’t personal,” Villaraigosa insisted.
It’s just politics.