The first time Kamala Harris won more than a citywide political contest was in the summer of 2010. Jerry Brown had just decided not to run for another term as California's attorney general and instead try for a third term in the governor's office he’d occupied from 1975 to 1983. Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney, decided to join the race to succeed him as AG, and she came out easily on top of a crowded Democratic field. Then, that fall, she barely nosed out her much better-known Republican opponent. It was the beginning of her career as a national figure.
Back during that 2010 campaign, the newly-hired MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell picked out Harris as the candidate Republicans should fear as “the next big Democratic star” and “the female Obama.” He ran a clip of her speech at the victory celebration after she won the primary for attorney general, which I happened to see. Harris, then in her mid-forties, looked and sounded surprisingly similar to the presidential candidate before us now, who turned 60 two weeks before Election Day. But she said something that has stayed with me.
"We are the state that creates leadership for the rest of this country," she told a cheering crowd of Californians, "based on our belief that we can be tough, and we can be smart—and all the time be dedicated to our history, while being empowered to know our destiny." It was rhetoric that tapped deep into a shared awareness of California's outsize role as a trendsetter and model-builder in American life.
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