I was very impressed with him as the Keynote Speaker at the 2012 Convention, writing "Michelle Obama was good but hands down, the star of the night was Julian Castro." (I was hopeful Hillary would choose him as her VP candidate in 2016 but it was not to be.
In 2012, the Washington Post wrote this article on Julio and his twin brother Joaquin who is now a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
The Dems could certainly use some new blood. I won't even write about Biden or Sanders, I think it's really sad when egos get in the way of what otherwise could be a graceful exit. No one needs an 80 year old in the White House. Would you want an 80 year old surgeon operating on you?
I'd like to see someone run who really cares and emphasizes the needs of the underdog, the poor (rather than the "middle class" and business owners), the powerless and the voiceless. Someone who is smart, has a law degree and experience with the criminal justice system in a non-law enforcement capacity -- someone with a foreign policy experience and someone who attracts good talent. Someone who doesn't want to throw money at defense contractors or builders of private prisons and detention centers. Someone with respect for the privacy rights of individuals who will put some brakes on the mission creep of government surveillance. And of course, someone who will try to right the wrongs of the war on drugs.
Is that Julian Castro? Probably not -- I don't think such a person exists among those who might run for President. You probably can't get there espousing those views. But I'll be looking for the person who comes closest -- and it's not Biden, Sanders, or Kamela Harris. From the 2017 article in Jacobin Magazine, The Two Faces of Kamela Harris:
In truth, there is much about Harris’s long record as a public prosecutor in California — the vast bulk of her career — that is up for legitimate criticism by any prospective 2020 Democratic voters.
The article gives several examples, such as that as California's attorney general, she defended the state's death penalty when a judge ruled it unconstitutional while refusing to support the state's anti-gay Proposition 8 in court, stating it was “a proposition that was found by a judge to be unconstitutional.”
You can see this pattern in Harris’s approach to criminal justice. Today, Harris talks a good game....Yet Harris’s “smart on crime” approach seems remarkably similar to a “tough on crime” one. “Getting Smart on Crime does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes,” she explains in her book.
She defended California's horrendous three-strikes law.
She urged voters to reject Proposition 66, a ballot initiative that would have reformed the harsh law by making only serious or violent felonies trigger life sentences. Harris promised that if voters rejected the initiative, she would put forward her own, different reform. But Harris’s proposal was a tepid half-measure: it simply eliminated some third strikes.
...When she ran for attorney general, her Republican opponent actually ran to her left on the issue. In fact, four years earlier, as the Los Angeles County district attorney, he had proposed a reform of the law. Harris had not supported it. (emphasis supplied)
Her record on sentencing reform as an AG also leaves much to be desired:
In 2012 and 2014, California voters passed two ballot initiatives that gave judges more discretion in sentencing and retroactively scaled back punishment for certain low-level crimes. Harris didn’t take a public position on either, claiming that taking a side would come into conflict with her duty to write the ballot text. A fellow Democrat who had preceded her as attorney general called the excuse “baloney.”
Today she's concerned about imprisoned women. But as District Attorney (before becoming CA Attorney General):
For all her recent concern about the incarceration of women and its economic effects, as district attorney, she successfully championed a statewide version of an anti-truancy law she had put in place in San Francisco that threatened parents of chronically truant children with as much as a $2,000 fine and a year in jail. By October 2012, two mothers had been imprisoned under the law.
“We are putting parents on notice,” she said in her inaugural speech as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”
There's lots more examples in the article to give you pause about Kamela Harris. Including but not limited to the war on drugs. She's born-again on the issue now, but when she was AG she went in the other direction. This is a really long and thorough article and covers her prior contrary stances on many issues, from police shootings, to civil liberties, to transgender rights. The article also argues we shouldn't give her a pass on her old ways:
It should matter to us that Harris, the ardent criminal justice reformer, not only did little to enact this reform during her years as a prosecutor but backed harsh, punitive policies that undermined her own progressive rhetoric on the issue. It should matter that she at times did so needlessly, taking a harsher stance than her right-wing opponents. It should matter that she repeatedly attempted to keep an innocent man locked up in prison and attempted to defend a falsified confession.
And if she continues to sell herself to the public as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor who went after financial misdeeds in defense of the ordinary homeowner, then it should matter that her record on this was more underwhelming than even some county district attorneys.
[Jacobin Magazine, which I have only recently encountered, describes itself as "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture."]
Again, I'm not making up my mind this early, but I'm glad that Julian Castro has thrown his hat in the ring.
