“You work for the government. Government is a place of service. You don’t get to dress casually for the people,” Kamala Harris, then the chief prosecutor in San Francisco, told Simon sternly. “Go home and come back tomorrow in a suit.”
Mr. Simon, now running for Congress in California’s East Bay district, said the reprimand was his “first taste of Kamala the boss, not Kamala the master.” It was an early example of Ms. Harris’s strict standards, dating back nearly two decades. Mr. Simon was reprimanded and walked out of her office.
But the next day, as she walked to work in business casual clothes she’d quickly borrowed from a friend, Harris handed her a shopping bag containing a newly purchased gray pantsuit and a scarf embroidered with an “L” for Latifa.
“She made it her job to make me better professionally and politically,” Simon recalled this week.
To her, the story illustrates Harris’ duality: a hardworking, demanding public servant, but also someone who quietly displays compassion and kindness, whether to subordinates or victims of crime, especially young people. These traits helped her navigate the fiercely competitive world of Bay Area politics and rise to the highest levels of American government, from trainee to district attorney, in just over a decade.
As Harris assumes her role as the Democratic presidential nominee, those who have campaigned with and against her in California say her presence in the political testing grounds of her home state could be both a blessing and a burden in November.
Her political instincts were developed by growing up in Oakland and San Francisco, but despite a rich history of producing strong leaders, the Bay Area has never produced a U.S. president. In fact, while California has sent several Republicans to the White House, no Democrat from the state has ever been elected to the nation’s highest office.
Since Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, conservatives have been quick to revive old tropes, calling her a “San Francisco liberal” and a “California socialist.” Early in her career, Simon and others say, Harris was prepared to fend off such attacks, like a lawyer under cross-examination.
“In my time with Kamala Harris, I’ve seen not only her rigor and hard work, but also how people constantly belittle her and reject her for anything but her excellence,” he said. “That’s the Kamala that will be president of the United States.”
Ms. Harris was born in Oakland and grew up in a house on Bancroft Way in the former red-light district of Berkeley Plains, from where she was bused to elementary school in the city’s affluent hillsides as part of an integration program.
When Harris was 12, her family left Berkeley for Canada, where her mother was teaching at McGill University. There, she met a friend whose experience of abuse inspired her to become a prosecutor, and she returned to the Bay Area to study law.
She began her career as an intern at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, a coveted position at an institution whose storied alumni include former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. In her memoir, “The Truth We Hold,” Harris writes that her time there was a turning point for her. She recalled helping to free an innocent woman caught in a drug raid, describing the victory as “a defining moment of my life.”
She took a full-time job in an office and was eventually assigned to the unit that prosecuted sex crimes. Her supervisor, Nancy O’Malley, remembers her displaying “an uncanny ability to connect with people, especially young victims of sexual assault.”
O’Malley still thinks back to one case Harris handled, in which he prosecuted a group of young men who gang-raped a 14-year-old girl who lived in foster care. The girl, who would give key testimony in a conviction, was wary of the lawyers, but Harris took her hand, comforted her, reassured her.
“Kamala made that little girl feel like the queen of the world,” O’Malley said. “I’ll never forget watching that interaction between the two of them and watching this young woman change before my eyes.”
Harris remembers the case, too. In her memoir, she writes that she won a conviction, but later heard rumors that young victims had been re-entered into the cycle of abuse. “It was hard not to feel the magnitude of the systemic problem we faced,” she acknowledges.
She said the incident forced her to consider policy changes that would break the pattern of violence, and some believe she always had aspirations for higher office.
“She was ambitious,” O’Malley said. “She always set her sights higher than where she was. And that was natural.”
The Alameda County district attorney’s office was well-staffed, including O’Malley, who would later become the first woman to hold the top job, but the path to power seemed easier across the Bay Bridge, and in 1998, Harris took a job with the San Francisco district attorney’s office.
And yet her first political venture five years later was hurtful and difficult.
She was trailing her former boss, incumbent District Attorney Terrence Hallinan, and longtime prosecutor Bill Fazio. The contest resurfaced the sensitive issue of Ms. Harris’ brief romantic relationship with a local political heavyweight, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
Though the two had separated several years earlier, Mr. Brown supported Ms. Harris’ candidacy, leading critics to accuse her of using political patronage. At the time, Ms. Harris came up with an effective counterattack, according to campaign advisers. Answering a question about her independence at a candidate forum, Ms. Harris highlighted scandalous accusations against both of her opponents and then promised to run a positive, issues-focused campaign.
“She knows how to play politics a lot better than I do,” said Fazio, now a Harris supporter. “She thinks on the fly, and you never know what’s going to happen next, which is what a lawyer has to do. She’s smart, she’s intelligent, she’s aggressive.”
Initially, Harris positioned her approach as “smart on crime,” seeking to balance law enforcement with liberal values. Though she opposed the death penalty and described herself as a “progressive,” her San Francisco Chronicle endorsement still declared her to be “for law and order.”
Ms. Harris won, and she and Mr. Fazio grew closer, bonding over the deaths of their mothers within months of each other. Ms. Fazio remembers Ms. Harris as a tough prosecutor who said her attacks on Mr. Brown were, and still are, “nonsense” that wouldn’t bother a male candidate.
During her first few years in the district attorney’s office, Harris increased conviction rates but also began to face political criticism for the first time. In 2004, a San Francisco police officer was killed in the line of duty, and shortly thereafter, Harris announced that she would not seek the death penalty for the killer, infuriating police and other elected officials. In an op-ed, Harris stood by her position, stating that “there are no exceptions to the rule.”
Harris then introduced a policy that would have imposed fines and even jail time on parents whose children did not attend school, drawing criticism from the left, but no jail time was ever imposed and truancy rates fell. Her office was also plunged into scandal after accusations that she had covered up misconduct by police medical technicians and violated the rights of defendants. Harris later said she was unaware of the problems but took responsibility as head of the office.
Louise Rene, who worked in the city attorney’s office before Harris ran for district attorney, said the vice president was one of several notable women who broke barriers in San Francisco, including former U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died in September, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who “knew how to stand her ground and be firm” despite attacks from both the right and the left.
Harris is a much more moderate figure than either side has given her credit for, Rene said. “As district attorney, Kamala aimed to be very pragmatic,” Rene said. “People don’t get that.”
During her second term as district attorney, Ms. Harris announced she was running for California attorney general, a move that would move her away from San Francisco and put her in the national spotlight. As she rose to power, some criticized her for being too cautious and tending to avoid controversial issues, especially pressing criminal justice issues, said Dan Morain, author of the biography “Kamala’s Way.” Critics say the approach weakens her bold leadership claims.
But even then, her opponents knew she would be a formidable force for years to come: In the 2010 attorney general election, Republicans, who had been more successful in the state than they are now, picked a strong candidate to run against her and spent millions of dollars on it. They saw it as their final chance to thwart her promising career, Morain said.
“If they had beaten her in 2010, she probably would have been a lawyer at a high-end law firm in San Francisco, but that didn’t work out, and here we are,” he said. “They saw her as a promising new star.”
