Katie Porter discusses crisis that shook her gubernatorial bid

SAN FRANCISCO — Katie Porter’s still standing, which is saying something.

The last time a significant number of people tuned into California‘s low-frequency race for governor was in October, when Porter’s political obituary was being written in bold type.

Immediately after a snappish and off-putting TV interview, Porter showed up in a years-old video profanely reaming a staff member for — the humanity! — straying into the video frame during her meeting with a Biden Cabinet member.

Not a good look for a candidate already facing questions about her temperament and emotional regulation. (Hang on, gentle reader, we’ll get to that whole gendered double-standard thing in a moment.)

The former Orange County congresswoman had played to the worst stereotypes and that was that. Her campaign was supposedly kaput.

But, lo, these several months later, Porter remains positioned exactly where she’d been before, as one of the handful of top contenders in a race that remains stubbornly formless and utterly wide open.

Did she ever think of exiting the contest, as some urged, and others plainly hoped to see? (The surfacing of that surly 2021 video, with the timing and intentionality of a one-two punch, was clearly not a coincidence.)

No, she said, not for a moment.

“Anyone who thinks that you can just push over Katie Porter has never tried to do it,” she said.

Porter apologized and expressed remorse for her tetchy behavior. She promised to do better.

“You definitely learn from your mistakes,” the Democrat said this week over a cup of chai in San Francisco’s Financial District. “I really have and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how do I show Californians who I am and that I really care about people who work for me. I need to earn back their trust and that’s what campaigns are literally about.”

She makes no excuse for acting churlish and wouldn’t bite when asked about that double standard — though she did allow as how Democratic leader John Burton, who died not long before people got busy digging Porter’s grave, was celebrated for his gruff manner and lavish detonation of f-bombs.

“It was a reminder,” she said, pivoting to the governor’s race, “that there have been other politicians who come on hot, come on strong and fight for what’s right and righteous and California has embraced them.”

Voters, she said, “want someone who will not back down.”

Porter warmed to the subject.

“If you are never gonna hurt anyone’s feelings, you are never gonna take [JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive] Jamie Dimon to task for not thinking about how his workers can’t afford to make ends meet. If you want everyone to love you, you are never gonna say to a big pharma CEO, ‘You didn’t make this cancer drug anymore. You just got richer, right?’ That is a feistiness that I’m proud of.”

At the same, Porter suggested, she wants to show there’s more to her persona than the whiteboard-wielding avenger that turned her into a viral sensation. The inquisitorial stance was, she said, her role as a congressional overseer charged with holding people accountable. Being governor is different. More collaborative. Less confrontational.

Her campaign approach has been to “call everyone, go everywhere” — even places Porter may not be welcomed — to listen and learn, build relationships and show “my ability to craft a compromise, my ability to learn and to change my mind.”

“All of that is really hard to convey,” she said, “in those whiteboard moments.”

The rap on this year’s pack of gubernatorial hopefuls is they’re a collective bore, as though the lack of A-list sizzle and failure to throw off sparks is some kind of mortal sin.

Porter doesn’t buy that.

“When we say boring, I think what we’re really saying is ‘I’m not 100% sure how all this is going to work out.’ People are waiting for some thing to happen, some coronation of our next governor. We’re not gonna have that.”

Gavin Newsom, she noted, was a high-profile former San Francisco mayor who spent eight years as lieutenant governor before winning the state’s top job. His predecessor was the dynastic Jerry Brown.

None of those running this time have that political pedigree, or the Sacramento backgrounds of Newsom or Brown, which, Porter suggested, is not a bad thing.

“I actually think this race has the potential to be really, really exciting for California,” she said. “… I think everyone in this race comes in with a little bit of a fresh energy, and I think that’s really good and healthy.”

Crowding into the conversation was, inevitably, Donald Trump, the sun around which today’s entire political universe turns.

Of course, Porter said, as governor she would stand up to the president. His administration’s actions in Minneapolis have been awful. His stalling on disaster relief for California is grotesque.

But, she said, Trump didn’t cause last year’s firestorm. He didn’t make housing in California obscenely expensive for the last many decades.

“When my children say ‘I don’t know if I want to go to college in California because we don’t have enough dorm housing,’ Trump has done plenty of horrible attacks on higher ed,” Porter said. “But that’s a homegrown problem that we need to tackle.”

Indeed, she’s “very leery of anyone who does not acknowledge that we had problems and policy challenges long before Donald Trump ever raised his orange head on the political horizon.”

Although California needs “someone who’s going to [buffer] us against Trump,” Porter said, “you can’t make that an excuse for why you are not tackling these policy changes that need to be.”

She hadn’t finished her tea, but it was time to go. Porter gathered her things.

She’d just spoken at an Urban League forum in San Francisco and was heading across the Bay Bridge to address union workers in Oakland.

The June 2 primary is some ways off. But Porter remains in the fight.