Ever heard of Kamala Harris? You will.
Ever heard of Kamala Harris? You will.
By DeWayne Wickham
In the world of politics, this could be called the "Year of the Woman."
From the rise of Republican Nikki Haley, who came from nowhere and fought off a scurrilous personal attack to win South Carolina's governorship, to the surprising staying power of Barbara Boxer, the three-term Democratic U.S. senator who handily won re-election in California, women stood out on the political landscape.
There is Sarah Palin shooting caribou on her own reality TV show, and New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand easily holding onto the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Florida voters made Republican Jennifer Carroll their state's first black lieutenant governor. And in Delaware, Christine O'Donnell, of witchcraft fame, held the stage while being soundly defeated in her third attempt to win a Senate seat.
But the woman the 2010 election cycle might eventually catapult to the greatest heights is one who barely made a blip on this nation's political radarscope. Her name is Kamala (pronounced COMMA-LA) Harris, and on Jan. 3 she'll become California's first female attorney general.
Some people have called the 46-year-old Harris, whose father is Jamaican and whose mother is from India, "the female Barack Obama." But to see Harris as that would be to misjudge her badly.
Obama was a Harvard-educated community organizer before he waded into the political arena. Harris, who graduated from Howard University— the citadel of black higher education institutions — was a prosecutor for more than a decade before she ran for office. She was elected San Francisco's district attorney in 2003 and won a second term in 2007.
While many of the women who crowded onto the political stage this year fit comfortably into an ideological mold, Harris does not. A self-described "child of the civil rights movement" who was raised in Berkeley, the hotbed of California liberalism, Harris also touts her record for putting violent offenders behind bars and getting tough on parents of elementary schoolchildren who are chronically absent from class. She also champions programs that offer non-violent first offenders job training instead of jail time and rehabilitation to people released from prison.
"I hope to serve this nation as the attorney general of California. I believe in that old adage that 'as goes California, so goes the country,' " Harris said, rejecting my suggestion that she could be a new breed of national politician.
While O'Donnell writes a book about her loss and Palin morphs between her roles as a reality TV show star and as a right-wing political operative, Harris instead is expanding her political base.
The transition team she named to oversee her move into the California attorney general's office is headed by two former U.S. secretaries of State: Republican George Shultz and Democrat Warren Christopher. It also includes former Stanford Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan, ex-Los Angeles police chief William Bratton, and Connie Rice, a highly regarded civil rights attorney. "I'm really humbled that they've dedicated their time to work on the transition. ... I wanted to have people who understand California in the context of the globe," Harris told me.
It is also the kind of team-building that will lift Harris above many of the other women in the political class of 2010. She's too smart to acknowledge that her sights are set on anything other than the job before her. She's too politically astute to get caught looking that far ahead.
But Harris, I think, is destined to become a commanding presence in the political life of this country, and a major player in this nation's other power center: Washington, D.C.
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