How Kamala Harris’s early career prepared her for this moment

SAN FRANCISCO — Lateefah Simon arrived for her first day at the top cop’soffice in her usual outfit of tracksuit and Pumas, ready to work with young men who were fresh out of prison. Her new boss — the woman who persuaded her to trade her career as a high-profile activist and organizer for a job in the district attorney’s office — wasn’t having it.

“You’re working in government, and government is about service, so you never dress down for your people,” Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, sternly told Simon. “Go home and come back tomorrow in a suit.”

Simon, who is now running for Congress to represent California’s East Bay, said the scolding was “my first taste of Boss Kamala, not Mentor Kamala.” It was an early example, nearly 20 years ago, of Harris’s exacting standards. Simon left her office chastened.

Yet when she walked into work the next day, clad in business casual clothes hastily borrowed from friends, Harris presented her with a shopping bag. Inside were a newly purchased gray pantsuit and a scarf embroidered with an “L” for Lateefah.

“She made it her business to make me better professionally and politically,” Simon recounted this week.

To her, the story illustrates the two sides of Harris: A hard-driving, demanding public servant, who also displayed compassion and kindness behind closed doors, especially with young people, whether they were on her staff or victims of a crime. Those traits helped Harris navigate the notoriously cutthroat world of Bay Area politics, where she rose from intern to district attorney in little more than a decade, building a career that has taken her to the heights of American government.

As Harris assumes the role of Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, those who worked with her and campaigned against her in California say her time in the crucible of her hometown’s politics could be both blessing and burden come November.

Oakland and San Francisco shaped her political instincts, but despite a rich history of producing powerful leaders, the Bay Area has never bred a U.S. president. Indeed, while California has sent several Republicans to the White House, no Democrat from this state has been elected to the nation’s highest office.

In the days since President Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, conservatives have quickly revived old tropes, tagging her as a “San Francisco liberal” and a “California socialist.” Simon and others say Harris’s early career prepared her to parry such attacks, like an attorney handling cross-examination.

“Every single day of my time with Kamala Harris, I saw not only her rigor and how hard she worked but also how people constantly discounted her and she refused to be anything less than excellent,” he said. “That’s the Kamala who is going to be president of the United States.”

Harris was born in Oakland and raised in a house on Bancroft Way in the formerly redlined Berkeley flatlands. It was from this home that she was bused to an elementary school in the city’s wealthy hills as part of an integration program.

She was 12 when her family left Berkeley for Canada, where her mother taught at McGill University. There, Harris met a friend whose story of abuse would motivate her to become a prosecutor, and when she returned to the Bay Area, it was to study law.

She got her start as an intern in the Alameda County district attorney’s office, a coveted post in an agency with a storied list of alumni, including former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren. Her time there was transformative, Harris wrote in her memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” She recalled helping free an innocent woman who was swept up in a drug bust, a victory she characterized as “a defining moment in my life.”

She landed a full-time job in the office and was eventually assigned to a unit that prosecuted sex crimes, where her team supervisor, Nancy O’Malley, remembers her displaying “an amazing ability to connect with people,” especially young victims of sexual violence.

O’Malley still thinks about one of Harris’s cases, which involved prosecuting a group of young men who had gang-raped a 14-year-old in foster care. The girl, whose testimony would be key to securing a conviction, was wary of the attorneys. But Harris took her hand, comforting and reassuring her.

“What Kamala did was make that girl feel like she was the queen of the world,” O’Malley said. “I will never forget watching their interaction, and this young woman transformed before my eyes.”

Harris remembers the case, too. She won a conviction, she wrote in her memoir, but later heard a rumor that the young victim had fallen back into a cycle of abuse. “It was hard not to feel the weight of the systemic problems we were up against,” Harris acknowledged.

In her telling, the case planted a seed, forcing her to consider policy changes that might disrupt patterns of violence. Others believe she always aspired to higher office.

“She was ambitious,” O’Malley said. “She always had her sights set higher than where she was, appropriately so.”

The DA’s office in Alameda County had a deep bench — including O’Malley, who would eventually become the first woman to hold the top job. But across the Bay Bridge, the path to power appeared easier. And in 1998, Harris accepted a job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

Still, her first political campaign five years later was bruising and difficult.

She was the underdog against her former boss, the incumbent DA Terence Hallinan, as well as longtime prosecutor Bill Fazio. The contest resurfaced a sensitive subject, Harris’s brief romantic relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, a local political kingmaker.

The two had broken up years earlier, but Brown supported Harris’s candidacy, and her critics accused her of benefiting from political patronage. According to her then-campaign consultant, Harris came up with an effective counter. Answering a question at a candidate forum about her independence, she highlighted scandalous accusations made about her two opponents before promising to run a positive, issue-focused campaign.

“She knows how to play politics way better than I ever did,” Fazio, now a Harris supporter, said. “She thinks on her feet, and trial attorneys have to do that because you never know what’ll come next. She’s smart, she’s bright, she’s aggressive.”

Early on, Harris branded her approach “smart on crime” in an attempt to balance law enforcement and liberal values. She opposed capital punishment and called herself a “progressive,” yet the San Francisco Chronicle’s endorsement still declared she was “for Law and Order.”

Harris won, and she and Fazio eventually became friendly, bonding over the loss of their mothers, who died within months of each other. He remembers her as a tough prosecutor and said the Brown attacks — then and now — are “nonsense” that would never dog a male candidate.

In her first years at the DA’s office, Harris increased the conviction rate but also began taking her first real political heat. In 2004, a San Francisco police officer was killed in the line of duty, and soon after Harris announced she would not seek the death penalty against the perpetrator, infuriating police officers and other elected officials. In an op-ed, Harris maintained her position, writing that “there can be no exception to principle.”

She then drew criticism from the left when she instituted a policy punishing parents of truant children with fines and possible jail time, though the latter penalty was never applied and truancy rates fell. Her office was also plunged into scandal after accusations that she had violated the rights of defendants by covering up the misconduct of a police lab technician. Harris later said she wasn’t aware of the problems but took responsibility as head of the office.

Louise Renne, who hired Harris to work in the city attorney’s office before her run for DA, said the vice president is part of an illustrious line of barrier-breaking San Francisco women, including former U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, who died in September, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took hits from right and left but “knew how to stand their ground and be firm.”

Harris is far more moderate than either side gives her credit for, Renne said. As district attorney, “Kamala was looking at being very practical,” she said. “People don’t understand that.”

During her second term as DA, Harris announced a bid for California attorney general. The move would take her out of San Francisco and position her more squarely in the national spotlight. As she advanced, some faulted her for being too cautious and often avoiding controversial issues, especially pressing criminal justice matters, said Dan Morain, author of the biography “Kamala’s Way.” Critics said the approach undercut her claims of bold leadership.

Even then, however, her opponents knew she would be a formidable force for years to come. In the 2010 AG race, Republicans — more successful in the state than now — picked a strong candidate to oppose her and poured millions into the contest. They viewed it, Morain said, as their last chance to stymie a promising career.

“If they had beat her in 2010, she would probably be a lawyer at some fancy San Francisco law firm … but that didn’t work and here we are,” he said. “They saw in her a rising star.”