Five-term Los Angeles Rep. Karen Bass is the other Californian on Joe Biden’s short list to be his vice president. She’s rising up the veepstakes charts so fast that even conservative columnist George Will — the Ronald Reagan-cheerleader-turned-never-Trumper — said she’d be a great pick.
Like many of the other women on Biden’s short list, Bass, 66, is a ceiling-breaker. The daughter of a postal worker, in 2008 she became the first Black woman in history to lead the California Assembly or any similar legislative body in the country. But she’s also different. She’s a healer. And right now, she’s having a moment in the national spotlight while trying to bring together warring parties.
She is leading the congressional effort to reform policing and working on the Biden-Sen. Bernie Sanders unity team, tasked with trying to get progressives to warm up to the former vice president. If Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are the fighters on Biden’s short list, always ready to trade punches with President Trump, then Bass is more like her potential running mate in her ability to work — or at least reach — across the aisle.
In 2010, she shared the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award with two Republicans and a Democrat for helping steward California out of its $42 billion budget crisis. Said the former president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy: The four Legislature leaders “set aside party loyalties and ideological differences and fashioned a solution to rescue California from the brink of financial ruin.”
Bass has has won praise from the top Republican in the House, Bakersfield Rep. Kevin McCarthy — whom she knew from their days in the Legislature — and from House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat whose endorsement delivered the nomination for Biden. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised her “gentility and strength” in tasking her, as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, to lead the effort to change how policing is done.
But don’t confuse being a healer with being soft.
“She fights with a smile,” said Manuel Pastor, a University of Southern California sociology professor who has known her for 25 years.
“You could see Kamala Harris leaving Donald Trump or Mike Pence on the floor in a debate. That’s not Karen in a debate,” said Pastor, author of “State of Resistance.” “But are you going to walk away from that debate thinking that Mike Pence is a fool? Probably. She will do that in a very subtle way.”
Key Bass fact: She earned brown belts in tae kwon do and hapkido. As she told the Los Angeles Times in 2009: Learning martial arts “taught me how to fight in a manner that is respectful; don’t personalize and get to the point. The goal of a martial artist is actually to not fight, (it’s) to prevent the fight.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that Bass is a healer since, like Biden, she has had to heal herself after losing a child. In 2006, her only daughter, Emilia Bass-Lechuga, and son-in-law Michael Wright, who met as students at Loyola Marymount University, were killed in an automobile accident shortly after they were married. Emilia was 23. Bass has four stepchildren she raised with her ex-husband.
“What we need to do is heal this country,” Bass told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast this week. “This country has just been torn apart for three and a half years. We’ve been traumatized on a daily basis. Most days multiple times in a day — 131,000 Americans are dead (from the coronavirus). And we have a president who hasn’t even blinked. As a matter of fact, he gets angry that we don’t praise him that more people didn’t die.”
She remains positive about the police reform bill that the House passed last month, even though the GOP-led Senate shows few signs of acting on it. Bass said there are ongoing “conversations but not negotiations.” On Wednesday, Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who has led the Senate’s reform effort, said he has talked to Bass about compromising on a measure.
What gives Bass hope is that she saw something different in the GOP’s reaction to the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody.
“This time my Republican colleagues, to a letter, all agreed that something terrible happened to George Floyd,” Bass said. “Now that might sound simple, but it’s not simple because I’ve never seen that before. Before, people always turn to the person that was killed to try to find out what they had done to deserve to be killed. And that did not happen this time. People looked at policing, and people recognized there’s a problem.”
Said Bass: “One thing I think in general about our American culture is that even when we accomplish something, sometimes it’s hard for us to even recognize that something’s been accomplished if you don’t get 100%” of what you want.
Bass remains a long shot to be Biden’s pick. Harris and Warren have been vetted nationally and are used to the national spotlight. Harris “just seems presidential — in that way that a lot of senators do,” Pastor said.
If Biden, 77, picked Bass — or Warren, 71 — they’d be the oldest ticket in history.
And Bass would bring some political baggage with her. Some of her fellow Democrats criticized her 2016 remarks after the death of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, when she referred to him a bit too respectfully as “comandante en jefe” in her condolence remarks. Critics said that could hurt Biden among some in the Cuban community in the key battleground state of Florida, where polls show he has a slim lead.
Bass — who is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, which has tried to advance democratic reforms in Cuba — told The Chronicle she was not trying to “slight anyone” with her remarks and said that “I will definitely take into consideration the sensitivities of different geographic areas, and also of different generations.”
Her efforts to work with Republicans haven’t hurt her standing with progressives, which could help the Democratic ticket because many progressives aren’t enthusiastic about Biden.
While Warren handily won a recent veepstakes poll among members of Progressive Democrats of America, Executive Director Alan Minsky said, “We (progressives) love Karen. Along with Warren, Karen Bass is the other name on the short list that has consistently been on the correct side of issues from a progressive perspective.”
Minsky added that George Will’s endorsement did little to dull his enthusiasm for Bass.
Said Minsky: “George Will and I agree on baseball, too.”
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
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How Karen Bass — the other Californian up for VP — is different from her rivals - San Francisco Chronicle
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