She grew up around Berkeley activists but came to believe working from inside the system had greater power to effect change.
NY Times - 12 Aug, 2020: Kamala Harris’s first act as a political candidate was knocking out a former boxer: the progressive San Francisco district attorney who had been her boss.
Her freshman Senate term has been defined by committee performances so lacerating that Trump administration officials have complained of her lawyerly velocity. “I’m not able to be rushed this fast,” a flustered Jeff Sessions once said to her. “It makes me nervous.”
And in Ms. Harris’s most memorable turn as a presidential contender, speaking with practiced precision to the man who on Tuesday chose her as his running mate, she began with a less than charitable disclaimer — “I do not believe you are a racist” — before flattening him with the “but …”
“It was a debate,” she has said repeatedly since then, offering no apology for campaign combat.
That is San Francisco politics, friends say. That is Kamala Devi Harris.
In announcing Ms. Harris, 55, as his vice-presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. told supporters she was the person best equipped to “take this fight” to President Trump, making space in a campaign premised on restoring American decency for a willing brawler who learned early in her career that fortune would not favor the meek among Black women in her lines of work. “She had to be savvy to find a way,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who has known Ms. Harris for more than two decades. “There was no path laid out for her. She had to find her way through the kind of set of obstacles that most people in the positions that she’s held have not had to ever deal with.”
I
t is this dexterity, people close to her say, that has most powered Ms. Harris’s rise — and can be most frustrating to those who wish her electoral fearlessness were accompanied by policy audacity to match.
Caustic when she needs to be but cautious on substantive issues more often than many liberals would like, Ms. Harris has spent her public life negotiating disparate orbits, fluent in both activist and establishment circles without ever feeling entirely anchored to either.
Despite her early departure from the race last year, allies have long retained an unshakable belief in her talents as a prospective future standard-bearer for the party.
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