IS KAMALA HARRIS THE NEXT OBAMA?

Character and a compelling story just might win her the White House

For the most populous state in America, you would think California would produce presidents as prolifically as Ohio and Virginia. It hasn’t.

Richard Nixon was the only president born here. Ronald Reagan moved here from Illinois, Herbert Hoover from Iowa.

All were conservatives, reflecting a state that was reliably red for much of the last century. But California is now decisively and defiantly blue. Democrats hold 46 of the 53 congressional seats, super-majorities in both state houses, the governorship and all major statewide offices. The Republicans are a spent force.

In Washington, Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House and Dianne Feinstein is an éminence grise of the Senate; by the end of her current term, she will be the longest-serving woman in its history.

So, given the state and its liberalism, it is no surprise that Feinstein’s junior colleague, freshman Kamala Harris, wants to be president in 2020 — and she just might be.

A year before the first presidential contest in Iowa, Harris is already shaping the race for the Democratic nomination. Her campaign announcement in Oakland, her hometown, drew a surprising 20,000. Her town hall on CNN drew two million viewers, a record for the network. Her new memoir, The Truths We Hold, is drawing readers and reviews. And, most of all, her campaign is drawing volunteers, endorsements and money.

Two recent polls put Harris in third place behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, those undeclared septuagenarians. We know polls are dubious a year out. But in a prospective field of 20 candidates, her early prominence matters.

Harris is intelligent, charming, tough, seasoned and authentic. Her story is compelling: her mother was from India and her father from Jamaica, scholars who met at Berkeley in the 1960s. She went to Howard University in Washington and law school (after attending Westmount High School in Montreal, as I did) in California and has spent her career in criminal justice as district attorney in San Francisco and California’s attorney general.

She has been in the Senate only two years, which is how long Barack Obama — with whom she is compared — had served before he launched his quixotic campaign in 2007. Obama had served eight years in state politics; she claims experience in local, state and national politics. Like Obama, she does not apologize for running now, for not waiting her turn, for challenging the odds.

Obama won without the deep political experience, in the conventional sense, once demanded of presidential candidates. Donald Trump, for his part, held no public office at all.

Harris brings strengths that will help her in the primaries: she is a woman in a year in which a woman must be on the party’s ticket; she is of mixed race, appealing to the core constituency of minority voters, who matter in early voting primary states such as South Carolina; she is from California, which votes in March 2020; she is a progressive on taxes, health care and education.

Something else: She is likable. She laughs easily and naturally, radiating the politics of joy. She moves easily as a retail politician, promising to bring “decency and moral clarity.”

But she is tough. She quoted Bobby Kennedy in her launch in Oakland, embracing his idealism. Like him, she is called a brass-knuckles political warrior with a streak of ruthlessness. To beat Trump, she will need it, and confidence, too. Curiously, she ignores him in her stump speech beyond dismissing his border wall as “a medieval vanity project.” Instead, she appeals to America’s better angels. “The American story has always been written by people who can see what can be, unburdened by what has been,” she declares. “That is our story.”

Her campaign slogan is “Kamala Harris for the People.” Will the people be for Kamala Harris?

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.