(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown jokingly suggested he is running for president following Kamala Harris’s elevation as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
Brown made these remarks after being approached by reporters outside a San Francisco restaurant on Monday. He has recently trended due to the resurfacing of his affair with Harris in the late 1990s.
“Who are you people? What are you doing here?” Brown jestingly asked reporters, prompting one to reply that Brown was popular, according to the San Francisco Standard.
Brown quipped in response, “You think so? Then I’m announcing my candidacy.” He added, “No! I will never be second! Not only that, you know I’m too old. They got rid of the old guy!”
In a separate interview with San Francisco’s KRON-TV, Brown offered positive remarks for Harris, calling her the only candidate who can defeat Trump.
Brown’s puns came after President Joe Biden exited the 2024 race, following what has been widely criticized as a “coup d’état” within his own party. Biden endorsed Harris, his unpopular vice president, as his replacement.
In response to this shocking development, Brown suggested that Biden should resign to boost Harris’s chances in the general election.
“I hope all those Democrats who’ve been pushing Biden to quit will now show up and ring doorbells with me,” he stated.
He continued, “I hope all those people that on the Democratic side for the last three months have allowed a poor performance out of a debate to distract them … will now no longer be distracted.”
Harris and Brown dated in the 1990s when he was the Speaker of the California State Assembly. He was married to Blanche Vitero Brown, though they were allegedly separated at the time.
Brown is widely regarded as the key figure who helped launch Harris’s political career by appointing her to two state commissions.
She then ran for San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general,
“Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco,” Brown wrote in an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2020.
The relationship resurfaced when Harris announced her failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination—an election she lost to Biden, then a former vice president.
A Headline USA review of Google Trends showed that searches for “Willie Brown” reached “peak popularity” two hours after Biden announced his exit and endorsement of Harris for the 2024 election.
