SAN FRANCISCO — After a week of showing up to her new job in jeans and sneakers, Lateefah Simon got a surprise gift from her boss, Kamala Harris — her first business suit and a monogrammed scarf.
Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney, presented the gift box with tenderness, but the message was clear: Simon had to look more professional.
“Kamala is everybody’s auntie,” Simon said, recalling her tenure running Harris’ pioneering program for youth offenders. “She’ll be the one to say ‘Nuh-uh.'”
Harris’ head-down, buttoned-up approach to politics helped her stand out in San Francisco, a city with an abundance of ego-driven Democratic political stars. And it has been her defining trait in her U.S. Senate run against fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez, an Orange County congresswoman whose behavior on the campaign trail can sometimes be erratic.
“Harris’ strategy has always been to be calm, consistent and reliable and let other people do the flamboyant stuff that usually just ends up hurting them in the end,” said Melissa Michelson, a professor of politics at Menlo College in Atherton.
So far it seems to be working. Harris, who nearly always appears publicly in a gray suit, has led decisively in every poll in a race that voters have paid little attention — a dynamic that wouldn’t seem to bother California’s 51-year-old attorney general.
For someone whose foray into public life was captured on the gossip pages as then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s new girlfriend, Harris has managed over the past two decades to cultivate a celebrity mystique while fiercely guarding her privacy.
Supporters laud her as a pioneering criminal justice reformer and a workaholic who builds bridges with adversaries and demands excellence from her staffers. Some expect her to one day seek the presidency.
But several observers see a too-cautious and often calculating politician who hasn’t tackled thorny law enforcement issues like bail reform or heeded the call of protesters to assume a bigger role in police misconduct cases.
“She has been very careful about how she guides her political future,” said San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi. “If you want to become a senator, then that is what you have to do.”
In an interview, Harris rejected the critique, pointing to her championing of law enforcement reforms long before they were en vogue and her successful battles with powerful banks and the for-profit college industry.
“Perhaps it’s because I don’t use reckless language, and I don’t use grand gestures that people think those fights didn’t require a lot of courage or involve a lot of risk,” she said.
Harris entered the Senate race as an established Democratic star with a Rolodex full of high-profile friends and associates, including Napster founder Sean Parker and President Barack Obama, who had to apologize in 2013 for calling her “by far the best-looking attorney general in the country” at a Silicon Valley fundraiser.
If she wins, Harris said, she’ll seek to make college more affordable, protect students from predatory lenders and replicate some of her criminal justice initiatives — including the state’s criminal justice data portal, which includes figures concerning deaths in police custody.
Harris grew up in Berkeley, the oldest of two daughters born to Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian-born breast cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, a Jamaican-born Marxist economist who taught at Stanford.
Her parents divorced when she was 5. Harris and her sister were raised by their mother in Berkeley and Montreal, before she attended Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, D.C.
Harris returned to the Bay Area to attend Hastings College of the Law and then worked mostly as a prosecutor in Alameda County and San Francisco until 2003, when she unseated her former boss, San Francisco District Attorney Terrence Hallinan, a celebrated leftist and scion of one of the city’s most prominent families.
It didn’t take long for Harris to find herself in the hot seat. After she quickly refused to consider the death penalty for a man accused of killing police officer Isaac Espinoza, Harris had to stare down several leading Democrats, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who declared during the officer’s funeral that the murder merited capital punishment.
“It took a lot of courage to do that,” Adachi said of Harris.
As district attorney, Harris sought to de-emphasize the prosecution of nonviolent offenses and help keep young offenders from getting trapped in the justice system. And she sought to reform a disjointed office and instill a culture of professionalism.
Simon recalled Harris taking her to task for a poorly written memo.
“What if this showed up in The New York Times?” Simon remembers Harris telling her. “A little tear would fall from my eye, but she wanted the best.”
After a razor-thin victory over Republican Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, in the 2010 race for attorney general, Harris again faced controversy — this time over her refusal to agree to the Obama administration’s settlement with the mortgage industry for illegally foreclosing on homes.
“She was the one in the room that kept saying, ‘We need more relief,’” said Brian Nelson, who served as Harris’ general counsel.
The $18 billion-plus settlement Harris eventually wrangled from the mortgage industry is seen as one of her biggest triumphs. But Harris has gotten pushback from critics who think that she, as the state’s first African-American top law enforcement official, should be championing efforts to address police violence, such as a bill that would have required her to appoint a panel to investigate fatal officer-involved shootings, now generally handled by local district attorneys.
“The local DA is too close to the police, so I’m a bit puzzled why she disagreed with it,” said Cruz Reynoso, a former California Supreme Court justice who was ousted in a recall election in 1986. “To me, it’s such a logical thing.”
Harris said her office doesn’t have the capacity to take over investigations for all fatal shootings by law enforcement officers. But “if there is a conflict of interest,” she said, “I would go right in.”
