America’s Love-Hate Relationship With Adam Schiff

No more. As Trump’s chief congressional antagonist, Schiff has played the parts of Law & Order’s Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterston rolled into one, both investigator and prosecutor in the Ukraine impeachment inquiry now racing to its high-speed climax. That role has made him a formidable political figure, and he is sitting atop a campaign war chest of nearly $7 million, more than half of it raised in the past nine months alone. Only three years ago, when he considered a run for the open Senate seat that Kamala Harris went on to win, a Los Angeles Times poll found that just 19 percent of Californians knew enough about him to have an opinion; now nearly three-quarters of voters statewide do.

“He’s done an incredible job,” says Garry South, a veteran California Democratic strategist. “He’s got the right demeanor, he’s got the right persona, he’s extremely well-spoken, he’s very judicious in terms of his public utterances. Not just the impeachment inquiry, but the Russia inquiry before that, has really elevated him into a national figure.”

That reality was on stark display last weekend in a pair of contrasting scenes on Schiff’s home turf of Los Angeles.

One was a celebration—of the long-sought final passage of a joint congressional resolution condemning the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians as the 20th century’s first genocide. And when Schiff, the measure’s chief sponsor, arrived in suburban Glendale for the event, he was welcomed with cheers and whoops and thunderous applause from some 200 representatives of the largest Armenian enclave outside of Armenia itself.

But just moments after he began speaking, angry shouts of “Liar!” rang out in the second-floor auditorium of the Glendale Central Library. “You should be in jail!” someone exclaimed. Had Turkish protesters crashed the party? No, just a rowdy, angry contingent of Donald Trump supporters, chanting and holding up red-white-and-blue signs proclaiming Don’t Impeach! A tug of war erupted over a Trump T-shirt, and as the demonstrators scuffled with the crowd, a couple of people stumbled and fell to the floor. For 15 or 20 minutes as Schiff stood calmly by onstage, a full-scale brawl seemed about to break out.

The scene had been different just hours before at a community parade in the diverse, hip, and gentrifying neighborhood of Echo Park, near Dodger Stadium. There, Schiff rolled down Sunset Boulevard on the back of a bright-red Mustang convertible, a string of plastic Christmas lights around his neck, as spectators hollered friendly greetings to the hometown hero he has become.“Thank you for standing up for America!” one yelled. “Go get ’em, Adam! Put him away!” cried another. A third simply called out, “We love you, Adam Schiff!”

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This is the slightly surreal reality of Schiff, blue America’s man of the hour, red America’s public enemy No. 1, and California’s fairest-haired political prospect for (some) higher office. For most of his nearly 19 years in Congress, Schiff toiled in comparative obscurity, an earnest, respected legislator but not a bold-faced figure. Now seemingly everybody knows the House Intelligence Committee chairman by his face.

“I did not imagine that I would become a household name,” Schiff told me before the Armenian event. “There is a popular mythology of the last couple of years that I was a complete unknown before Donald Trump, which wasn’t true. I used to do lots of Sunday-morning shows and whatnot, but as an expert on national security and foreign policy. So I was known to those who are devoted to the policy debate, but that’s a very different thing than the kind of recognition that has come with this—both for and against.”